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Mad Max: Fury Road

June 4, 2015 /

Well, I loved it. Coming out of the cinema last night, I couldn’t stop laughing for at least ten minutes because I’d enjoyed myself so much. The last time I had that kind of very hyperactive physical reaction to a movie was when I saw Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell on its London opening night back in 2009. DMTH left me with the similar impulse to head right back inside the auditorium for an immediate second viewing, although I happen to think that Fury Road is infinitely the better, the more meaningful film, more lasting as art than the hugely entertaining but ultimately disposable DMTH will ever be.

A great deal of perceptive, insightful, enthusiastic, original, and thought-provoking criticism of Fury Road has already been produced, with critics working hard to get inside the (generously distributed) meat and bones of this movie. That’s not what I want to do here – this is a personal reaction only – but just for the record, I do want to say that I loved what this movie did with male-female interaction in the context of the Hollywood action movie. In her truly excellent review, Abigail Nussbaum has some words of caution on this subject:

“A lot of what Fury Road does with regards to women–making the prime mover of the story a woman who is not sexualized or treated as the hero’s prize, featuring multiple female characters, not all of whom are young and beautiful, passing the Bechdel test–is not so much revolutionary as the very baseline of what we should expect from most movies–what we would expect, if we hadn’t become so accustomed to the toxic sludge of misogyny that Hollywood blockbusters have been serving up for twenty years.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more Fury Road seems not like a revolution, but like a throwback to the action films of the 80s, before the genre gained the respectability that comes from being Hollywood’s primary source of revenue, back when it was still possible to put women and people of color front and center, to be weird and grotesque, and not have to worry about courting an audience made up of thirteen-year-old boys.”

Whilst I applaud what Abigail is saying here and agree wholeheartedly, neither can I deny the sheer joy I did experience in seeing what we should be seeing up there on the screen… up there on the screen.  I loved the ‘passing the gun’ moment – because it was so understated, because it happened so naturally, and without even a flicker of resentment or attitude on Max’s part. I didn’t find anything male-gaze-y about the ‘women bathing’ scene. There is no hint of ogling in Max’s expression – just shock, incredulity at the sight of something so massively at odds with the horror and violence he’s just been experiencing. And the sight of water, of course – indeed, it’s almost as if he’s looking right past the women, at the water.  Neither did I feel that Furiosa’s autonomy was compromised by her reliance on Max. What I saw was Furiosa making deft use of the opportunities that came her way – Max turns up, he clearly shares some of our aims, let’s go with it. It’s not Max showing Furiosa what to do, getting her out of a tight spot – it’s two people, working together because they choose to and because it benefits them both.  What I saw was mutual respect, not timely rescue.

For those who felt that Max almost gets sidelined in the movie, I’d say no way does he. I felt my attention drawn by both characters equally. I think the difference here is that people are so used to seeing the action guy take the lead they don’t quite know where to look (the same as that thing you get when there are three women out of ten in a boardroom and the men start muttering about women ‘taking over’).

What I want to focus on mainly though – perhaps because in the main people have not talked so much about this aspect of Fury Road – is the movie’s supreme confidence, coherence and staggering beauty as a work of art. I don’t normally give a toss about special effects or CGI. If a film doesn’t have a good script to back it up, I’m just not interested. In Fury Road I have found my exception that proves the rule. I don’t think I have ever seen a movie in which the special effects were more exquisitely tailored to the action onscreen. People made a lot of noise about the visual spectacle of Gravity and Interstellar. I found the former to be completely empty – I can’t stand George Clooney anyway, and whilst watching the film I was never able to forget even for a second that Apollo 13 was far more exciting and much better written. The latter was a typical piece of ego-bigger-than-the-idea Hollywood bullshittery with a ludicrous script, heavily derivative storyline and not even as good in terms of its editing and cinematography as was inception. With Fury Road, on the other hand, I felt that perhaps in this instance the almost total lack of a script was a good thing. The power of the visual imagery told its own story, was demonstrative in a way that, dare I say it, opera or ballet is demonstrative. And what a relief to be spared the inane backchat, macho wisecracks and by-the-numbers, relentless wank that normally characterises what passes for the script of a Hollywood action movie. The worldbuilding, similarly, was superbly outrageous – never laboured, never explained, just there.

But simply as a piece of choreography, Fury Road is a stunningly beautiful thing, an exercise in skill and wild abandon that feels more like a piece of modern dance (by Pina Bausch, say) than anything else. The visual coherence, the gleeful relentlessness of pacing, the effortlessly logical segue from one set piece into another, the colours – the thing left me breathless with delight, not just at what was happening onscreen but at the obvious dedication, skill and commitment expended by those who put it there. In its visual audacity and visceral wantonness, Fury Road often reminded me of Jodorowski – only a lot less up itself and one hell of a lot more entertaining.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but Mad Max: Fury Road should win all the awards. It’s the kind of film I’d hesitate to watch again, in case that second viewing cast any kind of a backward shadow upon the heart-pounding, seat-jumping exhilaration of the unrepeatable first.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

December 25, 2014 /

The successful ghost story puts the reader into the position of saying to himself: ‘If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’

M. R. James

 

What is it with the British and their Christmas ghost stories? Despite resurgence in its popularity here in recent years, the Americans still do Hallowe’en better than us. Come midwinter though we are in our element. The idea that Christmas – and Christmas Eve in particular – should be the perfect time for gathering around the fire and taking it in turns to terrify the assembled company with ghoulish anecdotes seems so deeply rooted in British culture that it’s difficult to pin down exactly where it came from.

The most famous exponent of the tradition has to be M. R. James, the Cambridge don and antiquarian scholar who developed a passion for ghost stories and started writing his own to amuse himself and entertain his friends. It wasn’t long before his Christmas Eve readings – enlivened by some enthusiastic acting – became a highlight of the Cambridge year. The stories themselves are now seen as the mother-lode of English weird fiction, the standard by which all ghost writers since have been judged and often found wanting. M. R. James even had an adjective named after him: Jamesian, a word often used to describe a story characterised by an unsettling atmosphere of understated menace.

The Christmas ghost story didn’t start with M. R. James, though. His American namesake Henry James wrote his novella The Turn of the Screw in 1898, a full thirty years before the first publication of Montagu James’sCollected Ghost Stories. Henry James may have hailed from New York City, but he was an Anglophile at heart and eventually became a British citizen. The Turn of the Screw could be said to be the quintessential English ghost story and has probably been adapted for radio and screen more times than any other piece of weird fiction. It tells the story of an English governess and her battle to save her young charges from two particularly nasty apparitions. But the tale begins with a group of friends, gathered around the fire on Christmas Eve, telling each other ghost stories.

In other words, this business has been going on for centuries. There are those who insist it was Charles Dickens who started it all with his Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, who first appeared to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol in 1843. Personally, I doubt it. Christmas is an odd time of year. There’s nothing like the claustrophobia of enforced jollity to bring a family feud bubbling to the surface, and the staff on duty at police stations and hospitals over the festive season will tell you that there are more murders, drunken brawls and relationship breakdowns at Christmas than at any other time of year. What else can you expect when people who don’t normally see each other from one end of the year to the next are shut up together for days on end with nothing to keep them from each others’ throats but the Queen’s Speech and the Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special?

