Recent events – the desire by our current government to commit political suicide, and half the population to commit economic suicide – have somewhat over-shadowed the past couple of weeks, but prior to the UK imploding very messily, I spent a weekend in Stockholm at Fantastika 2016, this year’s Swecon. It was my second Swecon, and my third Nordic con. My first had been Fantastika 2013, in the same venue as this year’s Fantastika – the Dieselverkstaden in Sickla, an area to the south of Stockholm’s city centre.
I flew to Sweden early on Friday 17 June. I’d been panicking a bit because I’d had trouble finding out where I was supposed to check-in online, but fortunately I got it sorted the evening before I flew. And when I boarded the aircraft – a Norwegian Boeing 737-800 – I discovered I had one of the seats by the emergency exit over the wing. In other words: leg room! After landing at Stockholm, I caught the Arlanda Express into the city-centre – SEK 280! – where I met up with Tobias Bodlund. We caught the Metro to Gamla stan, and had a burger and a couple of beers. The plan was to cross the bridge to Slussen and catch the Saltsjöbanan urban railway to Sickla… But it seemed the railway was closed as they were extending it or something, so we had to catch a replacement bus. The weather was hot and sunny, and the bus was like a sauna.
At Fantastika 2013, this area in front of the Dieselverkstaden had been a building site
I checked into my hotel, showered and then headed over to the Dieselverkstaden to register… Early in the evening a group of us ate at the Italian restaurant just by the Diselverkstaden – although “restaurant” is perhaps a bit strong. You picked your food from a variety of bowls of saucers and pasta in a display counter, they dished it out onto a plate, and then stuck the plate in one of a dozen microwaves on a shelf behind the counter. Despite that, the food wasn’t that bad. Later, I caught one of the programme items, a conversation between GoH Caroline Mullan and Linnéa Anglemark.
Next was Jukka Halme’s infamous quiz, which I was told I had to go to… and where I was immediately volunteered to be one of the contestants. Jukka’s quiz is designed to be difficult, and the scoring can be a bit random, but it’s also intended to be entertaining. Which it certainly was. Our team was international, with GoH Jerry Määttä (Sweden), Thomas Recktenwald (Germany) and myself (UK). We also won. By a thumbs up. (The audience managed to score the same number of points – don’t ask – as us, but we’d managed a thumbs up for a close guess on one question.) Apparently, the score keeper – a volunteer from the audience – normally wins. I also managed to answer one of the “four fields” questions correctly and scored the full two points, which has apparently never been done before.
I had another beer or two after the quiz – unlike the last Fantastika, they’d set up a small bar in the concourse area outside the two auditoriums used for the programme.
The view from my hotel room on the Saturday morning
The next morning when I woke up, it was chucking it down. And it rained most of the day. I wondered if I’d brought the weather with me from the UK. Breakfast was packed – there were at least four coach parties, one British, staying at the hotel. Fantastika 2013 had taken place in October, and the hotel had been a lot less busy. Back across to the Diselverkstaden to catch a few programme items and several wanders around the SAAM/Alvarfonden book room (a Swedish fan charity which sells secondhand books, mostly UK and US paperbacks, for SEK 10 to SEK 30). Tobias and I ate lunch at the Mexican taverna next to the Italian restaurant. Then it was an afternoon of programme items, visits to the book room, and the occasional beer. I ate in the hotel restaurant that night as I was on a panel at 6 pm, which was apparently when a lot of people went for dinner. The panel was titled “That’s why I killed him!” and was about character motivation. On the panel were GoH Maria Turtschaninoff, Anna Jakobsson Lund, Mats Strandberg, myself, and moderator Markku Soikkeli. I thought the panel went pretty well – and I was surprised when Markku asked me about the motivation behind the title character in my story ‘Barker’. (Easy: he’s based on a dog…).
After hanging around, drinking beer and chatting in the Diselverkstaden until around midnight, I headed back to the hotel.
Sunday was a quieter day. The con seemed to be winding down from around mid-morning. By mid-afternoon, when GoH Carolyn Ives Gilman had her signing, people were starting to leave. (I’d brought copies of her books for her to sign but, annoyingly, only realised I’d forgotten her debut, Halfway Human, when I landed in Sweden. Gah.) After the closing ceremony, led off by acapella singing by the Gléowine chair and closed with the spirit of Swecon being handed over to Kontur (Uppsala, 26 to 28 May next year), those of us that remained had the dead dog party in the Dieselverkstaden’s Bistro (last time, it had been in the Bishop’s Arms, a UK-style pub). The weather was nice and pleasant – bar the occasional shower – so we carried on until the bar closed. And when we moved across to the hotel, we managed to catch one more round before its bar closed.
Sergels torg, from the top of the Kulturhuset
My flight back to the UK was at 6 pm on the Monday, so I had plenty of time to kill. I woke up early, panicked a bit because I’d forgotten to check-in online the night before, but managed to do it on my phone (and discovered when I boarded the plane that evening that I’d once again got a seat by the emergency exit over the wing; result.) After checking out of the hotel, I took a taxi to the Centralstation, where I dumped my bag, and met up with Tobias. We went for lunch at the rooftop restaurant in the Kulturhuset, which overlooks Sergels torg. It was hot and sunny, just like it had been on the Friday (when I was also carrying a heavy bag around with me). After lunch, I said my goodbyes and caught the Arlanda Express to the airport, where I planned to kill the rest of the afternoon. The last time I’d flown from Stockholm had been on an early October morning, and the airport had been deserted. It wasn’t this time. It was heaving, and there weren’t many places left to sit.
My flight was delayed by 45 minutes, which meant I’d miss the train I’d planned to catch. Fortunately – for me, at least – the next train’s arrival had been delayed by 15 minutes, so I managed to catch it a couple of minutes before it left the station. But it was then delayed further – kids trespassing on the line between Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly, apparently – and I didn’t get home until 10:30 that night. That final train ride is always the worst part of any journey home from abroad, because drives in just how shit our railway network is. Of course, we know who to thank for that…
Three years ago, I’d had an excellent time at Fantastika 2013, so it had always been my plan to attend another Swecon. When I learnt Fantastika, in the exact same venue, had been chosen as the Swecon for 2016, I knew I had no excuse not to go. And especially since I’d met a lot more people in Nordic fandom at Archipelacon last year… And yes, this Fantastika was a good as the earlier one, if not better. Not only are the Swedish (and Nordic) fans extremely friendly, but they’re also still focused on celebrating the books and stories that fandom is actually about. While there was a panel on the novels Robert Heinlein – which was actually very interesting – there were also lots of discussion of current science fiction and fantasy works. The experience reminded why I became a fan myself.
I really ought to shout out to all the people I spoke to over the weekend, but I’ll probably go and get a forget someone – but I’ll have a go anyway. Here, in no particular order, goes… Tobias, Johan, Luke, Fia, Kristin, Erik, Jukka, Jessica, John-Henri, Caroline, Brian, Chris, Barbara, Anders, Jukka, Carolina, Thomas, Patrik, Jerry, my fellow panellists, Tommy, Flemming, AR, Karin… and if I’ve missed anyone, I sincerely apologise.
As mentioned earlier, next year’s Swecon is in Uppsala. I’m hoping I’ll be able to go. And if not, there’s always Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in August next year.
Bit of an odd bunch, this. Nothing from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. A few rentals, a couple from my own collection, a charity shop find, and one I found on Amazon Prime and initially thought was bloody awful but found myself enjoying by the end of it.
Nebraska, Alexander Payne (2013, USA). Bruce Dern is a crotchety old man, not entirely all there, who receives a letter telling him he’s been entered into a draw for $1 million and he thinks it means he’s won the prize. So he heads south to Lincoln, Nebraska, from his home in Billings, Montana… Or rather, he tries to, as he can’t drive. After several attempts to walk south to Lincoln, Dern’s youngest son reluctantly agrees to drive him to collect his “winnings”. The family all know there’s no prize money, but all they can do is humour Dern. En route, the pair stop off in Hawthorne, Nebraska, Dern’s home town. Once his family and old friends discover Dern is rich, they all want a piece of the money. Which doesn’t exist, of course. Dern is great in the lead role, and Will Forte – also responsible for the fucking awful MacGruber – puts in a good turn as his son. But it’s Dern’s film, and he’s more than up to the job. It’s filmed in black and white, which initially feels like an affectation, but soon seems to suit the material. Payne is not a director I especially rate – his previous movies I’ve seen have all been lightweight Hollywood comedies – but Nebraska is actually not bad. Like many films which show working-class white Americans, it demonstrates they can be not very nice people – while also suggesting they’re worse than depicted. The same might be said of working-class Brits, of course; or indeed those of any nation. But there is a particular mix of wilful ignorance and uncritical patriotism which seems characteristic of the white American working-class which is really unpalatable.
