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Monthly Archives: April 2018


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Reading diary 2018, #7

My reading has been a bit all over the place of late. On the plus-side, I seem to be better at picking books I enjoy.

The Silent Multitude, DG Compton (1966, UK). After Gwyneth Jones, I would say DG Compton was likely the second-best sf writer the UK has produced. Except… His writing was a cut above what is typical for the genre, and his best work is among the top rank of British sf – and rather than being timeless, it makes a virtue of the fact it is tied to its time of writing – but… Compton’s range was somewhat narrow. He wrote many similar novels. And there are a number of other UK sf writers of the 1970s whose prose was perhaps not as good as Compton’s but who managed to produce more varied work. Which is not to say that Compton was never good, or that mediocre Compton is not a great deal better than some other writers’ best. The Silent Multitude is Compton coming into his voice, after a handful of years of writing crime novels as Guy Compton. A mysterious organism is spreading across the UK which dissolves mortar and reduces buildings to rubble in a handful of days. The “Sickness” has now reached Gloucester, a city completely rebuilt in the 1980s, which has now been evacuated. Except for the local dean, an old man who collects newspapers and lives alone among the tens of thousands he has collected, a twentysomething hoodlum who proves to be the son of the architect who designed the new Gloucester, and a twentysomething young woman reporter who is the daughter of the editor of the newspaper for which she works. (The mentions of a redesigned Gloucester reminded me not only of Portmouth’s Tricorn Centre, which I’ve only seen in photographs, but also the various plans to rebuild the city centre of Coventry and, of course, the precinct which eventually resulted.) The Silent Multitude is essentially these four characters witnessing the death of a city – the death of its buildings and infrastructure, that is; the people have already left – and while Compton is good on the descriptive prose and the characterisation, this novel doesn’t feature any of the narrative tricks he later used. The Silent Multitude is a slim work, ideas-wise, propped up by good prose, but that’s no bad thing as science fiction in general could do with upping its game prose-wise. Compton is good – bloody good, in fact – but this is nowhere near his best work.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Theodora Goss (2017, USA). Most of Goss’s short fiction that I’ve seen has been fantasy or reworked fairy tales, which is not really the type of fiction that interests me. But a year or two ago, she wrote ‘Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology’, which was the sort of referential mash-up genre fiction that does appeal to me – and I thought it so good, I nominated it for the BSFA Award, but it did not make the shortlist – and it seems she has written more in a similar vein. Anyway, I saw mention of this, her first novel, and its premise – the daughters of various nineteenth-century fictional scientists team up to help Sherlock Holmes solve Jack the Ripper’s murders – sounded like it might be worth a go. And so it was. It is, in fact, very good. Except. Well, it feels a bit dumbed-down. I’m not sure what it is, but it doesn’t feel as clever a novel as its central conceit would suggest. It doesn’t help that Mary Jekyll – yes, the daughter of that Jekyll – is the main character but spends much of the plot tagging along behind Sherlock Holmes. On the other hand, the novel is explicitly presented as a narrative written by Catherine Moreau, often with interjections by the other women, and that works really well. It’s also quite funny. For a novel set in Victorian Britain, there are a few slips – the ground floor is continually referred to as the first floor; and some of the expletives are US English. Despite those minor quibbles, I enjoyed The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, and plan to pick up a copy of the sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, when it’s published in July.