The whole baby Jesus business is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately in festival terms, anyway, and entirely the invention of the clerics. Before the Christian church got involved the traditional end-of-year junket used to be pagan, a kind of midwinter bacchanalia designed to deflect the Grim Reaper from his seasonal rounds. Could it be that our darker midwinter yearnings are actually a modern echo of this ancient custom? It’s interesting when you think about it: the very things that can make Christmas difficult – the cold, the dark, the glacial passage of time – are often dwelled upon in Christmas ghost stories and turned to creative advantage. Certainly the one thing that unites all members of a family, regardless of their age, gender or propensity to eat turkey, is the love of a good ghost story.

Weird fiction is a weird business, and it’s always fun to speculate about exactly where it came from and exactly why it does what it does. You won’t be surprised to learn that I love ghost stories, and that one of the things I still look forward to about Christmas is the wealth of ghost-related entertainment that’s usually on offer. I can’t remember precisely how old I was when I first discovered that along with the pigs-in-blankets and chestnut stuffing, Christmas also offered a televisual feast of ghoultide delicacies; I do know that no one else got so much as a glance at the special double issue of the Radio Times until I completed my investigations into what ghosts were haunting the schedules and when.

One has to get one’s seasonal priorities in order, and if any is more pressing than making sure The Hauntingisn’t going to clash with The Innocents I haven’t discovered it.

One thing you can say about the Christmas spirits: they tend to be a better class of ghost; if it’s vampires and werewolves you’re after, you’d better try Hallowe’en. When in 2002 the BBC commissioned a series entitledGhost Stories for Christmas, the format couldn’t have been simpler or more classic: Christopher Lee, seated in an armchair before an open fire, reading selections from M. R. James by the light of a guttering candle and not a staking or decapitation in sight. What’s more, it was a huge success. What the British have come to expect from their Christmas ghost stories is not buckets of blood but that indefinable frisson of Jamesian terror: footsteps in the snow, the wind moaning in the chimney, lamplight in an upstairs window. At the time M. R. James wrote them, his ghost stories were remarkable for featuring contemporary protagonists in modern settings. It is only with the passing of time that we have come to see them as deliciously romantic: the solitary professor, monk-like in his rooms, unwisely delving into arcane matters that would generally be best left alone… The haunted mezzotint, the copperplate handwriting on yellowed parchment, the repression of all rages and lusts behind a mask of punctilious Englishness – what most characterises the Christmas ghost story is an air of nostalgia.

In other words, we prefer our yuletide hauntings to be retro, with long shadows, and preferably in black-and-white.

Of course, childhood itself casts a long shadow, and those things that delighted and terrified us when we were younger can sometimes appear lacklustre and even dull when we encounter them again as adults. While thinking about and reading for this article I inevitably began to recall those films that were special for me, special because I’d never seen anything like them before, and with that irresistible taste of the illicit because I was only allowed to watch them in the first place because it was Christmas. Would they, could they possibly stand the test of time, and the burden of emotion they had been prevailed upon to carry? The only way to find out was to see them again, a venture I undertook with some misgivings. The nights were longer in childhood, and the films weredefinitely scarier. I wasn’t sure I wanted that illusion to get debunked.

My first encounter with M. R. James came when I was about eleven, when I saw Jacques Tourneur’s film Night of the Demon as part of a Christmas double bill of scary movies. Night of the Demon was made in 1957, so I suppose to my concerned parents it seemed pretty safe. The movie it was paired with, Freddy Francis’s 1975 film The Ghoul, was another matter. It was in colour, for a start, and it went on until well after midnight. It was agreed that seeing as it was Christmas I could stay up and watch Night of the Demon just as long as I went to bed straight afterwards.

Never one to go down without a fight, I made a huge fuss about not being able to see Peter Cushing as the mad Egyptologist with a cannibal son locked in the attic (what’s not to like?) but the truth is I was glad to have a get-out clause. I saw the trailer for The Ghoul more than once in the run-up to Christmas, and the sequence showing Don Henderson’s bloodstained feet creeping down the attic stairs was in and of itself enough to give me nightmares. Night of the Demon, with its country-house setting and clipped bourgeois accents, did seem safer, and in a good way.

At any rate, I reckoned I could handle it.

I’d reckoned without the Jamesian influence. In his foreword to the 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels, MRJ makes no secret of his personal formula for a successful ghost story:

Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way. Let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.

This is the very essence of ‘Casting the Runes’, the original MRJ story Night of the Demon was based on. In fact James doesn’t let you see the demon at all except as a lithographic illustration. Luckily for both film-lovers and weird fiction enthusiasts, Jacques Tourneur had both the sense and sensibility to similarly understate his case when he made Night of the Demon. I don’t think I properly appreciated the cleverness of the story at the time of that early first encounter, but I do know that the atmosphere of the film, the sense of the not-quite-seen, the insistently threatened, the horror just around the corner terrified and transfixed me long before the final revelatory sequence on the railway line.

I had fond, fond memories of this film, and when I viewed it again recently I was delighted to discover that Tourneur’s Night of the Demon lived up to every one of my recollections and even surpassed them. Dr John Holden, the classic Jamesian sceptic, is personified with dapper brilliance by Dana Andrews as he pursues his ill-advised scholarly enquiry into the nature of evil, and Peggy Cummins shows a lot more backbone than the average fifties heroine as Joanna Harrington, the niece of the demon’s first victim. The script, rich in the dramatic conventions of the day, is finely wrought, and the central message of the story – that it is impossible to outrun your fate once it has singled you out – is conveyed with conviction and evident enjoyment of the ideas at stake. There are some genuinely frightening moments. Night of the Demon is not just a good scary movie; it is a great film, full stop.

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw the Ealing Studios movie Dead of Night. I know only that it was during the Christmas holidays, and that the ‘haunted mirror’ segment scared the bejesus out of me. I hadn’t read Borges then, and the story’s premise – that a mirror might be more than just a sheet of window glass silvered with mercury, that it might be the gateway to a world of nightmare – was new to me and horrifying.

I’m ashamed to say that perhaps because this one sequence had made such an impression on me I could barely recall what happened in the rest of the movie. The surprise when I saw it again was therefore all the more marvellous.

Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1945 film Dead of Night was the first of what came popularly to be known as ‘portmanteau’ horror films, movies that take the form of a set of shorter, separate stories-within-the-story linked together by a framing narrative. Portmanteau horror is most (in)famously exemplified in the films of Amicus Studios, makers of the late, great Asylum, but this fascinating little subgenre has proved something of an unquiet spirit, revived in 1993 with Necronomicon and still more recently in the super little triptychs of Asian horror, Three Extremes andThree Extremes 2.  Dead of Night though was the original, and in many ways it remains the best. This film is now getting on for seventy years old, yet I was thrilled by its freshness, its vigour, its deft touches of modernism and ironic sense of humour. The movie looks superb, and showcases some fine acting, that of the young Michael Redgrave in particular. His portrait of a man on the edge of madness in the ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’ sequence is 24 carat.