Ship of Fools, Stanley Kramer (1965, USA). A group of assorted characters are crossing the Atlantic just prior to World War II, hoping for Oscars in what they hope might be, in 1965, an Oscar-bait movie. The star-studded cast says so, the weighty themes say so, filmed in black and white says so, the 149 minutes running time says so… In the event, Ship of Fools was nominated for Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor, but won only for Best Art Direction – Set Direction Black and White and Best Cinematography Black and White. Having now seen the film, I’m not surprised. It’s so full of itself, it’s astonishing the ship didn’t sink the second the director shouted “Action!”. As is the case in most ensemble films, there are a variety of interlocking plots being worked out. They’re supposed to have added weight because the voyage takes place just before the outbreak of WWII and José Ferrer’s character is a straight-up German Nazi. Then there’s the Jew, with the mordant sense of humour, whose misplaced optimism seems somewhat tasteless. And Vivien Leigh was apparently suffering full-blown paranoia, but managed to put in a passable performance. Oskar Werner plays the good German – on the one hand, he’s trying to improve the conditions of the passengers in steerage; on the other, he’s feeding La Condesa’s drug habit. The film was apparently adapted from a 1962 novel by Katharine Anne Porter, who based it on a journey she actually took across the Atlantic in 1931. It took her 22 years to write the book. Porter was apparently disappointed with the film. I’m tempted to try the novel, but I can’t recommend the movie.
Winter Light, Ingmar Bergman (1963, Sweden). A married couple live happily in a small Swedish village, and the local vicar is their very good friend. They consult him on all manner of things, and he sets their hearts at rest every time… Of course not. This is a Bergman film. It’s not cheerful. It’s as miserable as the most miserable-looking git caught without an umbrella in a cold and miserable thunderstorm. I don’t think cheerful was in Bergman’s cinematic vocabulary. What Winter Light is, is the study of a married couple who are suffering existential qualms due to China’s development of an atomic bomb, and who are not comforted by their local vicar’s words of reassurance. But then the vicar has his own problems, chief among which is an ex-lover he no longer loves… And then the husband of the couple shoots himself and… I’m reminded to some extent of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, which also has a plot enabled by the threat of atomic bombs (the phrase “atomic bomb” sounds so much better than “nuclear bomb” – the former sounds like a wonder of science, the latter just another war toy). In The Sacrifice, the threat of nuclear war persuades Joseph Erlandsson – a member of Bergman’s stock conmpany at one point – to bargain with God: he will give up everything he owns if the holocaust is averted. It does, of course, somewhat depend on believing in a god. Winter Light plays the same existential game with the implied threat, but rather than apply it to a man’s possessions it makes play with his religious convictions instead. Of the three films in the The Faith Trilogy, I enjoyed The Silence the most, perhaps because it seemed most recognisably experimental in format; but on reflection, I wonder if Winter Light, being a much weightier story, is not the better one. [2]
Black Gold, Jean-Jacques Annaud (2011, Qatar). Also known as Day of the Falcon, which is just as vague a title. It’s basically the life of ibn Saud, but with oil as the cause of the war between the two royal houses. The film was panned on release, chiefly because of its casting – Antonio Banderas plays one emir, Mark Strong the other; Frieda Pinto plays the love interest, and Liya Kebede the other major female character. The star, the young prince who becomes an ibn Saud-like leader, is played by Tahar Rahim (which was weird as I’d watched him in A Prophet only a week or so before). Banderas, the sultan of Hobeika, and Strong, the sultan of Salmaah, have just signed a peace treaty, and have agreed to keep the “Yellow Belt” as a buffer zone between their two sultanates (I assumed this is taking place somewhere in Nejd). Salmaah also has to hand over two of his young sons to Hobeika to ensure the peace. (I’m not sure whether Banderas or Strong are sultans or emirs, the two terms seemed to be used interchangably during the film – probably they were ra’ees, usually translated as “ruler”). Anyway, some years later Americans discover oil in the Yellow Belt. Salmaah rejects them, but Hobeika is happy to profit from the “black gold”. But then the elder of Salmaah’s two sons who is living with Hobeika tries to escape and is killed. The younger, Auda, played by Rahim, who is a bookish sort, is sent to his father as peace envoy. His father persuades Auda to help in his plan to conquer Hobeika and shut down the oil wells. Auda must lead a diversionary force into the Yellow Belt, while Salmaah himself leads another force right up to the gates of Hobeika. Except librarian Auda proves to have real tactical genius, and defeats Hobeika’s armoured cars with a force of prisoners on camels. And when he then attacks the Bani Sirri and frees their slaves, he earns the loyalty of all the other desert tribes… And so turns up to Hobeika with an enormous army at his back. There are a few elements here taken from the life of ibn Saud – such as his attack on Riyadh and defeat of the House of Rashid – but the Hijaz is ignored, Mecca is ignored, and the history of oil in Saudi didn’t start until later (see Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and sequels). But despite its fancification of the real history of the interior of the Arabian peninsula (and did the Bedu tribes really dress that colourfully?), and the failure to cast appropriately (Strong at least manages an Arabic accent; Banderas doesn’t even try), I sort of found myself enjoying Black Gold. It was daft, but it was colourful and the references to ibn Saud’s life added an extra dimension.
Szamanka, Andrzej Żuławski (1996, Poland). Gosh, what to say. There is something about Żuławski’s films which… er, defies explanation. They are completely bonkers, but bonkers in such an emotionally intense and intensely watchable way that’s it’s hard not to feel something for them. The sight of Valérie Kaprisky burning up the screen in La femme publique had burned itself into my memory, and now Iwona Petry, as the (titular) heroine of Szamanka, who throws such an idiosyncratic performance at the screen it’s hard to forget it. She’s a student who rents a flat from an academic, but right from the moment they meet it’s l’amour fou. And it gets more fou as the film progresses. Meanwhile, the acadmic has discovered the well-preserved body of a two-thousand year-old shaman. The historical investigation and the affair become confused, so much so that the academic hallucinates the shaman telling him he was killed by his mistress. And so, as often happens in Żuławski films, the plot echoes the psychological dimension. Petry’s performance treads a fine line between plausible and outright weird, and the fact it works is more down to the tense atmosphere Żuławski manages to keep going for the length of the film – despite the lack of an obvious thriller plot. There are moments when it all feels like OTT posturing… but then something sort of clicks into place, and the film’s trajectory toward its tragic end is once again on course. As with La femme publique, I bought the Mondo Vision special edition DVD, which comes in a fancy box, with included OST CD, booklet and collectible bits and pieces. The presentation suits the material – I can think of many directors who deserve such releases, but Żuławski is certainly on that list. Worth buying. [1]
Kingsman: The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn (2014, UK). A couple of weeks after watching this and I still haven’t decided if this is a clever satire of 007 and other British secret agent movies, or a horrible affirmation of their worst aspects. The title refers to a private intelligence service which cleaves to an image of stereotypical British upper class manhood from about sixty years ago. And then they meet a stereotype of 1990s British working class manhood… But, of course, the establishment eventually assimilates him. En route, we have a dumb plot to kill off 90% of the global population via free SIM cards in their phones (so, er, not really 90% then) as planned by squeamish lisping zillionnaire Samuel L Jackson. Tonally, Kinsgman is all over the place – it can’t decide what values it should be promoting, and as a result ends up saying very little that makes sense. The Bond-ish villain is presented as a spoof without actually being much of a commentary, which renders it toothless as satire. Firth is even stiffer than usual in the lead role, Taron Egerton is forgettable as the everyman bruv, and the supporting cast are more noticeable for who they actually are rather than the parts they’re playing. Kingsman will kill a Satruday evening if accompanied pizza and beer, but it’s never going to make any list celebrating the best of cinema.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 776
A lot of people do best of the year posts, but I also like doing these best of the half-year ones, as I find it interesting to see how they change as the year progresses. The two sets of lists are rarely the same, of course – new works make each top five that I hadn’t read, watched or listened to in the first half of the year. But sometimes, works from the honourable mentions get promoted to the top five as my opinion changes of them.
books
Every time I write one of these best of posts, I seem to start them with: it’s been an odd year for reading but I’m not sure why… Which I guess means they haven’t really been odd since they’ve pretty much been the same. It could mean, I suppose, that the last few years have felt like my reading lacks shape or direction because it’s not in step with the genre commentary I see online. After all, while science fiction still forms the bulk of my reading at forty percent, with mainstream fiction a distant second at 26%, I don’t generally read the genre books which are getting the buzz… And when I do, as I did with this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, then I have no idea why those books are receiving so much praise… Which is no doubt why only one category sf novel makes my top five – and only two genre titles appear in my honourable mentions… And yes, the one sf novel in my top five is on the Clarke Award shortlist (because it’s an exception to my earlier comments, of course).
1The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck (2012). I knew the moment I finished this book it would make my top five for the half-year, and I’ve not read anything since (I read it back in March) that has impressed me as much. I plan to read more by Erpenbeck – although not all of her books have been translated into English. Although not published as genre, either here or in Germany, its central conceit is certainly genre – a young woman, who is born in the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, lives out her life during the turbulent years of the early twentieth century. Sometimes, she dies; other times, she survives. It’s a similar premise to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life; it’s also beautifully written and feels like a much more substantial read. The historical side is handled with skill, and the view it gives on elements of European history during the period in question is fascinating. I wrote about it here.
