Fascism and Feelgood

The Dictator: A biting, pull-no-punches satire on dictatorship, democracy, management, neo-liberalism, the other sort of liberalism, conservatism, anti-Semitism, Judaism, racism, tolerance and refugees. No wonder the Guardian was completely confused by it.

Iron Sky: Nazis-on-the-moon crowdsource film. Very funny, with some good performances and some nice satires on the US and the UN, and riffing pointedly on the similarities between neoconservatism and fascism and on why both appeal to politicians and people. Let down a bit by some bad performances (mostly the Sarah-Palinesque American president), but don't let that put you off. A region 2 DVD is £10 from Play.com; buy it and keep these people making movies.

Prometheus: Hard to review this one, since Scott is visibly setting up for a series of movies here (you don't cast a young guy in makeup as an old character unless there's going to be some sort of payoff later on). I will say for the moment, though, that it's rather like a big-budget version of Terry Nation's pilot for a Dalek TV series, 'The Destroyers', albeit with dodgier characterisation. Michael Fassbender's worth the price of admission alone, though.

Singin' in the Rain: A movie about two gay men making it in the late silent/early sound era. Although Debbie Reynolds does turn up to provide an ostensible love interest for Gene Kelly, she's actually just a metaphor for his relationship with Donald O'Connor.

Quantum of Solace: Just boring.

Movie count for 2012: 42

What I Saw at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival, by Fiona Aged 37 1/2

Clone: Explores one of the logical, if disturbing, results of human genetic engineering: a woman whose boyfriend dies suddenly in an accident arranges to give birth to his clone.... with the inevitable disturbing possibility of incest emerging as the child grows up and starts to resemble the man she knew. Stars Matt Smith just before he took over the role of the Doctor, and showing why he was a good choice for the role.

Robo-G: Probably my favourite film of the festival (and that's a very tough choice indeed): a Japanese comedy about a team of robotics engineers who "cheat" and hire a septuagenarian to pose, in costume, as their robot at a technical expo, but the stunt rapidly gets out of hand. Definite proof that the Japanese can laugh at themselves-- taking in robotics, cosplay, strange fetishes, gerontology, and mecha-- but also touching on a lot of themes that everybody can relate to.

Shuffle: Sort of like Slaughterhouse 5 crossed with The Time Traveler's Wife, as a man finds himself unstuck in time, traveling through his life in a series of seemingly random jumps, knowing he has to save someone's life-- but who that someone is, and how they need to be saved, is not entirely what he thinks it is.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A subtly revealing documentary about Joseph Campbell, editor of Astounding, exploring his positive role as a nurturer of talent and exponent of good SF stories, while not sugarcoating the fact that he was a casual racist, sexist and anti-Semite.

Exit: Strange and beautiful Australian film, portraying modern urban life as a kind of nightmarish maze, and following a group of people who become convinced that one of the doors in the city is an exit. Partly an exploration of fanaticism and obsession, and how half-remembered childhood beliefs can drive us as adults without our realising it, but also a meditation on what exactly is an "exit" in such a context.

Ghosts with Shit Jobs: I was really looking forward to this and wound up being slightly disappointed by it. It's got a great premise (the "ghosts" are Canadians, in a future where China is the dominant power, and all the shit jobs are outsourced to North America), some good acting (the woman who did piecework assembling robot babies was scarily convincing as a frustrated talent about to go postal), and makes such clever use of its small VFX budget that you don't actually realise how small that budget is. My problem was mainly that it carried on longer than it should, and in particular the ending wound up being dragged out to the point where my disbelief started to un-suspend. Good effort though.

Great Masters in Short Form: An unusual take on the short-film anthology, gathering a set of short films based on great works of SF. All were good, but the standouts were "Impossible Dreams" (an Israeli comedy), "The Other Celia" (a masterpiece of non-explanation) and "A Piece of Wood" (about whether war is inevitable).

Other Short Films: As always something of a mix. Standouts include this year's short film competition winner, "Believe the Dance" (www.believethedance.com-- seriously, you need to see this),  "Lucky Day Forever" (a Polish animation about predatory capitalism), Error 0036 (a satire on the annoying nature of helpdesks), Decapoda Shock (about a mutant man-lobster who... a postmodern satire on... um... OK, just see it), "This is Not Real" (about children and their imaginations) and "How to Kill Your Clone" (Mad Men meets the Tyrell Corporation). The winner of the 48-hour film challenge, "Future, Inc.," also deserves a mention for being hilariously twisted.