One of the nicest things about Dead of Night is that as well as being a masterpiece of British cinema it is an archetypical reformatting of the classic Christmas ghost story. Here we have a group of friends, comfortably ensconced in the elegant drawing room of an English country house, telling each other scary stories as they attempt to unmask the secrets of the supernatural. A stranger arrives with the warning that they are all in danger, while a professional sceptic – Frederick Valk as redoubtable psychiatrist Dr van Straaten – seeks to reassure them of the omnipotence of science.

It seems curiously in keeping with the spirit of Christmas that its ghost stories often have a philosophical slant: do ghosts exist, is there life after death, is it possible to predict the future? There is almost as much talking as action in Dead of Night, a characteristic that is, once again, typically Jamesian.

The British are famous for their love of tradition, and woe betide those foolish enough to try messing with it. Christmas especially is a time when repetition tends to dominate over innovation, and perhaps that is why, where scary movies are concerned, we tend to keep recycling old favourites instead of experimenting with contemporary adaptations. There’s nothing wrong with the old favourites – as we have seen, quite the opposite – but to close the door on a haunted house simply because it’s new and therefore different would be to fossilize the canon, which would be a tragedy. The modern reworking of The Turn of the Screw screened for Christmas 2009 came under fire for being too explicit in its handling of the subject of child abuse. While it’s true that some might have to read Henry James’s original novella two or three times before grasping the darker implications of the story, it is also true that the molestation of minors does form the central tenet of that story, and I would have thought that one of the chief advantages of living in the modern age is that we are more accustomed to artists who say what they mean. I myself thought Sandy Welch’s adapted screenplay was inventive and thought-provoking.

I was similarly impressed by the new adaptation of what is perhaps M. R. James’s most famous story, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, commissioned by the BBC for Christmas 2010.  Whistle and I’ll Come to You was scripted by Neil Cross, who worked on the BBC TV MI5 drama series Spooks, and directed by Andy de Emony, who also directed the two classic Red Dwarf episodes ‘Rimmerworld’ and ‘Gunmen of the Apocalypse’. It upset a lot of devout Jamesians, mainly because it deviated rather substantially from the original text. There are more characters, for a start. You don’t find many women in M. R. James stories (it’s easy to forget that women were not made full members of Cambridge University until 1947, and MRJ’s college did not admit women until the 1970s) but Cross’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You gave Gemma Jones a central role as Alice, wife to John Hurt’s melancholic Professor Parkin and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this adaptation is that it gives its protagonist, James Parkin, a proper backstory. MRJ’s professors tend to exist in monastic seclusion. We cannot imagine them having families or sex lives, and the most interesting thing about them is their talent for stirring up ghosts. Hurt’s Parkin is a man with a past, grieving the loss of his life’s companion and racked by guilt for having to put her in a nursing home. The ghosts he stirs up are as much his own demons as the disembodied wraiths that, if we are to believe Monty James at least, are worryingly common along Parkin’s particular stretch of the Suffolk coast. The terror he experiences is all the more appalling for having its roots in Parkin’s personal reality.

I read the reviews of de Emony’s film with interest. I was delighted at the continuing passion expressed by so many viewers for the work of MRJ and for the tradition of the Christmas ghost story in general. But I have to say I had little sympathy for their proprietary insistence on textual rigidity. It’s important to remember that even the most controversial adaptation is just that: an adaptation, and does not affect the integrity of the original in the slightest. James’s stories never set out to be comfortable, and I found Neil Cross’s reworking to be beautifully imaginative, genuinely frightening (watch out for the bit when Alice’s hands come under the door!) and replete with a sense of elegiac Englishness that made it a truly satisfying dramatic experience. What I thought it proved – and far more convincingly than Jonathan Miller’s stiflingly dull 1968 adaptation of the same story – was how versatile the English ghost story is, and how timeless. James’s story is more than a hundred years old now, yet it is as popular today as it always was and perhaps more so. The fact that a screenwriter might choose to reinterpret it for our own time rather than slavishly reconstructing it as a period drama is in my view a measure of the love and respect still felt for these stories within our literary culture. I think M. R. James himself would be pleased and intrigued, to see how his work has endured and expanded in our collective imagination.

But it’s time to stoke up the fire now, I think. Our guests will be arriving soon, and I feel certain one of them at least will have a story to tell…

Happy Christmas, everyone!

 

(This piece was originally written for and appeared at the Starburst magazine website, December 2011.)

Favourite Hallowe’en reads

October 30, 2014 /

I’ve seen a lot of people posting their best-loved Hallowe’en reads this week, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on a few of my own.

1) Peter Straub – Ghost Story.

A modern classic, and rightly so. Straub’s stories are always complex, lush with detail, and multi-layered. You’re already deep into the story before you fully realise what’s going on, that wandering-in-the-forest feeling epitomises everything a Hallowe’en read should be. Anyone who lists slasher movies or serial killer thrillers among their Hallowe’en favourites is missing the point. Hallowe’en – All Hallows Eve – is the night when spirits traditionally walk abroad. This is a time for exploring spirituality – both of the dark side and the light – for coming to terms with hard truths, for delving into the secrets of the past and perhaps uncovering something less than pleasant in the process. For the four ageing members of Straub’s Chowder Society in Ghost Story, this is a time of facing up to the consequences of their past actions – big style. I adore this book. I adore Straub’s erudite, meandering and occasionally obscure style. I’m also very fond of John Irvin’s 1981 film based on Ghost Story which, though it cannot hope to convey all the subtleties of the original novel, seems to me to be the epitome of what a great Hallowe’en movie should be: quiet, reflective, mysterious and chilling at the core.

2) Helen Oyeyemi – White is for Witching

One of my very favourite ghost stories of recent years, this short novel plays out big issues on an intimate stage. Its evocation of a particular milieu – the English seaside town – is perfectly executed, its portrayal of relationships, the closeness and distance between people, is razor sharp in its accuracy and pathos. White is for Witching is equally a tense family drama and a forthright examination of the divisions within contemporary British society. I read this in a single sitting. Haunting and masterful.

3) Joyce Carol Oates – Bellefleur

Ah, Bellefleur! This is sumptuous, gorgeous, genius, the vampire novel that dare not speak its name. The language, the irony, the beauty, the madness, the STORY! Oates’s intuitive understanding of the gothic is both articulate and sublime. For those who don’t have time to sink themselves into a 600-page epic just now, try the stories in Haunted instead. This exemplary collection was my first introduction to Oates and she’s been right there at the centre of my personal pantheon ever since.

4) Ramsey Campbell – The House on Nazareth Hill

I honestly do think this could be the perfect Hallowe’en read. It’s a haunted house story, basically, and as my first encounter with Ramsey Campbell’s fiction I’ll never forget the impact it made on me. I couldn’t put it down, and kept reading it far later into the night than I should have done. The central character, Amy, remains with me still as a powerful presence. And that inner room with no windows – brrrrr!

5) Clive Barker – The Books of Blood

Seminal works in the field of British horror literature, Clive Barker’s two collections of stories contain everything from ghosts to monsters to ur-beasts to mad obsessives in the best Dr Frankenstein tradition. Particular favourites among the stories include ‘The Forbidden’, ‘In the Hills, the Cities’, ‘The Skins of the Fathers’, ‘Son of Celluloid’ and how could I forget ‘Rawhead Rex’?? But by far the best way of reading The Books of Blood is to start at Book 1 and read the whole lot through chronologically. Although the stories aren’t linked as such, their cumulative effect is considerable and their overall ethos is such that they demand the concentrated reading you might lavish on a novel. The Books of Blood were groundbreaking in their time and they have lost none of their power. Anyone – and I mean anyone – interested in writing horror fiction should and must read these stories.