2Vertigo, WG Sebald (1990). Sebald is in a class of his own, so his presence in this list is probably no surprise. Vertigo is a collection of stories which have no overt link, but because of Sebald’s voice they read as a seamless whole. I’ve no idea how much of the novel is fact or fiction – it is, like Austerlitz, very autobiographical I suspect, but I’m not familiar enough with Sebald’s life and career to determine if parts of this novel – especially the section in which the narrator returns to his childhood village of W., notes the changes and reminisces about his time living in the village – although does not lessen my admiration of the book in the slightest (and learning the truth may well increase it). I’ve only read two Sebald books so far, and both made my best of the year lists. I still have one more, The Rings of Saturn, on the TBR. I think I should save it until next year. Anyway, I covered Vertigo in a blog post here.
3Europe at Midnight, Dave Hutchinson (2015). It’s been a good year for this book, with appearances on various award shortlists. And rightly so. It’s not quite a sequel to the earlier Europe in Autumn, but it’s better for not being one. And thanks to the rank irresponsibility of our government in calling this stupid referendum, Europe at Midnight has become unfortunately topical. I say “unfortunately” because it’s obviously not the book’s fault, and although its creation of a pocket universe England might map onto the wishes of assorted Brexit fuckwits, I know the author’s sympathies don’t lie there and the novel’s Gedankenexperiment is in no way an endorsement of them. Of course, no one ever accused Le Carré of being pro-Soviet but then his novels presented the USSR as the enemy… And I’m digging myself into a bit of a hole here as Hutchinson’s Community is also presented as the enemy. But never mind. I wrote about this book here.
4A Gods in Ruins, Kate Atkinson (2015). Like the Hutchinson, this is a sequel of sorts to an earlier novel, Life After Life, although it neither continues the plot, nor uses the same cast, as its predecessor. I thought Life After Life good – an immensely readable novel – and even nominated for the Hugo (of course, it didn’t make the shortlist). A God in Ruins is, I think, slightly better. Its central conceit is dialled back more in the narrative, but it’s just as hugely readable as Life After Life. A God in Ruins is the story of the life of a man who fought during WWII and so tries to live a blameless live afterwards. It is, sort of, a variation on A Matter of Life and Death; but in a way that is neither obvious nor intrusive. For much of its length, it’s a lovely piece of historical writing, of personal history stretching much of the length of the twentieth century; but there’s an added dimension which is only hinted at. I wrote about it here.
5Abandoned in Place, Roland Miller (2016). It’s all very well celebrating the achievements of past years, but often all we have as evidence are words in books. True, there is evidence aplenty on the surface of the Moon to prove that twelve men once walked there (assorted fuckwits who insist it was all faked aside), but in order to view that evidence we would have to, er, visit the surface of the Moon. There is, however, a lot of evidence remaining on Earth that something involving trips to the Moon took place – launch platforms, rocket test stands, etc – and it’s hard to imagine anything with such concrete (in both senses of the word) physicality being part of a great confidence trick. Is there a word which means the opposite of “paleo-archaeology”? Hunting through the abandoned remains of great engineering projects from last century, which either failed or have long since run their course? Neo-archaeology? This book celebrates one particular engineering project that ended over forty years ago – and it’s one that’s fascinated me for years. I wrote about Abandoned in Place in a post here.
Honourable mentions:Sisters of the Revolution, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (2015), an excellent reprint anthology of feminist sf, containing a couple of old favourites, and much that was new to me – some of which became new favourites; Soviet Ghosts, Rebecca Litchfield (2014), another photographic essay, this time of abandoned buildings and plants in what was the USSR and its satellites; Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (2015), strange goings-on when a 1970s UK folk band record at a haunted manor, handled with a lovely elegiac tone; Cockfosters, Helen Simpson (2015), a new collection by a favourite writer, so of course it gets a mention; In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition, Malcolm Lowry (2014), a “lost” novel and never before published, it’s certainly not among his best but the copious annotations make for a fascinating read; Women in Love, DH Lawrence (1920), his best-known novel after Lady Chatterley’s Lover and just as notorious back in the day for its rumpy-pumpy, but I love Lawrence’s prose… and if the philosophy and politics in this are somewhat dubious, I still have that; and The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood (1993), not since Alias Grace have I read an Atwood novel I enjoyed so much on a prose level, so for me this is currently her “second-best” book.
films
My project to watch all the films in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list is now in its second year and has continued to introduce me to new directors I might otherwise never have discovered. Two films in my top five certainly qualify as such, and a third I’d long been aware of but would probably never bothered watching if it hadn’t been on the list. Of the remaining two, one was on the list but I’d seen at least one film by the director before; and the other movie was on a version of the list different to the one I’ve been using…
1An Autumn Afternoon, Yasujiro Ozu (1962, Japan). My introduction to Ozu’s work was Tokyo Story which, at the time, I didn’t really take to. But he has been repeatedly recommended to me, and Floating Weeds was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, so I rented it… and liked it quite a lot. But the (I think) Criterion edition DVD cover art of An Autumn Afternoon reminded me a great deal of Michelangelo’s Antonioni’s Red Desert, a film I love, so I wanted to watch that. And after a false start, buying Late Autumn by mistake, but loving it all the same, I eventually got myself a copy of An Autumn Afternoon… And that convoluted route to it totally worked in its favour. Late Autumn I thought really good, but An Autumn Afternoon struck me as a somewhat satirical take on similar subject matter – and so perversely reminded me of my favourite Douglas Sirk movies – but it also seemed a distillation of all those elements of Ozu’s cinema I had noted in Tokyo Story and loved so much in Late Autumn. I have now added the rest of the BFI editions of Ozu’s films to my wants list.
2Entranced Earth, Glauber Rocha (1967, Brazil). This wasn’t quite a “Benning moment”, where I loved a film so much I immediately went and bought everything I could find by the director… although I did indeed love this film and immediately went and bought everything I could find by Rocha. But, I must confess, wine was involved in the Rocha purchase, whereas it wasn’t in the Benning one. Not that I regret buying Black God White Devil, Entranced Earth or Antonio das Mortes, as all three are fascinating films – but Entranced Earth remains my favourite of the three. Not only is the Brazilian landscape unfamiliar enough I find it strangely compelling, but the film also features scene of political declamatory dialogue, which I love. The film is part of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, which seems to be like France’s Nouvelle Vague in parts but Italy’s Neorealism in others. There’s a crudity in production which, perversely, seems a consequence of, as well as an enabler for, a film closer to the director’s vision than might otherwise have been the case. And I really like that, I really like that movies like this are closer to the creative process than is typical in our commodified homogenised product-placement Hollywoodised cinema world. There are those directors who muster sufficient clout in their nation’s cinema industry they can make whatever they like, but there are also those who make great films because of their total lack of influence… and it’s the latter who often produce the more lasting work. Like this one.
3Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio (1982, USA). I’ve no idea how many years I’ve known about this film, but I’d never actually bothered watching it. Something about what I’d heard about it persuaded me I wouldn’t enjoy it – and while that may have been true twenty years ago, it could hardly be true now given my love of Benning’s work. But it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, so I stuck it on the rental list, it duly arrived… and I was capitivated. The score and cinematography worked perfectly together – and while it’s a more obvious approach to its material than anything by Benning, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a beautifully-shot piece of work. I ended up buying the Criterion Blu-ray edition of all three Qatsi films, which, in hindsight, was a mistake, as the transfers of the first two don’t really do the format justice. The sequel, Powaqqatsi, is very good, although not as good as Koyyanisqatsi; but the third film, Naqoyqatsi, sadly suffers because its use of CGI (in 2002) makes it appear a little dated. All three are worth getting. But not on Blu-ray.
4Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzmán (2010, Chile). The problem – if that’s the right word – with documentary films, is that no matter how beautifully-shot they might be, if the subject does not appeal then you’re not going to like the film. But then it’s not really fair to say the subject of Nostalgia for the Light “appeals”, because it’s an unpleasant subject and no one’s world is a better place for knowing about it. Nostalgia for the Light contrasts the hunt for stars by astronomers at an observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert with the search for the remains of the Disappeared, the thousands of victims Pinochet’s brutal regime massacred for… whatever feeble-minded self-serving reasons such fascist regimes use. It’s a heart-breaking film, all the more so because it interviews those who survived the regime; but Guzmán’s intelligent commentary also gives context and commentary to the interviews. I now want to see more films by Guzmán – and oh look, there’s a boxed set of his documentaries available on…
5Pyaasa, Guru Dutt (1957, India). There are a couple of Bollywood films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and so I rented them and enjoyed them; and while they may be superior examples of the genre (if “Bollywood” could be called a genre) and great fun to watch, to be honest they struck me as no more worthy of inclusion than a great many of the US films on the same list. But then I stumbled across a list of Bollywood classic films, and decided to try a few more than the two or three on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list… Which is how I discovered Guru Dutt. He’s been described as “India’s Orson Welles”, which I think is a somewhat unfair label as it suggests he’s an imitator; but while Dutt’s films certainly follow the forms of Bollywood movies, they’re also well-constructed, cleverly-written dramas. After seeing Pyaasa, I bought a copy of his Kagaaz Ke Phool, which I also thought very good; and I have his Aar Paar on the To Be Watched pile (as well as the 1985 film of the same title, because the seller buggered up my order). I think Dutt would be a perfect candidate for the BFI to release on DVD/Blu-ray.