Movie count for 2012: 37

New short story in BFS Journal

Quick note: the British Fantasy Society Journal for this quarter has a short story by me entitled "The Kindly Race." Interested? Check it out here: http://www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk/news/bfs-journal-spring-2012-edition-out-now/

Rocket Science

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (in 3D!): Silly animated comedy, aimed at kids but with plenty to amuse adults (e.g. references to The Elephant Man, or Queen Victoria as a ninja), and with so much background detail I may have to buy the DVD just to get more of the jokes. Kind of anti-Darwin (presumably in a misguided attempt to appeal to a certain tranche of American society), but not anti-evolutionist (presumably on the principle that those same Americans aren't bright enough to figure that out).

Pinnoccio: A story about a wooden boy with an unhealthy obsession with 'real boys', who is seduced by a couple of tramps to take up acting, which leads to him being imprisoned and exploited by a big-nosed, long-bearded impresario out of the pages of Der Sturmer; escaping, he is seduced into going to Pleasure Island, along with a load of other boys, by Charles Laughton. Arguably Disney's most offensive film yet: anti-gay, anti-gypsy, antisemitic, and, somehow, anti-whale.

Lady and the Tramp: Short but sweet film about animals, instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever had a pet.

Spartacus: Yes, I know it's a classic of the genre and yes, it has a lot to say about human nature, liberty, society and idealism, to say nothing of McCarthyism and politics, but to be honest, this time around I found it difficult to get into.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Still my favourite Bond film; however people feel about Lazenby, he was just fine in it, the supporting cast were well chosen, and the soundtrack was good even before we get to the James Bond Novelty Christmas Hit, which gets points for sheer chutzpah.

 Hitler: The Last Ten Days: Terrible Italian historical starring Alec Guinness doing a subpar Hitler impersonation. Slightly saved by being indirectly responsible for this parody of Downfall parodies.

The Shining: Despite what everyone thinks, this is actually a film about alcoholism. No really. Watch it with that in mind, and it all makes sense.

Movie count for 2012: 31

Edward Cullen? Never heard of him.

Cronos: Early Guillermo del Toro interpretation of the vampire mythos. Basically about the fear of aging and death, and resisting the temptations of power.

Let the Right One In: Applies the Scandinavian genre of films about creepy dysfunctional children to the vampire mythos. Mostly a poignant and disturbing meditation on psychopathy, sociopathy, deviant sexuality, exploitation and enabling, but somewhat let down by an inadvertantly hilarious scene involving CGI cats.

Thirst: Gory Korean gangster-flick take on the vampire mythos. The general message is, never piss off either a) your daughter-in-law, or b) the village priest.

Movie count for 2012: 24

French leave

La Regle du Jeu: Apparently a classic of 1930s French cinema, exploring bourgeois social mores. I was kind of bored by it. Apparently the story involves a cat getting shot, but since the cat in question runs to the left of the picture and the actor fires his gun to the right, it's hard to tell.

Movie count for 2012: 21

Catching up

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Story of one man's quest to piss off another.

Cronos: Early Benedicio del Toro film; the body horror is less understated than in his more recent material, but it's still a disturbing and strangely touching take on the vampire theme.

Barton Fink: A tale of creativity, hypocrisy, and why it's not a good idea to get on the wrong side of an insurance salesman.

The Reader: Better-than-I-expected adaptation of the book. An intelligently ambiguous story about the German people's difficulties in coming to terms with the Nazi past.

The Ladykillers: Saw this right after seeing the West End play version of it. The film is less laugh-a-minute, but has more in the way of sinister atmosphere and visual humour; it's also really interesting to see what the King's Cross/St Pancras area looked like in the 1950s.

The Time Traveler's Wife: Somewhere, there's a plagiarism lawsuit waiting to happen involving this film, and everything Steven Moffat's written for Doctor Who.

Movie count for 2012: 20

Think of the children

M (ein Stadt sucht ein Moerder): Fritz Lang's first (partial) sound film. Draws disturbing parallels between police and criminal organisations, while also managing to condemn vigilantism.

