Tags
Batman Begins, cast, cast members, Curse of the Fatal Death, Doctor Who, Downton, Game of Thrones, Gormenghast, GQ, Harry Potter, IMDB, Liam Neeson, Love Actually, Margery Mason, Resident Evil, The Princess Bride, The Walking Dead
It is Christmas (well it will be in a couple of days) and I have just been released from work so that warrants a special post. I had actually been wracking my brains to think of something Christmas themed to post about and then it struck me that I had not done a Geek Quotient post for ages and there is a Christmas themed film that is bursting with potential for the GQ treatment – Love Actually.
You see, like Downton Abbey it is full of the sort of British actors who end up in sci fi and fantasy films or series on a regular basis and, in fact, given some of the names here it would not surprise me if it scored even higher than Downton’s rather good score of 0.633.
So, as usual, we look at the list of names on the cast list on IMDB, take a note of the number of them who have been in something sci fi or fantasy related and divide that into the total number of cast members.
So, when this is done we get a value of 0.496, which is a lot lower than both Downton’s value and the 0.584 achieved by the new version of Hawaii Five-O.
So, in a film which boasts Underworld and Shaun of the Dead’s Bill Nighy, The Hobbit’s Martin Freeman, Keira Knightly (Pirates of the Caribbean), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, 2012, Children of Men, Salt) and Liam Neeson (who has been in Star Wars, Batman and the Narnia films among others) along with a host of others who have been extras in Doctor Who* and other geek treats how come the value is so low?
The truth is that it is the sheer size of the cast list on IMDB that scuppers Love Actually. There are 115 cast members listed and many of them are only actors in this one film. So while there are actually very many contributing to the GQ here (57 in total) it is still just less than half the total cast. This is one of the flaws of the method of the GQ – you have to stick to the cast as listed on IMDB.
Despite that disappointing score, you still have to admit that Love Actually includes some major geek talent covering a broad range of films and TV shows. As well as the ones mentioned above we also have some very obvious Harry Potter links (Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson, who was also in Men in Black III among other things), quite a few who were in Ashes to Ashes (Rory MacGregor, for example), Game of Thrones (particularly the actor playing Liam Neeson’s son, Thomas Brodie-Sangster who was also in Doctor Who), the Walking Dead (Andrew Lincoln) and the Resident Evil series of films (Sienna Guillory). And even some of the actors you might not consider to have had a geek credit have some. Gregor Fisher (Gormenghast), Hugh Grant (was the Doctor in Curse of the Fatal Death along with Rowan Atkinson but also starred in a horror called Lair of the White Worm) and even Colin Firth scores with his role in Nanny McPhee.
Of all the cast list, the one that surprised me the most was Margery Mason. That she was the tea lady on the Hogwart’s Express is not the surprise. That came when I found out that she was also the aged old crone who boos Princess Buttercup in The Princess Bride in 1987, a very memorable character for her very brief screen time. Incidentally, unless the IMDB entry for her is woefully out of date, Margery earned a telegram from the Queen in September this year for reaching the ripe old age of 100 so well done to her for that!
Margery Mason, playing wonderfully batty old crones for over 30 years
So, there you have it. The GQ of Love Actually. A film which had great promise for a high score but didn’t make it due to the huge cast list. So, I am still waiting for something to beat Downton Abbey’s score… Any suggestions for a non geek film or series that might beat that score are welcomed.
*Including Caroline John, who played Liz Shaw in classic Who and who was there for the merest seconds in the funeral scenes as the mother of Liam Neeson’s character’s recently deceased girlfriend.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are strong women in UK Geekdom. What concerned me was the fact that all the examples I could think of off the top of my head were supporting characters and many of them were already involved in the franchises represented by characters in that line up. Hermione Granger, various Doctor Who companions (Sarah Jane Smith and River Song being the two that spring most readily to mind), Judi Dench’s portrayal of M in James Bond… the UK just did not seem to have a straight up Geek lead character who was female (unlike the US where there are a few, though many of them are Whedon creations like Buffy). I was so concerned I expressed my opinion on Facebook and did get a couple of suggestions for strong
female characters who were not involved in the franchises already mentioned (Emma Peel being one who I had somehow forgotten…) or who were sole leads (Lara Croft) but it does seem as if UK geekdom is a little thin on the ground. Plus, my concerns were not so much with the state of the feminist credentials of UK geekdom but rather with my own inability to think of some. I mean, I can be excused not thinking of Lara Croft because I have never played the game** nor watched the films but I used to watch the Avengers (the UK TV drama) all the time as a child*** so Emma Peel should have leapt out at me…
Of course there were other more outre suggestions for this film. Someone suggested that, since The Doctor is involved, in theory no time period is restricted. This means that we could have some other rather cool UK TV characters turning up. He suggested Richard Sharpe but we could also have Cadfael, the medieval mystery solving monk, Miss Marple and several others. Plus it might explain why Gene Hunt is there in 2012 (almost 30 years after the events of Ashes to Ashes and possibly in an alternate universe created by the minds of Sam Tyler and Alex Drake) and why Emma Peel is there (being, as she is, a character intrinsicly tied to the 1960s). In fact, in my head, this plot involves a centuries spanning plot spotted in several different time periods by different characters…