Honourable mentions:Yeelen, Souleymane Cissé (1987, Mali), an old Malian fantasy tale told in a straightforward way that only highlights its strangeness; Come and See, Elem Klimov (1985, Russia), the banal title hides a quite brutal look at WWII in Russia; Shock Corridor, Samuel Fuller (1963, USA), a low budget thriller that rises above its production values, but then Fuller was good at that; Falstaff – Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles (1966, Spain), a mishmash of Shakespeare’s various depictions of the title character, but it works really well and after watching it my admiration of Welles moved up a notch; Story of Women, Claude Chabrol (1988, France), a heart-breaking story of France’s mistreatment of its women during WWII, played strongly by the ever-excellent Isabelle Huppert; Osama, Siddiq Barmak (2003, Afghanistan), an even more heart-breaking film about the mistreatment of women by the Taliban; A Simple Death, Aleksandr Kaidanovsky (1985, Russia), a stark and beautifully-shot adaptation of Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’; Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22, Hideaki Anno (2007/2009, Japan), giant mecha piloted by high school kids battle giant alien “angels”, which as a précis does very little to describe these bonkers animes; Storm over Asia, Vsevelod Pudovkin (1928, Russia), a beautifully-shot silent film set in Mongolia; Fires Were Started, Humphrey Jennings (1943, UK), firemen during the Blitz by one of Britain’s best directors, but I probably need to rewatch his films to decide if this is his best; London, Patrick Keiller (1994, UK), it reminds me a little of Benning, but the arch commentary by Paul Scofield is hugely appealing; and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman (1975, France), a mostly-silent, almost entirely unadorned depiction of three days in the life of the title character, which makes for fascinating viewing despite its lack of action or, er, plot.
albums
You’d think that given the amount of music I listen to that this would be the easiest category to fill in each year. But, perversely, it usually proves the hardest. Probably because I don’t document my music purchases and I rarely write about music. I also don’t purchase albums in anything like the number of films I watch or even books I read. Having said all that, I managed to pick five albums I first listened to in the first half of 2016, and they are…
1A Year With No Summer, Obsidian Kingdom (2016). I saw this band perform at Bloodstock in 2014 and thought them so good I bought their album as soon as I got home. And now, after four years, a second album finally appears. In some respects, Obsidian Kingdom remind me of fellow countrymates NahemaH and Apocynthion, although they’re not as heavy as those two bands. They’re progressive metal, of a sort, and they build up a wall of sound with guitars and drums, not to mention the odd electronic effect, that’s extremely effective. The songs are complex, often very melodic, and move from dreamy to aggressive and back again very cleverly.
2Afterglow, In Mourning (2016). I’ve been a fan of In Mourning since first hearing the monumental The Weight of Oceans, which remains one of the best progressive death metal albums of recent years. Afterglow doesn’t start as strongly as that earlier albums, but a couple of tracks in it turns more progessive and the melodic hooks which characterise the band begin to appear. By the time the last song fades away, you know it’s another excellent album.
3Rooms, Todtgelichter (2016). The name of a band isn’t always a clue to its origin, but yes, Todtgelichter are German. And they play a sort of guitar-heavy post-black metal that works really well. Most post-black bands – I’m thinking of Solefald as much as I am Arcturus – tend to incorporate all sorts of musical influences; but Todtgelichter keep it simple and heavy and hard-hitting, and it works extremely well.
4Eidos, Kingcrow (2015). It’s an entirely international line-up this top five, with Spain, Sweden, Germany, and now Italy. Kingcrow play progressive metal, although this is no Dream Theatre. They sound in parts very like Porcupine Tree – which is a perfectly good band to sound like – and on one track, ‘Adrift’, the main guitar part is almost pure Opeth. As influences go, you can’t really do better than that.
5Changing Tides, Trauma Field (2016). I stumbled across Trauma Field a year or two ago when I found their 2013 album Harvest on bandcamp. It seem to me there were bits of fellow Finns Sentenced in there – although Sentenced never used a female vocalist that I can recall – but also a more progressive element than that band had ever incorporated. This new album feels a little lighter in tone, much more atmospheric, and is definitely less Sentenced-like… which is, of course, good.
Unfortunately, there are no honourable mentions so far this year. I’ve just not been listening to enough new music. I do most of my listening at work, and I’ve been so busy there I’ve not had a chance.
Only one US film in this lot? I must be slipping. Lots of British films though – more, in fact, than it appears, since the two Jennings collections contain 14 and 8 films respectively. They were a damn sight more interesting than the one US movie, too.
The Silence, Ingmar Bergman (1963, Sweden). This is the third film in Tartan DVD’s The Faith Trilogy by Bergman (the other two in the set are Through A Glass Darkly and Winter Light), but I’ve not been watching them in order. The Silence is set in an invented Central European country. Two sisters, one with her young son, are travelling by train through the country, and stop to spend some time in one of the towns. The older of the two sisters is a translator; she is also ill. They take an apartment in a run-down, but grandiose, hotel. While the son wanders around the hotel – at one point acting about with a troupe of dwarfs from a Spanish travelling show – his mother wanders about the town, visiting a theatre, sitting in a bar, before returning to the hotel with a man. In an introduction, Bergman explains that he’s always liked The Silence, but was convinced it would be a flop. In fact, it proved one of his more successful films internationally. It’s filmed in stark black and white, with very little dialogue (only 38 lines, claims Bergman), and the faded grandeur of hotel and town is evident in every film. I’ve said before that watching a Bergman film is like reading a literary fiction short story… and that’s especially true of this one – but one of those slightly-fabulist European stories where a deep reading is needed to figure out what’s going on. I liked this film much more than Through A Glass Darkly, although only the latter is on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.
The Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume 1: The First Days (2011, UK). After renting The Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume 2: Fires Were Started because the title film was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before you Die list, I decided to buy all three of the BFI collections of Jennings’s short documentaries. There are fourteen films in this set, from 1934 to 1940. The early ones cover subjects such as the history of the post office, steam locomotives, chalk barges in Cornwall, fashion, a postcard’s journey and the GPO’s telephone link with the US via shortwave (the films were made by the GPO Film Unit). Later films show Britain during WWII – not just of the Blitz, but also showing how the government and farmers worked together to raise crops on land left fallow. Given that the later films are actual propaganda, it’s hardly surprising they’re all patriotic and jolly-old-Britain-look-how-wonderful-we-are, although as historical documents they’re quite fascinating. But even the pre-war ones hav ea certain terribly English quality about them, not just because of the BBC accents, but also thanks to their slightly patronising listen-with-mother air. Some were mucy more interesting than others – while the post office ones were a bit dull, and 1934 documentary on locomotives had its moments, I did find ‘Speaking from America’ (1938), with its description of shortwave translantic communications, fascinating. Worth seeing.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*, Robert Aldrich (1962, USA). It would seem the most notable thing about this movie is that its two stars – Joan Crawford and Bette Davis – loathed each other, and that hatred fed into their portrayals of washed-up acting sisters. Because there’s nothing else in the film to warrant its appearance on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. Davis plays a successful child star (well, not her, obvs, a child plays her) who didn’t make the grade as an adult actress; while her sister, Crawford, proved a star as an adult. Until, that is, an attempt by one sister to run over the other – they didn’t get on, even back then – resulted in Crawford being paralysed from the waist down and so killed her career. Who actually ran over who is not revealed, and left to provide a twist at the end… and it’s a pretty feeble twist. The film quickly sets up the sisters’ back-history, and cleverly uses clips from early films by Crawford and Davis, before leaping ahead to the early 1960s. Crawford is bed-ridden, and cared for by Davis, who resents her sister’s fame and the fact she now has to care for her. And then, afraid Crawford is going to sell the house, Davis begins to mistreat her – and impersonates her over the phone to hide her mistreatment… It’s a hard film to take seriously. The plot telegraphs every twist and turn with all the subtlety of a brick in the face, Davis plays her role like a wild-eyed loon, and Crawford couldn’t play a convincing doe-eyed victim to save her life. The final twist in the tale is, as mentioned earlier, neither a surprise nor dramatic. Meh.
Jeux interdits*, René Cléments (1952, France). During WWII, a young girl’s parents are killed in an attack by a German Stuka, and she seeks refuge at a nearby farm. The family take her in, especially since she is of an age with their youngest son. When one of the older sons dies of his illness, the two kids begin a “game” of their own – they create a cemetery for the dead animals they find, and steal crosses from, first, the older son’s hearse and later the graveyard, for the graves of their creatures. When the boy’s father finds out, he is furious… eventually leading to the young girl being taken away to a refugee camp by the Red Cross. I like the films of Jean Renoir – some more than others, it has to be said – and Jean Cocteau; but I can’t say I’ve ever really got on with other French films made before, say, the mid-1950s. Actually, I did like À nous la liberté (1931), and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) doesn’t count as the film may be French but he’s Danish… I’ve no idea what it is, I just find them a little dull, and often longer than they need to be. And so it was with this one. Meh.
The Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume 3: A Diary for Timothy (2013, UK). There are only eight films in this final set, but they’re mostly longer than those in the first volume. They’re from 1944 to 1950 (Jennings died in a fall from a cliff in Greece in 1950, while scouting locations), and are mostly work done by the Crown Film Unit (originally the GPO Film Unit) during WWII. The opener, for example, explains how British troops took the German song ‘Lili Marlene’ as their own after finding copies of it in over-run German positions. ‘A Defeated People’ (1946), on the other hand, shows the Germans trying to rebuild their shattered cities – and no film of London during the Blitz can ever compare with what Hamburg looked like by the end of the war. I don’t think you could accuse Jennings’s war films of being jingoistic, despite the fact they were propaganda. Most seem designed to bolster the spirits of the Brits – yes, there’s a note of “they deserved it” in ‘A Defeated People’, but the film is bluntly honest about the state the allies left the country in (and it does rightly point a finger at some of the plutocrats, the Krupp family in this case, whose industrial empire is still going… and you’d be surprised at the number of global brands still in existence which actively supported the Nazi regime…). Anyway, like the first and second volumes, this is worth seeing.
Bill, Richard Bracewell (2015, UK). I stumbled across this on Amazon Prime, and initial indications were not especially good… Bill Shakespeare is thrown out of his lute band after doing a blinding solo in a song during a gig. So he writes a play and decides to head to London to seek fame and fortune… Where he gets embroiled in a plot by the Earl of Croydon and King Philip II of Spain to kill Queen Elizabeth at a peace summit between the two. The story fits in Shakespeare’s “lost years”, between his departure from Stratford and appearance on the London stage. But I’m pretty sure it don’t go as this film claimed. I wasn’t that impressed initially – the humour was mostly based on anachronisms, and that’s a hard trick to pull off. But as it progressed, the jokes got funnier, the humour sharper, and the plot, er, thicker. The film was put together by the central cast from the Horrible Histories series, and is the second project they’ve worked together on (the first was Yonderland). They each play multiple roles, and they’re good in them (some, in fact, it took me a while to notice they were the same actors). There are some good lines and running gags, and it’s all a good deal funnier than Ben Elton’s lacklustre Upstart Crow.
Trent’s Last Case, Herbert Wilcox (1952, UK). I found this in a local charity shop and thought it worth a go. It wasn’t. It’s apparently the third film version of a 1913 novel by EC Bentley, which is considered by many to be the first send-up novel of the crime genre. Bentley also invented the clerihew (it is, in fact, his middle name). Despite the title, Trent’s Last Case was actually the first novel by Bentley featuring journalist/detective Philip Trent – and was intended as a standalone, but proved so popular Bentley wrote a sequel in 1936, Trent’s Own Case (and a short story collection, Trent Intervenes, in 1938). Wealthy businessman Sigsbee Manderson is found dead in the garden of his home, apparently a suicide. Trent, covering the death for his newspaper, investigates and decides it was murder. Initially, he believes the widow to be the guilty party, but then fastens on the tycoon’s personal assistant. But when he accuses the PA, and explains how the crime went down, he’s told he has some parts right – moving the body, impersonating the dead man, falsifying an alibi – but the tycoon did apparently kill himself. At which point, the widow’s uncle reveals that he actually killed the tycoon, accidentally, in a wrestle over a gun. Trent also falls in love with the widow, and asks her to marry him. Michael Wilding was awful as Trent, Orson Welles wore bizarre prosthetic eyebrows and a prosthetic nose which made him look like Parker from Thunderbirds, and Margaret Lockwood only reminded me of better actresses from the period. The film may have been a piss-take of crime novel conventions, but it came across as just a badly-plotted film. Oh well.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 776
Looks like I’m going to need another clear-out soon. Normally, I dump the books I no longer want at local charity shops, but the more recent genre ones I save for the York and Sheffield pub meet raffles. However, I might stick a list up here of books for sale – I have a lot of 1980s sf paperbacks in very good condition (they were in storage for pretty much the entire 1990s). We’ll see. Meanwhile…
Some sf, recent and not so recent. I bought The Book of Phoenix and Way Down Dark because they were shortlisted for the Clarke Award. I read them. I was not impressed with either – see here. I’ve been picking up copies of the Tor doubles from the 1980s when I find them, although not all are worth reading; hence #21: Home is the Hangman / We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line… and #22: Thieves Carnival / The Jewel of Bas. A Game of Authors is actually not sf, but a thriller. WordFire Press (ie, Kevin J Anderson’s own imprint) has been publishing old manuscripts by Frank Herbert that never saw print, and I’ve been buying them. They’re interesting from an historical point of view, although, to be fair, I can see no good reason why they weren’t published back in the day.
Some first editions for the collection. First up, the third book of Eric Brown’s Telemass quartet, Reunion on Alpha Reticuli II. Also from PS Publishing is The Brain From Beyond. Both were launched at Mancunicon, but the signed editions weren’t available at the con. The Persistence of Vision was a lucky find on eBay. I still rate Varley’s short fiction. And Dissidence is the latest from an author whose books I buy on publication.
And a mixed bag of non-fiction. The Entropy Exhibition, signed, was a lucky find on eBay. I’ve been collecting the Anatomy of the Ship series when I find them going for a fair price – originally I bought them for research for my space opera trilogy, but now it’s just because they’re cool books: hence The Destroyer Escort England. When I saw spotted Nazi Moonbase on Amazon, I couldn’t resist it. Romancing is a biographical/critical work about Henry Green, an author I’m keen to read more of.
Bit of a mixed bag this time around. Three science fiction, two crime and one literary. Which is what my reading is like sometimes.
Reunion on Alpha Reticuli II, Eric Brown (2016). This is the third novella in Brown’s Telemass Quartet (yes, I know; everyone seems to be doing them these days), each of which has been numbered in reverse in the title. The quartet follows the attempt by retired Dutch policeman Hendrick to rescue his terminally-ill-but-in-medical-stasis daughter from his estranged ex-wife, who is so desperate for a cure she’s trying all manner of alien mumbo-jumbo. Her attempts have, in the books so far, been bizarrely lacking a technological basis. And the same is true of Reunion on Alpha Reticuli II. Hendrick follows his wife to to the titular planet, a popular holiday world, notable for hotels which comprise huge concrete spikes from which hang glass bubbles (the rooms), as depicted on the cover. But Hendrick’s ex-wife is there to meet secretly with a member of a reclusive race… who claims to be able to save the daughter… Unfortunately, three novellas in and the series is beginning to feel a little formulaic. Brown draws his characters and his worlds well, but the plot in Reunion on Alpha Reticuli II feels more by-the-numbers than the previous two. It’s not helped by the introduction of a telepathic love-interest, who comes across as far too good to be true. I kept on waiting for the twist. There wasn’t one. Having said all that, if you’ve been following the Telemass Quartet, you know what you’re going to get. And Brown delivers. The second has, to my mind, been the best so far, but… there’s still one more to go.
Thieves’ Carnival / The Jewel of Bas, Karen Haber / Leigh Brackett (1990/1944). I’ve been picking up copies of Tor’s series of back-to-back doubles since first stumbling across a couple of them in a remaindered bookshop in Abu Dhabi. There were thirty-six published in total, between 1988 and 1991, mostly reprints but with the occasional piece of original fiction, and all by known names. (Although Haber here is probably better-known as an anthologist.) ‘Thieves’ Carnival’ is a prequel to Brackett’s story, and shows how the two main characters met and ended up married. While it’s set chronologically earlier, it should really have been the second story in this book. Brackett does her typically skilful job at setting up world and cast in ‘The Jewel of Bas’ – although, to be honest, this is not one of her best – and ‘Thieves’ Carnival’ would have proven a more interesting read as a pendant to Brackett’s. Which tells how Mouse and her husband, the minstrel Ciaran, are captured by minions of Bas – well, not exactly, it’s the two androids Bas built to attend him, it’s their minions who have been enslaving people in order to build an engine to save the world… because Bas is more interested in his dreamworld and has been neglecting things. In Haber’s prequel, Mouse is teamed with Ciaran in a thievery competition, and she decides to steal the Portal Cube… which proves to be some sort of time-travel device and its theft results in weird flashbacks to other times and places. The Brackett is not among her best – the story feels tired, the dialogue is clunkier than you’d expect, and the plot echoes a few too many other stories of the period. Haber’s prequel takes Brackett’s science-fantasy and ups the fantasy, turning the story into something more like a RPG adventure than an homage to Brackett. I get that publishers are often constrained when putting these series together in as much as they can only include those stories to which they could obtain the rights… but both of these are entirely forgettable.
The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood (1993). Four women, who first met at university in the sixties, each have a run-in with a fifth woman, Zenia. But that’s all behind them, since Zenia apparently died in a terrorist bomb, and her depradations actually brought them together as friends, even though they sort of knew each other back in university… And then a woman walks into the coffee shop where the four have met for their weekly lunch, and they all recognise her: Zenia. The novel then takes each of the four women in turn, and tells their stories and how Zenia entered their lives and the damage she caused. There are, it sometimes seems to me, two Margaret Atwoods. There are the novels written by one Atwood, where the ideas are really good but the prose never really shines; and there’s the other Atwood, whose prose is beautifully put together and a joy to read. I’d say Oryx and Crake was by the first Atwood, and Alias Grace by the second. The Robber Bride is also by the second. I’ve not enjoyed, and been so impressed on a sentence-by-sentence level, by an Atwood novel since reading, well, Alias Grace. This is easily her second-best work. I have by no means read her entire oeuvre, although I do plan to work by way through it. But of those I’ve read so far, I’d put The Robber Bride second after Alias Grace (and yes, above The Handmaid’s Tale).