If...: A good counterargument to anybody who claims that all these teenage rioters need is strong authority figures and military discipline.

Beguiled: Proof that it's not just male schoolchildren who can go, homicidally, off the rails.

Baader-Meinhof Complex: Scary docudrama about the German terrorist organisation, providing context for their actions while also revealing the brutal infighting within the group. Also draws disturbing parallels between police and criminal organisations, while managing to condemn vigilantism. Costarring the ubiquitous Bruno "Hitler" Ganz.

Movie count for 2012: 14

Oscar material

The Artist: "Silent" movie, which actually makes quite clever use of sound. The period detail is fantastic, but the show is completely stolen by a wire-haired terrier.

The Iron Lady: Controversial Thatcher biopic, which was a lot more even-handed than I was expecting; it doesn't condemn her, but also makes it quite plain that even before the hubris began to sink in, her policies did as much damage as they did good, if not more. I also thought the dementia aspect was sensitively handled.

Come And See: Nightmarish Russian film about war. Brilliant and uncompromising, but a single viewing is likely to induce post-traumatic stress disorder.

Gunfight at the OK Corral: Average Western. The casting is good and there's an interesting subtext to the general effect that the lawmen and the various factions of criminals are all playing each other off against each other, but it made for pretty tedious viewing, there's a romantic subplot which is built up hugely and then hastily abandoned, and, oh yes, it is one of those Westerns with an annoying song running through it.

House of Flying Daggers: Beautiful period martial-arts piece which has a) probably the best use of colour I've ever seen in a movie, and b) also one of the most stunning plot reversals, with information revealed in the final third of the story completely rewriting the viewer's percetion of the relationships seen in the first two-thirds.

Movie count for 2012: 10

Between the Head and the Heart

How to Get Ahead in Advertising: Surreal comedy, a scathing indictment of 1980s selfishness and greed which is, if anything, even more uncomfortable viewing today as so many of its predictions have come true.

The Prestige: Fantasy about rival magicians and Nicolai Tesla, which conceals under a steampunk exterior a tragic story about the cost of obsession, and how it blinds its protagonists to love, human kindness and the genuine miracles around them.

Devils of Darkness: Sixties vampire badflick. Hilarious if you're in the right sort of mood, but massively derogatory to Gypsies, the French, Americans, lesbians and beatniks, as well as containing some of the most inept day-for-night filming I've ever seen.

I Heart Huckabees: Returning to the surreal comedy theme, this one is a psychological farce about an environmentalist and a corporate executive who are connected on the existential level.

Movie count for 2012: 5

Over the Rambow

Son of Rambow: A story about the dangers of personality cults, revolving around two eleven-year-old amateur filmmakers? Yes, it works, and the result is a cross between Lord of the Flies, Oranges are Not The Only Fruit and Bowfinger, with an exciting plot reversal approximately every fifteen minutes.

Movie count for 2012: 1

Wrapping up the 2011 capsule movie reviews

E.T.: Visibly from Spielberg's postmodernist period, as he inverts the tropes of 1950s alien-invasion B-movies in both plot and visual terms, with the alien as childlike and vulnerable, and the Earth authorities portrayed as invading, faceless spacesuits. Detracted from by the annoying squeaky voice of the hero child, the product placement, the shameless underuse of Peter Coyote, and the climax of the film, which went on way too long, was far too maudlin, and was, frankly, hackneyed.

Sarah Palin: You Betcha!: On-the-fringes documentary as the filmmaker, failing to get an interview with Palin herself, constructs the process of trying to do so into a sinister portrait of the failed Governor of Alaska as a bullying, selfish creature not above backstabbing those who helped her get into power. At the time of writing Gingrich has just declared that he would like her as a running-mate.

Dancer in the Dark: A film which breaks every single rule of filmmaking, and makes it work. Tragic, yet somehow also beautiful and uplifting.

Dorian Gray: Takes rather a lot of subtext and, unfortunately, makes it text. With a tragically uncharismatic Dorian and a curiously unhomoerotic Henry.

Movie count for 2011: 128

The Repeated Meme: The Horse and His Boy

Central Premise Recycled From: "The Empty Child" mostly (see next point).