And what will I be watching tomorrow evening? The Haunting (Wise’s 1963 version) is perhaps the quintessential Hallowe’en entertainment, and is pretty faithful to the original Shirley Jackson masterpiece into the bargain. If it’s atmospheric ghost stories you’re into then Amenabar’s The Others is pretty good, too.  I have a crazy, perfect love for the 1993 portmanteau film Necronomicon, the third segment of which scared me so badly the first time I saw it that I couldn’t sleep for a weekend (I tried it out on some friends a few months later – they were not amused, and I ended up having to bring a duvet downstairs for them all to hide under). My favourite film adaptation of Dracula is still the Coppola, no matter what anyone says. And for a dose of sheer Hallowe’en madness – with flying head-drillers and trans-dimensional dwarfs – what about Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm?

On balance though, I think tomorrow evening might be the perfect time to revisit a little-remarked-on but for me unforgettable adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Released as a TV movie in 1973 and starring James Mason as Polidori and David McCallum as Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein – the True Story is lush and overlong and over-the-top and with enough of the earnestness and passion of the original story to make it compelling. I first saw this in 1974, on the night ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’. My parents were having a Eurovision party downstairs (they were young, they were foolish) and my brother and I were treated to an unlimited supply of Twiglets and the free use of the black-and-white portable TV in their room upstairs. I was nine years old, my brother only seven, so I’m really not sure if Frankenstein was the kind of viewing Mum and Dad had in mind, but we watched it anyway. It seemed to go on for hours, and I was mesmerised throughout. It was many years before I saw it again, but I still remembered whole scenes perfectly and, perhaps because it was one of those so-important early influences, it had lost none of its power for me. Jane Seymour’s night at the ball, Elizabeth in the ice, the final pursuit to the cave. When I saw that Frankenstein – the True Story was to be released on DVD, I pre-ordered it at once. And having talked this out here I’m decided – tomorrow at around 9pm I’m going to unleash the monster from its cellophane wrapping…

Well, that was weird

December 26, 2013 /

I came here to post something about last night’s Doctor Who, only to find that my previous post had disappeared. Entirely. It wasn’t in the trash, it was nowhere. It was as if it had been sucked through that crack in the known universe people keep spreading rumours about.

I don’t know what I can read into this, other than that it might be some kind of retribution for the fact that I didn’t much care for The Time of the Doctor. For having the sneaking feeling, in fact, that it was a lazy piece of fan-service, something that was cobbled together in a hurry while everyone was still high on the success of the 50th anniversary episode The Day of the Doctor.

Yes, Doctor Who is a show that has come to be defined by its mythos and its season-long story arcs, and as a fan of intricate narratives I don’t have a problem with that, at all. But when an individual episode has no intrinsic worth as story, indeed when it makes no sense as story when taken in isolation, then what we have is lazy, lazy writing, and that’s what we were dished up with yesterday. The only ‘present tense’ narrative strand in The Time of the Doctor had to do with time travel as a novel method for getting your turkey roasted and I know it’s Christmas, but for goodness’ sake, surely there are better story ideas out there?

A sorry end to Matt Smith’s term as the Doctor, in my opinion, and further proof if any were needed that the programme is badly in need of some new blood in the showrunning department.

Still, all was not lost. Mark Gatiss’s documentary on M. R. James was a delight, as was his adaptation of ‘The Tractate Middoth’ immediately before it. A simple story, but effective, and beautifully retold. Perhaps Moffat needs to reacquaint himself with the masters…

I’ve now reinstated my post on what I read in 2013 – let’s hope it stays in place this time. I’ll be watching with interest to see if anything odd happens with this one.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Heartfelt thanks and good wishes to all those who stop by this blog every once in a while, and looking forward to more musings, rants and meanderings in the coming twelve months.

Spectre at the Fest

August 27, 2013 /

I made a momentous and rather sad decision this weekend: I’m giving up on generic horror films, for good.

It’s been some years now since I’ve been able to derive any pleasure from generic horror on the page, but I’ve continued to enjoy it on screen, as a guilty pleasure perhaps, but a pleasure nonetheless. If this weekend’s FrightFest has proved anything to me it’s that I can no longer do so.

Perhaps I’m just too old for this shit now. I don’t know.

I went to five films at FrightFest this year, each as glutinous and lacking in flavour as warm rice pudding. The horror community frequently bemoans the fact that the mainstream cinema audience just ‘doesn’t get’ horror, that they reject horror as a genre on principle, because of the gore, the violence, the disturbing psychologies of the protagonists, and in rejecting it they miss its subversiveness, its social awareness, its time-honoured position in the vanguard of underground cinema. Well, I ain’t buying it. I’ve seen more horror movies than I care to remember, and I can state with some authority that the only terrifying thing about generic horror cinema at the present moment in time is how derivative, burned out and tame it now is. Virtually every Anglo-American film currently being produced and sold as horror is actually cinematic comfort food. Tragically, the European horror film seems to be heading in the same direction.

OK, so let’s get specific. Here’s a brief run-down of the movies I saw at FF this weekend and what I thought was wrong with them:

Dementamania dir. Kit Ryan. Corporate executive Edward Arkham (geddit?) is having a bad day. Recently split from his girffriend Laura, he is finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the frustrating monotony and professional backstabbing that plague his work life. He’s also off his meds. Fortunately, a mysterious stranger named Nicholas Lemarchand (geddit? Geddit?) is on hand to give some sage advice: break free, Edward, exercise your will, you owe these wankers nothing, do what needs to be done…

Everything about this film was a cliche, from the ominous-sounding opening title music to the elevator ride to hell near the end. The script clearly thought it was being original and, God help us, deep. In fact it was so hackneyed and stilted it veered perilously close to the comedic on several occasions. What actually annoyed me most about this movie though was its attitude to women. I’m pretty certain that the team involved in making this film would be surprised to learn that their vision might have caused offence in this respect – and yet how could it not, when the women in this movie are reduced to choosing their roles from among the following: crazy stalker neighbour, duplicitous girlfriend, demon temptress with tentacles, office siren, or Eddie’s little lunchtime lesbian porn fantasy. For one crazy moment I thought the balance was about to be redressed during the by-the-numbers ‘back to reality – or am I?’ sequence towards the end when the medic attending Ed was shown to be female. But no, wait a minute, she’s just a NURSE! No worries though, because she loses no time in calling in a male doctor, along with a psychiatrist, also male. So that’s… just… fine.

I often find myself going overboard to prove how inclusive the horror community really is – but you know what guys, this was pants. Stupid bloody title, too.

Haunter dir Vincenzo Natali. Fifteen-year-old Lisa is also having a bad day. Or should we say, she keeps on having the same bad day. Waking repeatedly to the same routine, the worst aspect of Lisa’s nightmare is that her parents and younger brother don’t seem to realise that anything is wrong. Following her discovery of a mysterious scrapbook, Lisa begins to piece together the drama and horror of what has happened to her, and what she must do next. For although it’s already too late for her, there’s another terrified young girl who desperately needs her help.