Beast in View, Margaret Millar (1962). Reclusive rich spinster Helen Clarvoe receives a telephone call from a woman who threatens her. After quizzing the staff of the hotel where she lives and finding out nothing, Clarvoe contacts her investment manager, Paul Blackshear, and ask for his help. Since he has just retired, and he finds himself liking Clarvoe, he decides to investigate… which puts him on the trail of Evelyn Merrick, an old school friend of Clarvoe and the estranged ex-wife of Clarvoe’s brother – who is gay, but married Merrick in order to appear “normal” but it all went horribly wrong on the honeymoon. While Blackshear runs around Los Angeles trying to track down Merrick before she makes good on her threat – and stumbling across a few of the Clarvoe family secrets, a murder, and increasing evidence that Merrick is completely deranged… But there’s a clever twist in the tail. I pretty much read this in a single sitting one Sunday afternoon. Worth a go.
Heritage of Flight, Susan Shwartz (1989). I read this to review on SF Mistressworks. I read Shwartz’s Grail of Hearts many years ago and really liked it – I must reread it one of these days – so I was pretty keen to try some of her actual science fiction. And eventually I stumbled across a copy of Heritage of Flight at Mancunicon earlier this year (on the Porcupine Books stall in one of the dealers’ rooms). But what I liked about Grail of Hearts was its repurposing of Arthurian legend as a romance, where as Heritage of Flight is pretty much a straight-up sf novel of the 1980s. In other words, a bit disappointing. It has its moments, but it’s by no means a great book. And that cover art is pretty misleading. A review of it will appear on SF Mistressworks later this week.
The Lady from Zagreb, Philip Kerr (2015). Kerr admits in an afterword to this tenth volume in the Bernie Gunther series that he had planned to retire his Kripo/SD detective after nine books. He also admits there is another volume to follow this one, The Other Side of Silence (which is on the TBR)… And it seems there’s going to be a twelfth volume too, Prussian Blue, according to Wikipedia. Not that I’m complaining. These are superior detective novels, and Kerr’s research and level of historical detail is impressive. It is, of course, getting harder to stitch stories into Gunther’s life, but that’s hardly surprising – and while inconsistencies might pop up when reading the series from start to finish, I’ve not noticed any in my intermittent, albeit chronological, read of the books. The Lady from Zagreb opens in the 1950s. Gunther is a house detective for a hotel on the Riviera. He goes into a cinema and watches a film starring 1940s German star Dalia Dresner… with whom he was romantically involved back in 1942. Which is where the story abruptly shoots back to. It’s a fairly standard plot, perhaps even a noir staple, but by setting it in Nazi Germany during World War II, and framing it around the events of earlier novel, A Man Without Breath, but following on from Prague Fatale, Kerr gives the story an added dimension. Basically, Dresner gets Goebbels to task Gunther with tracking down her Croatian father, currently a monk in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Except things are not as clear-cut as they seem, including Dresner’s own marriage in neutral Switzerland. One day, someone should make a TV series of these books. They’re really very good.
Half of this post’s films are American, so I seem to be slipping a little. Having said that, movies from countries other than the US (or UK) are surprisingly difficult to find on DVD or as rentals – especially old films. For example, I’d really like to see Vidas Secas, an early Brazilian Cinema Novo movie, by Nelson Pereiros dos Santos… but I can’t find a copy. There are also a number of directors whose oeuvres I’d like to explore, even ones that are really well-known (albeit not Anglophone), but not all of their films are available – Godard, for instance… Ah well. I guess I should have more mainstream tastes… Or learn some more languages…
The Twilight Samurai, Yoji Yamada (2002, Japan). I am not a huge fan of Japanese historical dramas; I’ve seen several of Kurosawa’s films, for example, but I like Dersu Uzala – which is set in, er, Russia – best. And while Ozu’s are historical in that they’re set in the past, they’re set in the twentieth century, so, er, not really historical then. (Slight digression here on what defines “historical”. The general consensus is that historical fiction is fiction set before the liftetime of the author and written from research not personal experience. So just because a novel, or film, is set in the 1970s, forty years ago, that doesn’t make it historical (unless the author is in their twenties, but, seriously, why would they try writing a novel set four decades ago knowing there are people still alive who remember the decade quite well?).) Anyway, The Twilight Samurai is set a few years before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A widower samurai spends his money on ensuring his daughters are fed and clothed, and so gains a reputation for being unkempt and a bit smelly. Then a childhood friend turns up after a quick divorce from her abusive husband, and begins spending time with the samurai and his two daughters. The ex-husband appears, very drunk, and challenges the woman’s brother, Twilight’s friend, and so Twilight jumps in and accepts the challenge. He surprises everyone by beating the ex-husband, even though armed only with a stick… Although slow to start, this film began to pick up as the title character became less the butt of jokes and more the protagonist of the story. Turned out better than I thought it would. Worth seeing.
Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzmán (2010, Chile). I’m surprised this didn’t make the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list. Perhaps the makers didn’t think its topic as worthy as that of… Senna, or a film about a female serial killer. But then Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing didn’t make the list either, so perhaps the list-makers aren’t interested in films on state-run massacres. It might remind them of their own nation’s complicity in several such… (Not that the UK is innocent – and Margaret Thatcher was very chummy with Pinochet, and for that, among many other things, deserves our deepest contempt.) Nostalgia for the Light contrasts the search for stars by the astronomers of the Atacama Desert with the search for the bodies of the Disappeared by a group of Chilean women who sift the sand for the remains of their husbands and sons and brothers… The film features Guzmán in voice-over describing how the events shown relate to Chile’s history and character. There’s a telling moment when Guzmán says of one old couple, survivors of Pincohet’s regime, that they represent Chile for him: the man cannot forget anything that happened to him, the woman has dementia and cannot remember anything. A fascinating, but heart-breaking, documentary that both destroys your faith in humanity but also reaffirms (okay, it destroys any faith you might have had in the rich and powerful – but then you’d have to be daft as a brush to have any faith in them in the first place). I’d put this on my own 1001 Movies list.
A Gathering of Eagles, Delbert Mann (1963, USA). My mother told me there was a Rock Hudson film on Drama one afternoon, and when I learnt it was A Gathering of Eagles, I had two reasons for wanting to catch it: Rock Hudson and SAC. (The actual conversation went like this: Mother: “There’s a Rock Hudson film on Drama this afternoon. Gathering something…” Me: “A Gathering of Eagles?” Mother: “That’s it.” Me: “I keep on thinking today is Saturday.” Mother: “That film is on tomorrow afternoon.”) I like Hudson’s films, he was an excellent leading man during a period whose films I enjoy; and I’m fascinated by the military hardware, especially aerospace hardware, built and used by the US – especially the USAF’s Strategic Air Command – during the Cold War. Rock Hudson and B-52 bombers. Cool. I wasn’t expecting great cinema, but as long as there was some good aerial photography and lots of interior shots of the B-52s, then I’d be happy. I love stuff like that. Strategic Air Command, starring Jimmy Stewart, some B-36s and some B-47s, is one of my favourite films; but it’s a fairly routine drama. And Toward the Unknown showcases the XB-51, which makes it quite interesting. A Gathering of Eagles has plenty of aerial photography of B-52s refueling from KC-135 tankers, but is mostly concerned with Hudson pissing off everyone in the wing he’s been given command of. The movie has its moments, but if you want to see B-52s on-screen you’d be better off watching Bombers B-52.
The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper, (2015, UK). This film has taken quite a bit of stick for taking liberties with a novel which itself takes liberties with the real life of its subject: Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery. For a start, her name wasn’t Lili Elbe – that was invented by a journalist. Her name was actually Lili Ilse Elvenes. Eddie Redmayne plays Einar Wegener/Lili Elvenes, and while the film tries to show Wegener coming to the realisation she is the wrong gender, Redmayne spoils the effect somewhat with his smirking. The movie never manages to convince, despite showing a reasonably good depiction of 1920s Copenhagen – possibly because it squeezes the events of nearly two decades into what feels like a handful of years. There are plenty of other inaccuracies too – so many, you have to wonder at the point of making a film about a real person that seems happy to ignore what actually happened. Of course, Hollywood has never let facts get in the way of a good story (although this is a British film), and actually has a well-known history of rewriting, er, history… But then the UK film industry does that too – like The Imitation Game turning Alan Turing into a spy-catcher… I don’t know; The Danish Girl felt like a ham-fisted attempt to tell a story that served its subject badly… and its viewers too. Meh.