Author’s Choice Monthly 10: Tales from a Vanished Country, Elizabeth A Lynn (1990, USA). One day I will have all of these muahahah. Ahem. But for now, I have just over half of the series. Lynn was not an author known to me, so I came to this short collection cold. In the first story, a wizard runs a trading empire, and when his CEO, so to speak, betrays him, he imprisons him as water in the sea. Some time later, he frees him, because a rival wizard has been upsetting the balance of power. The two disguise themselves to visit the other wizard, but he sees through their disguises. Fortunately, after several months of drugged gaslighting, the CEO chap regains his senses, and the world is set right. So far, so consolatory. The second story, however, is anything but. Three sisters are noted for their beauty, intelligence and martial prowess. A mysterious woman appears and challenges them to combat. One accepts and is killed. Some time later, the mysterious challenger reappears, and this time the second sister is killed in combat. So the third sister hunts down the killer, who turns out to be an aspect of the Moon, and she becomes her lover. Years later, the sister decides to return to her family, but it seems decades have passed. But she stays and lives out her life, mourning her dead sisters and lost lover. The final story reads more like mythology than epic fantasy. A goddess entrusts command of the five winds to a reclusive astronomer who lives in a cave in the mountains. The goddess’s son decide to check this out, and becomes the woman’s lover. She has two girls, who grow faster than human girls. He leaves and steals the cloak the woman uses to command the winds. Chaos ensues. Eventually, the goddess returns. But the woman has disappeared and the two daughters are only just managing to survive. I don’t think I’ve read anything by Lynn before, and I have the impression I’ve seen her name chiefly on the covers of sharecropped novels… although checking on isfdb.org, I see that’s completely false and two of her three standalone novels are, in fact, science fiction. (The 1983 UK paperback edition of one has quite striking cover art.) The three stories in Tales from a Vanished Country are really good, which was completely unexpected. They make clever use of fantasy tropes, and are deeply feminist, even the first one which features no female characters. I think I’ll track down copies of those two science fiction novels…

Phosphorus, Liz Williams (2018, UK). This is the third novella of the third quartet of NewCon Press novellas, although the fourth book I read of the set. Not, I hasten to add, for any particular reason. It is subtitled “A Winterstrike Story’, and I have no objection to subtitles but I would like to point out that they are not titles. So when a data entry form has a field called “title”, it means title, not title and subtitle, not title and, as I have seen, “[random award] winner”. People complain about Big Data, but it would be much less of a problem if we didn’t have Shit Data. But that’s a rant for another day. I have read Winterstrike, but not the other books in the series. Neither is necessary to understand the story of Phosphorus, which, to be honest, isn’t much of a story. It’s extremely strong on setting – and Williams’s Mars is a fascinating place – but the story doesn’t really go anywhere or do much. A young woman with some mysterious quality is adopted by her mysterious aunt, who takes her from Winterstrike, which is under attack by another city, to the dead city of Tharsis. Meanwhile, the sole survivor of the Hunt – although she is dead, but animated by one of the Hunt’s starships – an alien race that saw its mission in life as “culling” other races, leaves her homeworld of Phosphorus, and eventually ends up on Mars. An event which, it transpires, happened centuries before the other narrative, and the young woman is in some way connected. And, er, that’s it. Pretty much. An interesting idea that’s not at all explored. It reads like the start of a novel. Nice writing, nice world-building, but disappointing plot.

Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon (2007, USA). Back in the day, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union appeared on several genre award shortlists, IIRC, and I read it and thought it quite good. So I stuck The Amazing Adventures of  Kavalier and Clay on my wishlist and some years later was given it as a birthday present. And then I read it, an embarrassing number of years after that, and was much more impressed. And shortly after that I found a copy of Gentlemen of the Road in a charity shop, so of course I bought it. And… Chabon writes in an afterword that to him the novel (a very short novel) was always titled “Jews with Swords”. Because to him Jews had never been associated with swords – at least not since Biblical times. I’ve never attached a religion to a weapon – people with swords are people with swords, and I’ve never really thought about the religious tradition from which they came, perhaps because in most cases in fiction that tradition was invented, and for those where it was not the context more than explained it. But “Jews with Swords” gives us a Frankish Jew estranged from his European family, and an Ethiopian Jew from tribe that no other Jew seems willing to accept, on a mission which involves the Khazars, a Turkic state which converted to Judaism, but vanished after three centuries. The two unwillingly accept a commission to take a young Khazar prince, the last survivor of the family of a deposed bek (martial leader, a sort of government CEO to the kagan’s chairperson). But they lose him to some mercenaries, who are taking him to the new bek. Except the prince persuades the mercenaries to rally his cause, and sort of builds up an army from the Muslim Khazar cities in the south of the region which the new bek had let the Vikings plunder with impunity. And… well, the big secret about the prince is pretty obvious from about a page after he’s been introduced, and the only suspense is in wondering how the two main characters can be so dumb as to not figure it out. Having said that, the history is fascinating, the characters are interesting, and, while I find Chabon’s prose a bit hit and miss, the mannered style he adopts here works well with the story. I should read more Chabon. Fortunately, I have Wonder Boys on the TBR, picked up from a charity shop at the same time as Gentlemen of the Road…