I had high hopes for this one as I found plenty to enjoy in Natali’s earlier speculative movies Cube and Cypher. A bemused half an hour in, however, I remembered that the director’s most recent outing was the risibly generic Splice, and those hopes took a nose-dive. Billed as Groundhog Day meets The Others, Haunter has neither the originality, the sharply ironic script or brilliant acting performances of the former, nor the poetry and cinematic beauty of the latter. Rather, it is a tediously disappointing mish-mash of derivative tropes and yet another outing for the increasinly popular Hollywood ‘all ghosts go to heaven’ trope. Here’s a story – just like the Del Toro-produced remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – that would have benefited enormously from being recast in a more contemporary style. (The original DBAOTD was placed in a more ordinary domestic setting and was all the better for it.) Mists? Mansions? Cellars? Daddy possessed by a serial child murderer? As if all that garbage weren’t enough, the script’s awful. This is ghosts for grannies, a popcorn haunting dressed up to look like The Innocents and failing miserably. One giant yawn for mankind.

Dark Touch dir. Marina de Van. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more banal, along comes this Orphanage/Orphan/Mama rehash to prove me wrong. Honestly, this film is so embarrassingly bad it’s almost funny. A new and totally superfluous addition to the ‘demon seed’ subgenre, there’s nothing new about it apart from the depths it plumbs in its quest for the title of Possibly the Most Overcooked and Derivative Film You’ll See this Year. Traumatised by a mysterious and violent incident in early childhood, Niamh begins to show all the psychological characteristics of an abuse victim – characteristics that can only become more exaggerated when her parents and young brother die in a bloody massacre at their Irish home. Adopted by ubiquitous do-gooders Nat and Lucas, Niamh continues to insist that there were no murderers, that it was the House that did it (where have we heard that before?) and that the evil is likely to strike again at any time. As indeed it does. Only it’s at this point that the script writer seems to get really confused. Does she mean Niamh to be a protector and rescuer of abused children (cue violent death of Overweight, Abusive, Badly Dressed Village Mother) or a dangerous monster that will, if left unchecked, bring destruction and anarchy upon the whole valley?

Apparently Marina de Van just couldn’t bring herself to make up her mind between these two equally tempting possibilities.

Comparisons have already been made between Dark Touch and Carrie. Again, this is arrant nonsense. Brian de Palma’s film (as Stephen King’s novel before it) is a classic because of its incisive and brutal portrayal of high school bullying. The horror gets lathered on a bit after the bucket-of-pig’s-blood scene, this is true, and the bloody demise of Piper Laurie is just for the kids. But all the same, there is so much about Carrie (a decent screenplay, for a start, alongside marvellous performances by Amy Irving and John Travolta and of course Sissy Spacek herself) that remains resonant and affecting. Dark Touch is just stupid, period.

Banshee Chapter dir. Blair Erickson. Of the five films I saw, this was the only one that contained some discernably interesting ideas, that could actually have been a decent film if it had been imagined better. As it is, every spark of life in this movie is killed off more or less immediately by an unthinking and unnecessary reliance on overused horror tropes.

The film is inspired by the CIA-backed ‘MK-Ultra‘ project of the 50s and 60s, under whose auspices many hundreds of ordinary American civilians were subjected to voluntary and involuntary experiments in mind control, many of them involving dangerous hallucinogens. So far, so genuinely disturbing – similar stuff was going on here in the UK at Porton Down and is probably still going on (Gulf War Syndrome, anyone?) There are a multiplicity of crimes here that need exposing, not to mention a gold mine of conspiracy theories. Erickson’s movie presents us with the story of one James Hirsch, a young writer who decides to take one of the ‘Ultra’ drugs and record what happens. A scrap of surviving film footage shows James swiftly become paranoid and then terrified and then… absent. His college friend Anne, now a journalist for a successful online news outlet, is determined to find out what happened to him. She makes contact with the Burroughs-esque Thomas Blackburn, a counter-culture guru who, it would seem, procured the drug for James in the first place. And that’s where things begin to get silly.

There’s nothing new about Lovecraftian mystery stories, but there’s mileage in the mythos yet. My beef here is not with the concept as such, but with the hash that’s been made of it. Why are directors still pissing about with found footage horror? Blair Witch is fifteen years old now and enough already. And if they do have to use it, why oh why oh why do they have to succumb so readily to its most obvious cliches (jerky, static-infested camerawork, the main action occurring off to the side somewhere and the sequence cut short at the very moment something actually goes down)? Why does everything have to happen in the dark? (You’re in a top secret government bunker, not a garden shed – just turn on the light, for God’s sake.) Why does every film like this have to end up in a basement with someone going ‘no, no!’ and then shooting themselves? (This made me laugh in Chernobyl Diaries because the film makers were clearly revelling in the ridiculousness of it all – Erickson went for Woo this is Serious Shit and I was too annoyed to even raise a smile.)

If the director had taken the trouble to stop and think about his material and what might be made of it, he might have had a decent film on his hands. Instead he just reached for the obvious, the ready-made, the expected, and what we have as a result is another instantly forgettable found footage fiasco with no discernable merit whatsoever. Inaudible dialogue did nothing to salvage the situation, either.

Odd Thomas dir. Stephen Sommers. It’s a point of principle with me never to leave a film before the end, but I have to confess I only made it half way through this. The trains were dodgy because of the Bank Holiday, and I didn’t fancy being late home because of a film that could only ever play out as a cross between a rip-off of Stephen King’s Insomnia and an epiisode of Supernatural. CGI psychopomps. Time, waste of.

I’d love to be able to write these failures off as follies of youth – but you only have to consider the superior talents of Brit Marling, Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides was made when she was not yet thirty) Ben Wheatley and Tom Kingsley (Black Pond was one of my favourite films of 2011) to see that youth is no bar to subtlety, originality or artistic flair. Anyway, many of the FF directors are mature film makers with a sizeable roster of movies to their name. So what’s the problem?

The problem, as I see it, lies not so much with individual directors as with the idea that there is an accepted way of ‘doing’ horror, that horror can be created simply by throwing a bunch of staple ingredients into a mixing pot, that a horror film is not so much a story as a series of effects, designed primarily to manipulate the audience into jumping in their seats when someone shouts boo.

This unthinkingly generic approach is killing horror. Rather than seeking out their own source material, or expanding on themes that properly excite their creativity, new and upcoming directors are turning instead to other horror films as their core inspiration. It’s no wonder that the results feel second hand. It’s difficult to fully appreciate now the impact that Texas Chainsaw and Night of the Living Dead had, on both audiences and other film directors, when they were originally released. But it doesn’t use up a great deal of research time to discover that these movies were made thirty-nine and forty-five years ago respectively.

I for one think it’s time we had some new iconography. It doesn’t take anything away from the classics. In fact it helps us appreciate them more for what they were.

And just as there is innovative and wonderful horror fiction still out there if you care to look for it, there is still exciting and original horror cinema. In the past year alone I have seen films that have delighted me and impressed me and would definitely withstand multiple viewings. Just off the top of my head:

Sightseers, dir. Ben Wheatley. An inimitably British offering, insanely inventive and bizarrely appealing. One of a kind. I loved it.