Reference to Moffat's Back Catalogue: WWII-set story involving small boys and their mummies, and something which looks villainous actually just trying to help out; parents as the real heroes; girls with pigtails; Christmas special which is a Doctor Who-styled reinterpretation of a British children's classic; the Doctor as some kind of wizard-figure who fixes everything for everyone. Though he's borrowed Gatiss' wooden dolls, and Davies' celebration of the nuclear family unit as some sort of ideal.

Amy Screws Up the day with Wuv: What's wrong with carol-singers, I'd like to know?

Robert Holmes Called...: It does make the story less saccharine knowing that the planet that's harvsting the trees is Androzani Major.

And from the Hiatus: There's a story in one of the Short Trips anthologies by Mark Michalowski entitled 'The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe'.

Murray Gold's Festive Number 1: None! What, did they run out of budget there as well? We couldn't have had a novelty Forties-style song number from Alexander Armstrong or something?

Nostalgia UK: The story takes place in that kind of fantasy WWII which lurks in the heads of the British, where courageous RAF pilots fight dastardly Nazis on behalf of stiff-upper-lipped mothers and their children, with none of the messy details like the Dresden bombing or black marketeering or Churchill's secret realpolitik or information censorship getting in the way.

Inside Jokes: Alexander Armstrong as a WWII pilot. Come on, who didn't think that his first words to his navigator would be "Vera Lynn, she's well fit, innit?" Rather a lot of Chronicles of Narnia inside jokes (Uncle Digby, sentient forests, a child's journey to an alternate universe providing a means of saving a parent, etc.). Androzani Major.

Teeth! None, they're trees.

Hats! A space helmet with airholes in the back, it seems.

Fish! I'd have to watch it again but there's got to be an aquarium in that playroom somewhere.

Small Child! Two of them.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: Bill Bailey's team would seem obvious but there might be some lawsuits from the designers of Halo over the look of their environment suits, so I'll suggest the big tree people.

Special effects

The Conversation: Simple but powerful film about interpretation: Gene Hackman is a private surveillance operative who records a conversation; he doesn't know what it's about or why the person who commissioned it thinks it's important, leading to a spiral of brilliantly-rendered paranoid delusion as the operative speculates endlessly on its meaning and interprets the events of his life in regard to these speculations.

Hugo: I went to see this in part because of reading a review which said that this is the first film to actually use 3D as an integral part of the storytelling rather than a gimmick. I'm not sure I'd really go that far-- the 3D certainly added excitement and drama but I didn't see anything that couldn't have come across fine in a 2D version. That aside, it was still a rather sweet family drama (albeit one which occasionally segues into a lecture on the history of early cinema), with Sasha Baron-Cohen giving a surprisingly touching performance as the ostensibly-evil-but-it-turns-out-just-misunderstood antagonist.

The Red Baron: How anyone managed to make the story of a group of largely-aristocratic teenagers/twentysomethings given access to really powerful flying machines and more or less carte-blanche as to how to use them into such a boring movie, I'll never know, but they did. The misguided worthiness of the piece is summed up for me by the fact that they actually made up a Jewish flying-ace secondary character, adding in a title card at the end of the story that he "represents" the Jewish pilots who distinguished themselves in the German Air Force of WWI-- it's like saying "we have to emphasise this so no one will accuse us of being antisemitic, but God forbid we should actually tell the story of a real German Jewish pilot".

The Magic Roundabout: I was going to go sarcastic on this one and interpret it as a metaphor for how the underlying selfishness of the postwar generation led to the very same bright-eyed hippies and communards of the 1960s and 1970s becoming the relentless commercialists of the 1980s and 1990s. But it's too much work, so I'll just sum this up by saying that I don't remember kung-fu ninja death skeletons being a part of the original TV programme.

Movie count for 2011, with a week to go: 124

Of Human Bondage

Dr No: Had never seen this before. It's quite a beautifully-filmed slice of late Fifties/early Sixties period colour, with calypso and the Carribbean underlying a story with elements which had yet to become cliched (deformed mixed-race geniuses in Nehru jackets with secret island bases and plans to Take Over the World). Connery looks good, so does Ursula Andress.

From Russia with Love: More beautiful Sixties material, and the idea of SPECTRE as a third party setting NATO and the USSR off against each other for their own purposes is clever, but I found it not as interesting or as much fun as either of the previous films. The fight sequence on the train was very much the highlight.