Inside Moebius, Part 1, Moebius (2004, France). I came to Moebius’s work from Jodorwosky, as Moebius – Jean Giraud – illustrated Jodorowsky’s Incal series, still one of the greatest sf bandes dessinées of all time. Although, having said that, I seem to remember seeing parts of Moebius’s Airtight Garage many. many years ago. Back in the early 1980s, I used to fly out to the Middle East for holidays via Schiphol Airport, and in the bookshop there I would often pick up a copy of Heavy Metal or Epic, and even an issue of 1984 (which I had to hide once I’d discovered what it contained). I’ve a feeling that’s where I first encountered Moebius’s work. That’s all by the bye. I’ve been a fan of Moebius for many years now, so I keep an eye open for when new stuff by him appears in English (I could, I suppose, buy the original French editions, but I have enough trouble keeping track of new stuff in one language market, never mind doing it in two). Inside Moebius, originally published in in six volumes in France but now as three volumes from Dark Horse, is a sort of autobiographical private project that blossomed. Moebius wanted to give up smoking, so he started writing a bande dessinée about it, and then sort of dragged in the books he had worked on, or was currently working on, and his thoughts on a variety of subjects. Particularly politics. Osama bin Laden makes an appearance in Inside Moebius, Part 1, as do some of Moebius’s characters – Blueberry, Arzak and the Major. The art is not as detailed as in other Moebius works, it’s almost sketches, in fact. But the way the book is designed, it’s clear the words are more important. The dialogue is full of puns, many of which have not translated but a helpful afterword explains them. (For the record, I did get the “Fumetti” one.) It’s all good stuff, although I could have wished for artwork as good as that in the aforementioned works.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 131


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Moving pictures 2018, #22

Sometimes, I even convince myself these posts must be taking the piss – I mean, there may be two films from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list here, but both are pretty obscure… and they’re probably the least obscure of the half-dozen. Jancsó films I buy as soon as the come available. Colorful was lent to me, and A Silent Voice was added to my rental list when I wasn’t looking. And Penda’s Fen I stumbled across on Amazon, and it looked interesting enough to give it a go…

Silence and Cry, Miklós Jancsó (1968, Hungary). I’m a fan of Jancsó’s films, even if I don’t understand them half the time. Watching Silence and Cry, it felt like an early attempt at Red Psalm (see here), a film it precedes by four years. Like the later film it is set at the same farmhouse, and it has the same sort of flowing camera movement, following the cast as they move around. And, also like that film, the cast are never still. Even when in conversation, they continue to stroll around. However, Silence and Cry is set in 1919, not 1890, after a nationalist revolution against the communists in power. A troop of soldiers occupy the farm – it may be a village, as it contains several separate dwellings; I don’t know – unaware that one of the men who lives there was a member of a Communist battalion. For their own amusement, however, they force him to undergo demeaning trials. All of which comers to a head. Like Red Psalm, the characters are more stand-ins for the roles played by people in Hungary’s chequered past than they are actual characters. But given Jancsó’s predilection for filming against flat landscapes in which only sparsely scattered trees appear, or framing such landscapes in the doorways and windows of interior scenes, then their lack of depth seems entirely appropriate. Despite the staged fell to much of the story, Jancsó’s camera-work, almost continually on the move, gives the story a flow and urgency it would not other wise possess. As far as I’m concerned, Jancsó is one of the great directors. I’d definitely put him in my top ten greatest directors – in alphabetical order, at this moment in time, they’d probably be: Antonioni, Dreyer, Ghatak, Godard, Haneke, Hitchcock, Jancsó, Jia, Ozu and Sokurov (sadly, no female directors).