Stoker, dir. Chan-wook Park. A stunning film visually, intense, visceral, surreal. Amazing use of music. I’m anxious to see it again.

Agnosia, dir. Eugenio Mira. This was amazing – an off-the-wall high gothic drama of mistaken identity, false imprisonment, dastardly goings-on below stairs. I’m not sure it even had a theatrical release in the UK, which is a criminal shame. The cinematography alone makes it a must-see for anyone with a genuine interest in dark fantasy.

The Monk, dir. Dominik Moll. Sounds like it’s going to be just another horror movie, but it really isn’t. It’s weird, and unsettling, and beautiful, with a denouement that is as brilliant as it is unexpected. Bravo.

Byzantium, dir. Neil Jordan. Heartfelt commitment and genuine creative vision, plus a beautiful script, made a mini-masterpiece of this otherwise fairly conventional vampire story. I have such fond memories of seeing this, and look forward to adding the DVD to our collection.

Only God Forgives, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn. I loved Drive, and so was eager to see Refn’s follow-up and in fact I defected from FrightFest for a couple of hours on Friday to do just that. More horrifying than anything the FF programme had to offer, this is a total one-off. It’s terrifyingly tense, amazing to look at, reminded me a little of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, but you can see it all in one go without losing consciousness. Makes Lynchian use of karaoke music. Ryan Gosling is brilliant. Kristin Scott Thomas is worth the price of entry all by herself.

So – the films are out there, but as with the best speculative fiction they tend to lurk in the borderlands. Often they’re not advertised as horror at all – because the concerns they express extend further and wider than can be expressed in a single word. These films are about characters, not effects. They tell stories, and they put the needs of the story before the demands of a label. They have nothing in common with the Hollywood idea of horror, nothing to do with the horror boom of the 1980s, nothing to do with anything but the original and passionate vision of their creators.

This is the kind of horror cinema I want to support, and from now on, as with the books I read, I’m going to make sure that this is where my money goes. I have no further interest in feeding the machine that is commercial horror. Machines are great at producing industrial quantities of identical product. Which kind of says it all really, doesn’t it?

Byzantium

June 11, 2013 /

There’s only so much you can do with the vampire subgenre, and you can bet that most everything you can do has already been done before. But at least in Neil Jordan’s new film Byzantium there is the satisfaction of seeing those things done beautifully, and very well.

Byzantium tells the story of two vampires on the run from their past, seeking sanctuary in an obscure town and knocking ordinary lives off kilter as they play out the latest round in a personal vendetta that has already been going on for a couple of centuries. It’s a familiar set-up – horror fans will have no trouble in catching echoes of Interview With the Vampire, Let the Right One In, The Hunger, even. What’s less familiar is the sheer haunting intensity of this film, the atmosphere it creates through its striking combination of opulence and understatement, the curious and (for me) utterly compelling interaction between the blandly prosaic and high gothic.

The cinematography is scintillating. The way the script grounds itself in the commonplace and moves in a stately progression towards the more grandiose abstractions of poetry is an act of daring that the screenwriter, Moira Buffini, pulls off rather marvellously.

Everyone in this movie plays their part with commitment and appropriate intensity. Saoirse Ronan is outstanding.

Horror cinema has never been more popular, it seems, than it is today. Barely a week goes by without a new horror movie being released – but with the predominance of the over-produced, shoddily conceived and lamely scripted kind of Hollywood product still in the ascendant, there are precious few genuinely decent ones around. It’s all the more satisfying, then, when a film as gorgeous and thoughtful and lovingly crafted as Byzantium arrives on our screens. I came away from it excited and moved – it has a killer ending – and all the more so because Byzantium was filmed in Hastings. Our town looks perfect in her role – mysterious and end-of-summer and faintly spooky – and the familiar locations have been utilized with the same appropriate and effective understatement as everything else in the film. It was lovely to see local people turning out in force to see it – there was a real sense of anticipation and the excited chatter as the audience left the cinema told its own success story. This movie is good for Hastings, and good for horror.

Byzantium is vamptastic. Go and see it.

They’re here!

May 17, 2013 /

I’m delighted to report that my author copies of Stardust were delivered this morning, and that the book is now officially out in the world! I have to say I’m seriously happy about that. There’s always something a bit weird about finally seeing work in print – the sense, perhaps, that the stories no longer belong to you – but in the case of Stardust this is very much good weird. I finished working on the collection right at the end of 2010, and there are some big stories in there – at 27,000 words ‘Wreck of the Julia’ is actually my longest published piece of fiction to date, and ‘The Gateway’ is pretty much the same length as my TTA novella, Spin – stuff I’ve been longing to share with readers, and now I can do that. Ben Baldwin’s cover art looks amazing – just as importantly for me, it also looks exactly right for the book. It speaks truly of what’s inside, somehow, and this makes me not just excited about and proud of the book, but comfortable in its presence, too. Thank you, Ben.

My thanks once again also to Pete and Nicky Crowther for making this happen.

There’s going to be a London launch event for several books including Stardust at the beginning of July. It’s shaping up to be an interesting evening, and I look forward to announcing more details in the near future. Watch this space!

And as if that wasn’t excitement enough, I received my author copies of Spin this week, also! At the risk of gushing all over everthing, I do have to say that it too looks amazing, and once again I’m thrilled with Ben’s cover, not to mention Andy Cox’s brilliant efforts in bringing this novella to publication. I’m happy to say that as well as the print edition, Spin is also now available as a Kindle eBook for just £3.69 – you can get a sneak peek here.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ve been thinking about new projects (big new projects) and working on a brand new story, which I’m hoping to have finished by the middle of next week. This has been one of those bastard stories where the first draft was a total mess – just a bunch of words tipped out on the page, basically – and so it’s taken me three complete redraftings to get it into a state where I can think about feeling happy with it. And sometimes – when you’ve just redrafted 5,000 words at one sitting, for instance – the only way to recharge the batteries is to stare at the cinema screen entranced while a burning spaceship ploughs its way through the atmosphere and collides with the planet’s surface in a smoking great impact.

That was Star Trek: Into Darkness. And yes, I know how silly it is, I know the bromance is in danger of transgressing the boundaries of self-parody, and that they had Uhura fighting Khan in an effing satin mini-dress, but for yesterday evening at least it rocked my world…

Fearing a credibility malfunction, Chris stayed at home.

Stoker

March 24, 2013 /

A number of reviews of Park Chan-wook’s new film Stoker have talked a lot about Hitchcock, but for me the movie owes more – so much more – to Park’s own earlier and inimitable ‘Vengeance’ trilogy.

There have been some miserable and pointless remakes of Asian horror movies. While Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s classic 1998 film Ring was not a bad effort, the Guard brothers’ 2009 The Uninvited, the Hollywood reboot of Kim Jee-woon’s deliciously haunting and strange 2003 film A Tale of Two Sisters, was so bland it was an insult, and you don’t have to go a million miles to find other examples. Park’s insistently compelling new movie provides the perfect antidote; for Stoker, the surface glamour of Hollywood is just so much camouflage. Stoker has not so much the feel of a remake as a rethink: what would happen if you took the characterlessly opulent interiors, vapidly beautiful people and self-indulgent first-world ennui that is the staple background to so much Hollywood horror, and forcibly injected it with some of the cinematic elegance, narrative ambiguity and edge-of-the-seat dramatic tension that has characterised much of the recent speculative cinema coming out of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea? The answer to that question is Stoker.