Diamonds Are Forever: Again, hadn't seen this one before, and things seem a bit more on the slide-- perhaps it's the fact that Sean Connery has gained weight and the design is tending towards the brown polyester of the early 1970s (during the scenes in Amsterdam, I kept expecting him to walk past Van der Valk brooding by a canal). Still, the two crypto-homosexual murderers are lots of fun, as is Charles Gray as Blofeld and his collection of doubles, and there's a fun reference to faked-moon-landing cosmpiracy theories. Points for audacity, basically.

Raging Bull: A film about what happens to people who peak too early, following boxer Jake La Motta to the peak of his athletic career and then the relentless slide downhill. A cross between an art film, a gangster film and a sports film, which somehow works in all three categories.

The Long Day Closes: Impressionistic memoir of a working-class 1950s Liverpool childhood. Does a good job at conveying the randomness and surrealism of being a child, but the slowness of it all does make it difficult to empathise with in places.

Xala: Senegalese comedy about postcolonialism. The protagonist is a Senegalese businessman and politician who marries a third wife, but discovers that he is under a Xala curse which renders him impotent; the events which follow are a metaphor for the corruption which afflicts the country. There's also some clever use of language, with a lot of significance attached to who speaks French and who speaks Wolof, and when.

Beowulf: I enjoyed this more than I thought I would-- it takes liberties with the original story, but I think they're actually for the good (since the last third of the epic is kind of disconnected from the first two, it helps a modern audience to have some kind of through thread) and it's not like people haven't done alternative/postmodern takes on it before. The motion-capture did make everyone look somewhat doll-like, but then, well, it's a legend, where people tend to be rather archetypical.

Movie count for 2011: 120

Mannequin Skywalker

Revenge of the Sith: I was prepared to revise my initial opinion on the prequels for about the first fifteen minutes of this film, which was an exciting, well-paced rescue sequence with a bit of humour and convincing violence. The moment Anakin and Obi-Wan are back on Coruscant, however, things start going downhill. To be fair, this one does have generally pacier dialogue than the previous two (any line involving the word 'younglings' aside), Samuel L. Jackson actually gets something to do for a change, I've always had a bit of a liking for General Grievous as a character (albeit a two-dimensional one), and the scene where Yoda advises Anakin to let go of his grief for his mother and fears of losing Padme, but Anakin simply can't do that, is a nice touch (however brief) of a real-world philosophical problem. But none of this really helps.

Movie count for 2011: 113

The Last Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Serf's Up

Absence of Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Actually, this time we get a crowd of aliens under people influence. Way to ring the changes!

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: None, but "Joseph Serf" was one of Patrick McGoohan's pseudonyms when writing The Prisoner.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter, and for once not even mentioned in an anecdote.

Luke Cameo: Clearly this was intended as the mid-season Luke episode.

Sky says something so daft that you have to wonder how she gets through life without being mercilessly bullied: No, but then she's got to compete with Luke apparently having always called Clyde and Rani "Clani," even though that's never appeared before in the series.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: She goes on about family so much I suspect she's planning a US presidential campaign.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Luke actually makes a joke about the sheer number of mobiles destroyed in the service of the plots of this series.

Racism Towards Aliens: Yes, but, in a nice twist, not from the regulars this time.

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Breaking and entering, deception, theft, destruction of property.

Sonic Lipstick: Versus magic alien pen.

Wristwatch Scanner: Yeah.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: No, but you've got a whole crowd of hypnotised journalists.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: The way she and her kids lord it over Clyde and Rani over getting to go to the big exclusive Serfboard launch, I'm amazed they're still friends.

Wide-Eyed Speech About the Wonders of the Universe and How Great it Is to be in Sarah's Gang: Copied from the first episode for obvious reasons.

The Repeated Meme Toywatch: How did we do?

Well, the second wave of Character Options figures are out, so time to check how we scored on the "item most likely to wind up as a toy" predictions front.

The Impossible Astronaut: I predicted the Silent. That didn't take much predicting.

Day of the Moon: I predicted a limited-edition Amy Pond Up the Duff. Thus far, still none. We did get an astronaut, though.

The Curse of the Black Spot: I predicted either a green glow-in-the-dark mermaid, or Hugh Bonneville with a small child. We didn't get either. Still, Playmobil have a range of glow-in-the-dark pirates.