Colorful, Keiichi Hara (2010, Japan). David Tallerman lent me this as he seems to be on a mission to convince me anime is not all completely weird shit like Utena Revolutionary Girl (see here). I know that already, of course, but I’m not going to turn down the lend of a film worth watching. And, okay, I thought Colorful laid it on a bit thick, but it was a good film nonetheless. Some of the animation was really quite lovely. A soul is prevented from reaching heaven, and returned to earth to inhabit the body of a fourteen-year-old boy who has just committed suicide. A guardian angel tells him he has six months to figure what he did wrong in his former life, and to fix whatever led the boy whose body he is currently occupying to take his own life. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy, and after making a complete hash of everything – through a combination of his own self-centredness and his failure to make an effort to tackle the problems of his host body. Eventually, he is befriended by a fellow pupil, whose completely non-judgemental treatment of him, and indeed everyone, leads him to redemption… and the discoveries he needed to fulfil his contract with his guardian angel. Who offers him as a reward, a continued life, with no knowledge of the trial he has just undergone. I do like these sort of anime films – ie, the realistic dramas, not that the central premise of this one, with its A Matter of Life and Death conceit, is especially realistic – but when I worked my way through the Studio Ghibli films, I much preferred the high school drama ones, and that seems to be holding true for anime films in general.

Wanda*, Barbara Loden (1970, USA). I’m not sure why this made the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. It feels a bit like a John Cassavetes film – improvised, almost guerrilla film-making, about working-class Americans, very strong representation of women (I should like Cassavetes’s films more than I do) – but it’s not an ensemble piece, it’s not telling the story of a group, it’s telling the story of a single woman and it’s very much from her point of view, with entirely female gaze. That’s something you won’t find in Hollywood movies, and forty-seven years ago I suspect it was vanishingly rare in independent US film-making. The title refers to a woman who leaves her husband, does not contest custody of their kids at the divorce hearing, runs away with a one-night stand, only to be abandoned by him, before falling in with a bank robber and being forced by him to act as accomplice. For all that, like Cassavetes’s films, Wanda struck me as more admirable than likeable. Barbara Loden was best-known as an actress, and was married to critically-acclaimed and influential director Elia Kazan. But Wanda was made on a budget of $100,000, with a crew of four, and Loden as writer, director and star. That’s about as good a definition of vanity project as you can get. And, of course, not all vanity projects are ego trips with no redeeming qualities. I suspect Wanda is a more important film than a single viewing might suggest, and, of course, it doesn’t help that it’s a grim and depressing story… Apparently, Loden directed it because she could not interested anyone else – including Kazan – in doing so. It was critically well-received on release, but Loden died ten years later, at age 48, while preparing to direct her second feature film. After seeing Wanda, I must admit I’m now interested in seeing some of her other films roles.

Peking Opera Blues*, Tsui Hark (1986, China). I should have guessed what this film might be like since I knew the name Tsui Hark and had seen his Once Upon a Time in China (see here), but the title fooled me as I thought it might be more like Farewell My Concubine. It wasn’t. The story does feature Peking Opera, from which women were banned from performing, but it’s by no means the central plot. Peking Opera Blues is more of an action/comedy than it is a social drama. It’s set in the 1920s, and depicts the attempts by Sun Yat-Sen supporters to get hold of a document proving the emperor has borrowed money from Western bankers. The paper is held by a general, and his daughter is one of the supporters trying to steal it. Then there’s a young woman who had stolen a box of jewellery during a raid on another general’s house, but she lost it. While trying to hide from the general’s soldiers, the rebels hide out in an inn hosting a Peking Opera show. The impresario’s daughter gets caught up in the whole thing, helping to hide them, then assisting them in their several attempts to purloin the letter (did you see what I did there?). Other than the setting, and the three female leads, this is a typical Hong Kong action/comedy of the time. The fight scenes are good, there’s plenty of broad comedy, and the three leads – Brigitte Lin, Cherie Chung and Sally Yeh – are especially good. But the final scenes set during a performance of the Peking opera troupe, in which the three women, and their male accomplices, have taken over some of the roles, is a lot of fun. I’m not sure if Peking Opera Blues deserves its place on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list – it’s a lot of fun, but is it there because it’s atypical for its type? Is that enough? Not, I think, when you consider all the films that belong on the list but aren’t there. Still, it’s worth watching.