I adore Park’s films. I admire his ‘Vengeance’ trilogy as one of the most strongly argued cinematic achievements of recent times, and I thought his 2009 foray into the vampire genre, Thirst, was stunning. (I mean, come on, a vampire movie based on Therese Raquin? Genius!) Stoker is Park’s first English-language movie, and it concerns itself with vampires of a different kind. There’s no blood-sucking here, but in homage to the movie’s title there’s plenty of emotional vampirism, with Matthew Goode’s smoothly sinister Uncle Charlie mad as one of the Mantle twins, and Nicole Kidman – as Evelyn Stoker, a disappointed and jealous heiress sleepwalking her way through mid-life – hasn’t played anyone this demented since Eyes Wide Shut. And if it’s blood-letting you’re looking for, Park, here as everywhere, isn’t one to leave you disappointed.

The film’s surfaces are luscious, velvety, dripping with menace and double meaning and gorgeous hyper-realism, and Park’s use of music – as in the ‘Vengeance’ films – is outstanding (Clint Mansell’s Philip-Glass-like score, in the piano stool scene particularly, brings to mind Tony Scott’s delirious use of Schubert’s piano trios in The Hunger). Indeed there is something of the ballet about this film, a slow choreography of disaster that mounts towards a noisily inevitable – and almost joyous – finale of violence.

For those who like their horror wild and weird, this film is a must.

Flight from reason

February 4, 2013 /

I like books and films about people who fly aeroplanes for a living. William Langewiesche’s books Fly by Wire and Aloft both proved heart-poundingly exciting for me, the very best kind of serious, elegantly written, passionate investigative writing, and with enough dramatic tension to sink a dozen more conventional thrillers. Last year I finally sat down to watch Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, with mixed expectations (at 193 minutes a film better have a reason for existing or you’d walk out in protest) and even now some many months later I’m still a little in love with Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager, and the movie seems unlikely to be dislodged from its joint pole position (with Tarkovsky’s Solaris) at the top of my personal pantheon of cinema any time soon.

I could go on about how weird this all is, given that I am a very nervous flyer to say the least, but we’ll save that for another day. But from what I’ve written above you’d probably have no trouble in guessing that I was very much looking forward to Robert Zemeckis’s new movie Flight, starring Denzel Washington as a maverick airline captain, fighting to save his reputation after an investigation into a fatal air accident proves that he was drunk at the controls. Even the trailer had my pulse racing. I couldn’t wait.

We went to see it on Saturday night. It’s not as long as The Right Stuff, but it’s 138 minutes, which doesn’t exactly make it a short. The opening thirty of those minutes, which deal with the air accident itself, created an atmosphere of what I can only describe as rapt tension – it felt as if everyone in the cinema was holding their breath, so much so that when the plane finally hit the ground I felt a noticeable shift in air pressure as the audience collectively exhaled. And for the following hour and a half, that sense of drama and involvement continued. Washington was just great – wholly believable in his role, dignified yet tragic, brilliant yet dangerously flawed, his Captain ‘Whip’ Whitaker seemed likely to go down as a 9 carat portrayal of the kind of addictive personality that is so often the burden of the highly gifted. Kelly Reilly gave a powerful performance as Nicole, the recovering drug user who befriends Whitaker, only to leave him when it becomes clear that their relationship is likely to push her back over the edge into dependency.

But bugger me those last fifteen minutes. If you ever want to know what it feels like, watching a decent script being strapped to a gurney and having its throat cut, I would urge you to go and see Flight, whose numbingly sententious, tritely simplistic and just generally godawful final act made me so physically and mentally uncomfortable I couldn’t sit still in my seat. What Flight finally and sadly reminded me of was that spate of bizarre films from the late seventies and early eighties (Run Baby Run was one, The Hiding Place was another) which cast themselves as gritty dramas with serious themes but turn out to be little more than propaganda, the peddling of a particular brand of judgemental morality. Just who was responsible for this appalling blunder, which in a matter of moments reduces a credible and creditable exploration of human fallability to a mawkish mess? Whether it was the scriptwriter himself or a Hollywood committee, they ought to be rounded up and made to watch Zemeckis’s earlier outing, What Lies Beneath, which similarly falls apart disastrously in its final half hour. Only that didn’t matter so much, because it was just a stupid ghost story with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. Flight could actually have been a serious movie.

But if Flight seemed an apt demonstration of that old adage about a leopard never changing its spots, the other film I saw this week, Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering Django Unchained, appeared to prove that it is after all possible to come back from the grave. Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, which I looked forward to loudly and at every opportunity, turned out to be so crass and so embarrasingly bad it still makes me squirm to think about it. (I’ve actually sat through it twice to date – and God it’s long – because Chris, who’s not QT’s biggest fan anyway, refused to believe just how awful it was, and so I watched it again with him just to prove the point. Turned out I was right the first time.) But Tarantino is one of those directors I enjoy so much that just as I forgave Woody Allen for Whatever Works, so I was looking forward to Django more or less as if Basterds had never happened.

What a movie. Fellow director Spike Lee has criticised Django for being ‘disrespectful’, but as the film’s star Jamie Foxx asserts, Lee’s position is considerably weakened by him not having seen it. Foxx is a passionate defender of the movie, and he should be proud of his role in it. If he ever gives a better performance than he does in Django I look forward to seeing it.

Django effortlessly achieves what Basterds so memorably failed to do: it combines drama with brio, furious seriousness with QT’s unique brand of deadpan, pitch black humour. Oh yes, it’s daring, controversial even – it treads close to the edge of madness on so many levels. But somehow – miraculously – it keeps its balance. What Django is not is a documentary about the American slave trade. What it is is a grand fantasia, a Wagnerian behemoth of insane brilliance. If it proves something that I was crying during some parts of this film and laughing with delight in others, then there it is.

And bloody hell, that QT man can write. His timing, his feel for dramatic irony and structure, his love of narrative gamesmanship, above all the skilful construction and effortless power of his sentences, is a thrill to experience, every time. That, more than anything else, is why I love him.

It’s worth paying the ticket price of Django Unchained just for the soundtrack. And me? I don’t mind admitting I paid it twice.

Year’s Best

December 29, 2012 /

Last night we watched Hanna, Joe Wright’s film from 2011. We were keen to see it when it came out but it was one of those we missed – we’ve now caught up with it on DVD. The reviews at the time were non-committal, but whilst Hanna is undoubtedly flawed (Cate Blanchett’s part is so badly scripted you’re desperate for her to be gunned down just to put an end to her wooden dialogue) what we discovered was an odd, highly imaginative little movie with some wonderfully surreal moments, striking imagery and a great soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers. I loved seeing it, and it left me feeling aggrieved for Joe Wright that his first two features – the predictably lavish and entirely unchallenging costume dramas beloved of habitual non-cinema-goers, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – were so rapturously received, while his next three films – The Soloist, Hanna and this year’s Anna Karenina – have met with indifference and a vague bewilderment. The variety and weirdness on display in his more recent work gives us ample indication that Wright wants to do a great deal more as a director than pump out repeat performances of the kind of heritage cinema that launched his career – and yet it would seem that some reviewers at least would feel happier with him if he stayed in the box he was originally allocated. This, as they say, makes me mad.