The Martian, Ridley Scott (2015, USA). But you didn’t like the book, I hear you cry, so why watch the film? Well, it’s not unknown for bad books to make good films – in fact, I can think of several off the top of my head. And, to be fair, The Martian may have been badly-written but its story read as though it lent itself quite well to a cinematic treatment. Or so I thought. Unfortunately, while Scott’s The Martian looks very pretty – and at times, even resembles the Martian surface – the adaptation only highlights the flaws in Weir’s story. The storm looks very effective, but is complete nonsense – given Mar’s extremely low surface pressure, a hurricane would feel as powerful as a faint breeze. Also, Watney appears to have plenty of food, but still spends all that time and effort growing potatoes. And the final rescue scene is risible – the NASA spacecraft deliberately slows itself down while on a free-return trajectory about Mars… thus ensuring it will never get back to Earth. I was also amused they’d completely toned down the swearing from the book. The script demonstrated how pointless were the scenes set on Earth (badly-inserted in the novel for its publication by a publishing house), especially since they did little more than obfuscate the science. The success of the book was baffling, but the Hollywood marketing machine was there to ensure the movie adaptation was no flop – especially with marquee names like Ridley Scott and Matt Damon attached. So it seems churlish to complain about the quality of the film – since no one seems to give a shit. I mean, this is commercial fiction, and a commercial movie adaption thereof, actual quality is not relevant… but I do object to a story being sold on its science credentials when those credentials are paper-thin (Weir is now being invited to talk to Congress about space exploration!). The Martian is an entertaining, but not especially convincing, film about a man marooned on Mars. I still think Apollo 18 – rock monsters aside – is one of the most realistic sf films ever made.
The Jazz Singer*, Alan Crosland (1927, USA). This film is famously the first “talkie”, and its commercial (albeit not critical) success pretty much killed silent films – although not entirely: Dreyer’s mostly-silent Vampyr was released in 1932, and Murnau released two silent films after The Jazz Singer, City Girl in 1930 and Tabu and 1931; not to mention a silent film, The Artist, winning the Oscar in 2012… But clearly the moment The Jazz Singer appeared, silent films were obsolete, so it sort of doesn’t really matter what The Jazz Singer was like as a film per se, except… Jolson plays the son of a cantor who would rather sing in music halls, and so is disowned by his orthodox Jewish father. Eventually, of course, they reconcile… but that’s after a good sixty or so minutes of each posturing to defend their own point of view. The film is not without its problems – chief among which is that Jolson’s career was based upon performing in blackface, and so he does several times in the movie. By all accounts, when singing live he was accomplished at creating an emotional connection with the audience, but this doesn’t really transfer to film. In other words, he doesn’t much look like a leading man, and the various songs he performs don’t really explain it either. There’s no denying the historical impact of The Jazz Singer, but being first at something doesn’t automatically confer quality. Dreyer’s Vampyr, mentioned earlier, would have been a much better “first talkie”… but The Jazz Singer is what we have. I’m tempted to include it on my own 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list because it was the first kind, but reluctant to do so because it’s not a very good film…
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 774
I was under the impression I’d knocked a few more off the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list recently, but apparently not. Two of the directors in this post I’m a fan of, and one of them I’m becoming a fan of…
I Want to Live!, Robert Wise (1958, USA). Not only was this film based on a real-life murder case, but the movie makes a right meal of its origin, opening with a screen of text that insists how true it is – it’s even signed by the journalist who broke the story in the first place. So it’s a little off-putting to then learn that the story takes some major liberties with the truth. Like presenting the central character as innocent when she was actually guilty. Bah, Hollywood. The story goes as follows: Barbara Graham is a habitual criminal, whose marriage to a drug addict proves the last straw… so she leaves him and joins up with his associates, only to be arrested for the murder they had committed of a rich old woman, Graham is sentenced to death and then executed. The film presents Graham as a pawn in the actual murderers’ plot to commute their death sentences to life. But in reality, she was just as guilty. Susan Hayward plays Graham in an Osar-winning turn, but when all’s said and done I Want to Live! is a boringly ordinary moral drama. Samuel Fuller did it much better in both Shock Corridor (see here) and The Naked Kiss (see here), on a lower budget and without an Oscar-bait star. Meh.
Sunset Song, Terence Davies (2015, UK). I stumbled across this on Amazon Prime, and having been impressed by Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (although I thought the film much older than it was), I decided to give this one a go. It took several goes. It is grim. Majorly grim. Scottish grim. Beautifully shot, but as grim as the grimmest thing in a list of grim things. It looks beautiful – far too beautiful for Scotland, it seems, as part of it was shot in New Zealand. It’s based on a classic Scottish novel by Lewis Gibbon of the same title, and tells the story of a young woman, and farmer’s daughter, in the years up to and including the First World War. Peter Mullan plays family patriarch, and he’s a nasty piece of work. I’m tempted to say it’s like DH Lawrence but with the boinking taken out, but that’s the not the only thing missing. Lawrence was hardly an optimist but his novels are generally more cheerful than Sunset Song. When it wasn’t people growling at each other in Scottish accents, they were either shouting or wailing. It made for a gruelling viewing experience. I think this is a good film, and really quite beautifully shot at times, but its unremitting grimness made it difficult viewing, and some times your appetite for punishment is not quite as high as at other times. You need to be in the right mood to watch this. Recommended, but with caveats.
Kagaaz Ke Phool, Guru Dutt (1959, India). Exploring Bollywood films has been fun, but most of those I’ve seen have been pretty forgettable. A good night’s entertainment, but basically just a Hollywood family blockbuster turned up to eleven. With singing and dancing. So Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa came as something of a surprise… although now I’ve seen him described as “India’s Orson Welles”, his films begin to make more sense. They are clever and well-shot, and make excellent use of Bollywood conventions to tell a story that doesn’t really map onto Bollywood story templates. And this is just as true of Kagaaz Ke Phool, Dutt’s last film. Annoyingly, there don’t seem to be any good transfers of his films – you’d think he’d be a director ripe for a set of remastered editions by Criterion or the BFI (for one thing, he only directed eight films, between 1951 and 1959). Given the lovely job the BFI has done for Dreyer, I’d like to see them do the same for Dutt. And I say that having seen only two of his films. In Kagaaz Ke Phool, Dutt plays a Bollywood director whose career is declining. His wife and her family have always seen his career as beneath them, and he now has no access to his daughter. While secretly visiting his daughter at her boarding school, Dutt bumps into a young woman and gives her his coat to protect her from the rain. Later, she visits his studio to return the coat and he realises she has star quality. She becomes a big Bollywood star, and romantically attached to Dutt; but the daughter would sooner her mother and father got back together again, so the star gives up her career and becomes a teacher in a village. This is well-made stuff, and while it feels somewhat back-handed, and not a little insulting, to describe Dutt as “India’s Orson Welles”, it is a label that fits. After watching Pyaasa, I decided to buy this – and despite being disappointed at the quality of the transfer, I think I’ll be buying more of Dutt’s film. But can the BFI please step up and remaster them all, please?
Going My Way, Leo McCarey (1944, USA). This was the biggest grossing film of its year, and was nominated for ten Oscars, winning seven of them, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. And yet it’s not on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before you Die list. Strange. Or, at least, I thought so… But now that I’ve seen it… It’s, well, it’s sentimental tosh. Bing Crosby plays a young priest sent to the New York parish of St Dominic’s to get it sorted out. The incumbent is old, the church is mortgaged, and both need fresh new management. Which is what Bing does. And he sings too. He turns the local boys’ gang into a choir, sorts out a young woman who has left home, and generally spreads common sense and happiness with his trademark smile and “ba ba ba bum”. He also tries to raise money for the church by selling one of the songs he’s written – performed by an old friend who is now an opera diva. The music publisher doesn’t like the song, but when Bing and choir start singing ‘Swing on a Star’, he likes that one. There’s a relentless cheeriness to Going My Way that fails to offset the schamltzy plot and awful songs. I can perhaps see how in wartime it proved so popular, but its charm has long since dissipated. True, Oscar-winner Barry Fitzgerald isn’t bad as old Father Fitzgibbon, even if his character is a total stereotype. I’ve no idea why I stuck this on my rental list. Meh.
The Boss of It All, Lars von Trier (2006, Denmark). There’s nothing especially original about the plot of this film – it is, I guess, a variation on La cage aux folles. Or maybe something else. A man wants to sell his successful IT firm, but for the ten years it’s been in operation he’s pretended he’s not the actual boss. So he hires a friend actor to play “the boss of it all” in negotiations with the Icelandic buyers of the company. And, subsequently, with the employees. Of course, it gets very complicated, very quickly. It doesn’t help that the actor is a bit of a twit, and completely out of his depth. But von Trier does an excellent job of characterising his cast – in fact, in many respects The Boss of It All is a masterclass in small-cast drama. But that’s not good enough for von Trier, so he decides to present the movie explicitly as a piece of cinematic comedy, by introducing it in voice-over, explaining its aims, and even some of its story elements. The end-result is a post-modern cinematic approach to a post-modern story. I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to like it – but like most von Trier films, it ends up making you wonder: is this rubbish… or genius? And the fact he can elicit that response makes me tend toward the latter. Von Trier is experimenting with the medium, and that should be celebrated. If not every experiment is successful, that doesn’t invalidate the attempt… And it still makes him a damn sight more interesting a director than most of the other directors on this planet.