The Doctor's Wife: I predicted Idris. We got not one but three different versions. And Uncle, as well. Plus it seems you don't actually have to custom-make your own Nephew. Is this to make up for the lack of pirates above?

The Rebel Flesh: Predicted gangers. Got gangers, or at least a Doctor-ganger.

The Almost People: The Limited Edition Amy Pond in Labour playset. Come on, I dare you!

A Good Man Goes to War: Predicted Eyepatch Lady (and hoped for a nine-inch dress-up River Song, and a Lesbian Silurian). Thus far, no Eyepatch Lady! What hope have River Song and the Lesbian Silurian?

Let's Kill Hitler: We do get a River Song (albeit a reissue and thus in the wrong costume) but alas, no poseable Hitlers or pull-back-action Amy-and-Rory motorbikes.

Night Terrors: Yep, creepy dolls, or one of them anyway.

The Girl who Waited: Also no Amy Pond up the Menopause.

The God Complex: What, no naked mole-rat person? I'm disappointed.

Closing Time: Rusty Cybermen, as predicted. Though the job-lot of Cybermats were also predictable.

The Wedding of River Song: Novelty eyepatches. None yet, but I'm keeping an eye, so to speak, on the front of Doctor Who Adventures magazine.

Benares brass

Pather Panchali: Classic Indian neo-realist film, which I'll admit is a genre and location I'm not very familiar with, so I'm coming at this as a bit of an innocent. This film reminded me more than anything else of the British kitchen-sink drama of the same period (early Sixties): a story about a poor working-class family ground down by a combination of debt, poverty, bad luck, unsympathetic neighbours and hypocrisy (when, at the end of the film, the family finally decide to cut their losses and go to the big city, the village elders, who have been no help at all to them throughout the story, all turn up to beg them to stay on the grounds that it's their ancestral home). A familiar story which needs to be told over and over, and the characterisation of the family and their neighbours is nuanced, but the story was stretched over about three hours, mostly consisting of long shots of people looking faintly puzzled in the countryside, so I'm in no rush to view the rest of Indian neo-realist cinema.

Milk: Well-cast biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the USA. Viewed here and now against the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the somewhat terrifying rise of the religious right in the USA, it's particularly clear that his story has wider implications: that it's difficult and sometimes soul-destroying (and, as in Milk's case, also sometimes fatal) to stand up for equal rights and justice for the oppressed and marginalised, but that if enough people do, the movement can win in the long run.

Movie count for 2011: 112

The Sarah Jane Adventures Checklist: Wooden It Be Lovely

Absence of Crowds of People Under Alien Influence: Just one, and a diminishing chorus of homeless people.

Tie-in with Doctor Who story: None.

Rani's Mum is Annoying/Is Absent: The latter, though we do get a story about how she met Rani's poor, hapless father.

Luke Cameo: By mobile phone, no less.

Sky says something so daft that you have to wonder how she gets through life without being mercilessly bullied: Actually she's the only sensible one this episode.

Sarah Jane Waxes Maudlin: In fifty-something years of living in London, it seems, it's never occurred to her that there were homeless people. See "Selfish Cow," below.

Mobile Phone as Plot Device: Clyde's gets stolen and stamped on-- he seems to be losing it a lot these days.

Racism Towards Aliens: Sky's clearly picking up on her mother's attitudes when she says that everyone's strange behaviour must be down to "some alien."

The Crimes of Sarah Jane: Child abuse.

Sonic Lipstick: Present.

Wristwatch Scanner: Also present, though not really much good.

One or More of Sarah's Companions Falling Under Alien Influence: Clyde.

Sarah And/Or Companion Acts like a Selfish Cow: Sarah and Rani really don't come over too well this story, even when out from under alien influence. They drag Clyde away with them rather than wait five minutes for Ellie to turn up (thus ensuring that Ellie's never found again) and, when Clyde goes on his search for Ellie through the homeless hangouts, Sarah Jane acts like it's never occurred to her that such places exist.

Totem poles, incidentally, are a West Coast Indian thing, not a Plains Indian thing. And the Mojave desert, being on the Southwest Coast of the United States, is well outside of Plains Indian territory. It took me two minutes on Google to find that out.