I love Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was my great introduction to Russian literature and I’ve read it three times. I’d be content to see it (perhaps along with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago) awarded the title of Best Novel of All Time. Most attempts to film Anna Karenina have concentrated on period detail, on recreating, as accurately as possible given the time restrictions, what actually appears on the page. Such attempts have met with varying success, but given the scope of the novel and the mountain of narrative material to be climbed it’s perhaps inevitable that most of them were doomed. You can enjoy them as entertainment – in much the same way you can enjoy David Lean’s approximation of Doctor Zhivago – but they don’t add a thing to the novel. How could they, when all they’re doing is trying to ape a novelistic language, rather than approaching Tolstoy’s work from a fresh angle, in terms of cinema?

Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, filmed in a mock-up of a nineteenth century theatre, all swagged red velvet and gilt trim, is a satirization of lavishness. It plays around with the idea of being a stage play, and yet the filmic devices Wright employs – the apparent transposition of the action inside a toy theatre, the use of a model railway layout to portray Anna and Vronsky’s journey from Petersburg to Moscow – could only be achieved through the medium of cinema. As such they pass beyond gimmickry to illumination, augmenting our understanding of the novel from a twenty-first century perspective. Rather than being heritage cinema, Wright’s Anna is a modern work of art. Can it be that which upset the purists? Whatever the reason for this film’s lukewarm reception, it pisses me off. Cinema, like all art, thrives on risk, and the willingness to take risks, as Wright has done, is infinitely more praiseworthy than the lush repetition of some perfectly executed Hollywood Tolstoy-by-numbers.

Anna Karenina turned out to be one of my favourite films of 2012: a surprise and an inspiration and a delight. Other favourites include Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, Jean-Marc Vallee’s Cafe de Flore, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers. These are all what I’d call hole-in-the-wall movies, the kind that get only a limited theatrical release and rarely crop up in awards nominations. You won’t find them on view at your local multiplex, yet they’re undersold on the arthouse circuit also. They’re those peculiar little films that no one seems to know what to do with and I love them, even when, or especially when, they’re not perfect.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t seen The Master yet, but we’re going next week. I loved Woody Allen’s To Rome, With Love, even though it’s not ‘good’ Woody Allen, apparently, but then I’ve loved everything he’s done apart from Whatever Works – and yes, that includes the London movies. Also I totally adored William Friedkin’s Killer Joe. So shoot me down.)

The year in books was dominated for me by two titles, M. John Harrison’s Empty Space, and Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child. You might easily draw comparison between these two – Keith Ridgway tackles the crime novel in a manner reminiscent of the way Mike Harrison tackles the science fiction novel, an approach composed of pretty much equal parts love and resentment – but that wouldn’t be the point. Both these books are astoundingly well written, punch-to-the-gut well written in fact. Both do fascinating things with form, both offer an honest confrontation of contemporary reality. Above and beyond that, both these novels are meant, both give you the sense that the writer staked his integrity on them, not to say his sanity. Both feel like essential reading, in a way that too few contemporary novels are willing to risk. There – we’re back with risk again. A real novel, surely, should entail some.

If Empty Space and Hawthorn & Child tie for gold, my worthy runner up would have to be Sam Thompson’s Communion Town, a first outing so accomplished it raises the bar a notch higher for anyone and everyone behind Thompson in the debut queue. I really loved this book. What’s more, I was excited by it – not just because of the risks it takes with form and with genre but also because of the compelling mystery of its storytelling and the rapturous beauty of its language. Communion Town made the Booker longlist and should have gone further. Still, there’s plenty of time for Sam Thompson, who clearly means business.

The other books on my personal year’s best list weren’t written or even published this year – 2012 just happened to be the year in which I read them. Nicola Barker’s Clear was a total joy – I honestly can’t go far enough in stating my admiration for this writer and what she’s doing. Barker has often talked about how much she feels compelled to take risks, both in her subject matter and the form of her narratives, and it is a testament to her skill as a storyteller that for the reader these risks are rendered invisible by the runaway pleasure one always finds in reading her. (I mean, Barker’s Behindlings or Self’s Umbrella – which would you rather read..?) In 2013 I plan to read The Yips – already purchased – and to finally catch up with Wide Open, the novel that won Barker the Impac Award and that I’ve been meaning to get to for ages.

Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching took my breath away. A small novel, but perfectly formed. and without a doubt the best ghost story I’ve read in years. Why it was largely overlooked by the various awards judges – both mainstream and genre – is a complete mystery. Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich was another book I came away from wishing I’d written it. And continuing in the military vein, 2012 was the year I finally got around to reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I’ve heard so many people rate this book as their ‘desert island’ novel, an indispensable classic that made them look at narrative in a whole new way. I was a tad sceptical, to be honest – but wow this was a great read! The Good Soldier is buttoned up to the point of claustrophobia, understated to the point of being repressed – but still it seethes with tension and enmity and hidden meanings; unshowy yet flawlessly elegant in its use of language, it’s a genuine page-turner and I found myself joining the ranks of those who couldn’t put it down.

The book that has proved the most practical inspiration to me this year was Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. When I read it I burned with envy, simple as that. Here’s a novel that made me stop what I was doing and think again, a tautly composed, one-of-a-kind book that is a masterclass in storytelling as well as a showcase for some of King’s best writing. What King demonstrates most of all in The Gunslinger is that style and substance can and should be equal partners. Grasping this – indeed I think I shold say finding the courage to grasp this – is reshaping me as a writer, I hope for the better.

Of course there there were some low points: Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (trying to ‘do’ SF but failing from a great height with a lingering waaaaa sound), Benjamin Wood’s The Bellwether Revivals (a too-shallow exploration of a fine idea), Ali Shaw’s The Man Who Rained (a weak recapitulation of his brilliant first novel The Girl with Glass Feet) to name but three. But when it comes to reading and writing, nothing is wasted. I find that even the books that don’t work for me teach me something, and asking myself precisely why I’m angry with a book can often be as instructive as setting down my reasons for loving a text.

As for next year’s reading resolutions, what I wish for myself more than anything is some structure, the self discipline to stop dotting around all over the place and engage in some serious and constructive ‘project’ reading. (OK, so this is just another excuse for me to make lists of things, fair cop.) As well as completing Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I also have vague plans to read the whole of Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘gothic’ sequence – with the fifth and last novel due out in March, I can’t think of a better time to embark on that particular voyage, especially given that I could read JCO all year long and not get tired of her. I’d like to catch up with some contemporary crime novels (everyone was all over Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, for example) and I can always make time for more literature in translation – Bernardo Carvalho’s Nine Nights is already on my reading list. Then of course there’ll be the excitement of a whole new Clarke Award shortlist – I can barely wait!

But the best thing about a new year’s reading is the newness of it, not having a clue what your best discoveries will be.  And there’s always that hope, reiterated every year, that you’ll stumble upon a book that will change your whole outlook, that kind of talismanic text that fills you with a new urgency, that reminds you of what you’re supposed to be doing and equips you – if you pay attention – to do it better. That’s what I’m looking forward to in 2013.

Happy New Year!

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