In the House, François Ozon (2012, France). The near-sociopathic inveigling of a person into another family in this film reminds me of another movie, but I’ve yet to figure out which. Probably because the details are different enough to make comparison difficult. Anyway, I like Ozon’s films – well, I’ve not liked or admired every film he’s made, but I admire him as a director and he’s built up an inpressive oeuvre. In the House is one of the better ones, if not an especially characteristically Ozon film – this is not 8 femmes or Angel or Ricky; but perhaps it’s not so far from 5 x 2 or Jeune et jolie. Perhaps that variety is as much an Ozon trademark as the sensibility which created 8 femmes, Potiche or Le refuge… Whatever; Ozon is certainly one of my favourite directors, so I’m always keen to see his latest. In the House is one of his domestic thrillers, played straight, but with that unsettling edge he does so well. A pupil at a school writes an essay about his weekend for an assignment, and in it describes how he befriended a fellow pupil, went to his house to tutor him in maths, and so ingratiated himself in to the family. The essay ends “à suivre”. The teacher is a failed writer (one novel twenty years ago, nothing since), and encourages the pupil to continue his “story”… And so the pupil becomes more and more involved with the family… until it all goes horribly wrong. A good and unsettling film, with some good performances. Worth seeing.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 773
If I’ve been posting overmuch on movies, it’s because the day job has not left me much time of late for reading and thinking about science fiction…
Film Socialisme, Jean-Luc Godard (2010, France). There are some things you like the idea of more than you like the actuality. And, for me, that’s sort of true of Godard’s films. I admire his approach to cinema, his willingness to experiment and push at the boundaries of the medium, I admire what he’s made and what he’s done with his career… but I don’t necessarily like every film he’s made. Film Socialisme is a case in point. It’s a film whose concept I find more appealing than its execution. And yet I’m not so daft not to realise that its intent is likely to result in a film that wouldn’t be especially enjoyable. If that makes sense. It’s sort of like Koyaanisqatsi, which on paper should be dull and uninteresting but is actually a fascinating piece of cinema; Film Socialisme, on the other hand, sounds intriguing on paper, but is actually somewhat dull to watch. Partly, I suspect, that’s from Godard’s choices at presenting his material. The film is split into three “movements”. The first is set aboard a cruise ship, and is presented much like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, with no plot and no discernible characters; and it occasionally it drops into low-resolution video. The second movement is a somewhat absurd family drama at a petrol station, in which a pair of children put their parents on trial. And the third movement is cinematography of several well-known cities around the world. Bits of it work really well. But it feels mostly like an early draft, like someone working out a theory they haven’t quite thought through. I suspect it needs another viewing.
Wuthering Heights*, William Wyler (1939, USA). I may be getting my early nineteenth-century classics confused, but wasn’t there a mad woman confined to an attic and a house on fire and lots of running across the moors in Wuthering Heights? I don’t know; I’ve never read the book. I watched Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of it back in 2013, but I don’t remember much from it. This version from 1939, however, seems to be the one most people know of – hence it’s appearance on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, no doubt. Merle Oberon is Cathy, the girl from the big house who loves uplifted street urchin Heathcliff, played as an adult by Olivier. (And no, I’ve no idea what “wuthering” means.) There is a particular style of historical movie Hollywood did in the 1930s – I’m thinking of Queen Christina (see here) as well as this one – filmed in stark black-and-white, with only a token nod in the direction of authenticity or fidelity to the source material, and usually positioned as vehicles for their star or stars. Wuthering Heights sits firmly in that tradition. Like other films of its type, it relies heavily on its source material for its emotional content, but restructures and simplifies the plot and characters to meet the needs of the medium, often to the point where the original story is unrecognisable. The result is rarely satisfactory, except perhaps to those who don’t know the source. Not that I did – but I still found this film undeserving of its place on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.
Le jour se lève*, Marcel Carné (1939, France). It seems I might have a bit of a blindspot when it comes to French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, because so much of it appears on best of lists and 1001 Movies You Must See lists, and yet I’ve only really liked a small handful. Which, sadly, does not include Le jour se lève… despite its appearance on the latter list. In précis, Le jour se lève sounds like an interesting film: a man shoots another visiting his flat, then barricades himself inside, while the police gather outside the building to arrest him at the break of day. Meanwhile, the man’s story is told in flashbacks, leading up to the motive behind the shooting. It’s cleverly done, and so well-structured you never lose sight of either the framing narrative or the flashback chronology… But when all’s said and done, the story is somewhat banal – yes, he was involved with two women, and the prior lover of one of them is the victim. It’s a film that’s easy to admire for its technical skill, if not for its plot. The characters are not exactly sympathetic, and the jump-about chronology hardly gives the viewer ample reason to sympthasise with them anyway. It’s a film that feels cold, and about which it is easier to feel cold rather than get excited. A borderline case for the 1001 Movies you Must See list.
An Autumn Afternoon*, Yasujiro Ozu (1962, Japan). I am not technically a convert to Ozu… although I watched Tokyo Story a couple of years ago and was not especially taken with it… but then earlier this year I watched Floating Weeds and liked it a lot, and then went on to watch Late Autumn, which I liked even more… And now An Autumn Afternoon, which feels like a satirical retake of Late Autumn, and which I find myself liking a great deal. Which I guess actually does make me a convert to Ozu. Like Late Autumn, An Autumn Afternoon concerns men trying to marry off young women. Five men, friends since middle school, meet regularly. One would like to find a husband for his daughter, another thinks his secretary should get married. They invite an old school teacher to one of their meetings, and then learn that he now runs a noodle-shop in a working-class area. While visiting the noodle-shop, one of the men, Hirayama, the ostensible central character of the film, runs into a petty officer from the ship he commanded during the war. Meanwhile, Hirayama’s son-in-law borrows money to buy a refrigerator… and a set of golf clubs. An Autumn Afternoon is a very “inside” film, a very uchi film. Not only is the outside framed as if it is indoors, with walls to either side mimicking the many shots of corridors which appear in the movie, but the plot itself revolves around people of the outside group who have relationships with those in the inside group, ie, the central cast. It is also a beautifully-shot film, and the framing of much of it reminded me of Douglas Sirk’s work. As too did the slightly mocking and subversive tone it took to to the society it depicted. I liked Floating Weeds and Late Autumn a lot, but I loved An Autumn Afternoon. Highly recommended.
Harold and Maude*, Hal Ashby (1971, USA). This was apparently a critical and commercial failure on its release, although it has subsequently picked up a cult following. I cannot honestly see the appeal. Harold is the son of a wealthy socialite, but he is glum and mordant and stages fake suicides for his mother. She brushes them off as bad jokes. Maude is an old woman Harold meets at a funeral (he is in the habit of attending the funerals of strangers; as is Maude). She’s a bit of a character – she steal cars, she believes in living for the day, she’s pretty much a mad grandma. The two hang out together, Harold falls in love with Maude, they plan to get married. But on her eightieth birthday, shortly before the wedding, she commits suicide as she feels eighty years is long enough. The film pretty much hangs from Maude’s characterisation and she is not, to put it bluntly, an especially believable character. The ease with which she steals cars is, for a start, highly implausible. No one says it’s meant to be, but there are some things in a story you can appropriately slide over, and some things you can’t. Harold’s joke suicides, for example, its easy to accept them, no matter how horrible or improbable (and at least one is physically impossible as presented), but there’s a limit to what’s plausible – and some elements of Maude’s character don’t pass the test. Another US film whose presence on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list is somewhat baffling.
Made in U.S.A., Jean-Luc Godard (1966, France). This was shot back-to-back with 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, which is one of my favourite Godard films. Of course, that’s no reason for this film to be equally good. Which, sadly, is the case. I’ll admit I’ve never understood the obsession some European directors had with US noir films – Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his The American Soldier (and others), Godard and Made in U.S.A. (and others)… Perhaps it was envy of the glamour and romance of the Hollywood system… except – noir? Perhaps it was the stark morality of noir, something European culture had given up centuries before. Perhaps it was… I don’t know, the use of archetypes as characters, the use of stereotypes and cliché as cinematic shorthand… Not that either Fassbinder or Godard could ever have made a straight noir film à l’américaine, as is amply demonstrated by Made in U.S.A. It is allegedly set in Atlantic City, but no effort was made to use locations, or to dress sets, in order to give the impression of a US setting. Anna Karenina travels to the city to meet her boyfriend, learns he is dead, and decides to investigate his death. Karenina then bounces from one group of characters to another, being lectured at by, and lecturing to, these people. She finds a strange man in her hotel room, knocks him out… and he later turns up dead in the flat of a writer. Made in U.S.A. has certainly blown my Godard theory out of the water – well, mostly. I mean, I’ve also recently watched Goodbye to Language and Film Socialisme, and I thought they were interesting, if not entirely successful, experiments, and certainly worth rewatching. Made in U.S.A., despite being a colour film, reminds me more of Masculin féminin and Une femme mariée than it does 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her or Week End. Still, I bought the DVD, so I’ll be able to watch it again, and perhaps I’ll revise my opinion.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 