A Silent Voice, Naoko Yamada (2016, Japan). This anime film I actually rented – only to discover after watching it that David Tallerman had stuck it on my watch list during one of our afternoons out in Shalesmoor. The story is relatively simple: a deaf girl joins a new school, is bullied by the other students, years later the biggest bully bumps into her, having spent years unable to deal with people because of guilt over how he treated her, and tries to kindle a friendship. Her willingness to forgive him, despite the the mockery of other members of the class whom he still runs into, helps him deal with his guilt, and he soon finds he can meet the gaze of other people – and they don’t much care about, or even know, what he did. However, the other members of that high school class are happy for him to carry the blame for their treatment of the deaf girl, and many still deny their own cruelty and hate him for forcing them to confront their own behaviour. There’s a lot about A Silent Voice that reminded me of Makoto Shinkai’s films, especially his latest, Your Name (see here), although A Silent Voice is straight-up drama that uses some elements that feel like genre to emphasise aspects of its story. Whereas Your Name uses a time-slip narrative, which is about as genre as you can get. Recommended.

Penda’s Fen, Alan Clarke (1974, UK). The title refers to an area near the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. A teenager, the son of the local vicar, is not liked by his peers, chiefly because he’s a priggish know-it-all whose ideas on religion appal his liberal low Anglican parents. The government is engaged in some secret project nearby – probably digging a secret nuclear bunker – and the locals have had several meetings on the topic, at which the chief opposition has been a playwright known for writing controversial television plays. The schoolboy, meanwhile, who is very irritating, has various fantastical encounters, including angels, Elgar, whose music features heavily, and eventually King Penda. This is good stuff – unassuming, but with real intelligence and depth. It was broadcast as a Play for Today in 1974, and written by David Rudkin. It’s very English, in the way that Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood is very English, but it’s an England that’s as foreign to me as it would be to a non-Brit. My England is the run-down and neglected industrial areas of the Midlands and Yorkshire. Their streets of terraced houses, mills and factories and works fallen into ruin, tap rooms and chip shops. The only mythology is that which attaches to generations of the same family working in the same industry. There are no sleeping kings at the bottom of a pit shaft. So I find films – or, technically, television plays – like Penda’s Fen almost as fascinating as I would a film set in, say, Mali, or China, or Greenland… Recommended.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 906


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Moving pictures 2018, #21

I promised 2018 wouldn’t be all film posts, but we’re less than four months into the year and I’m on my twenty-first film post. That’s like three a week. And not much else, except posts on the books I’ve bought and the books I’ve read. While I’ve started reviewing again for Interzone, and SF Mistressworks is back up and running, I still need to start writing criticism again. I suspect I’m better at ranting than sustained arguments, and since the “reviews” in these film posts have a tendency to turn into mini-rants, I’m letting it out in dribs and drabs instead of holding it back for one long piece on science fiction… On the other hand, I’ve found it harder to engage with online sf fandom this last year or so, chiefly because I’m usually not interested in the books and authors under discussion.

Speaking of mini-rants… We have an Oscar-winner in this post. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it won the Hugo this year. I hated it.

The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro (2017, USA). I’m not really sure how to write about this film. Del Toro has been widely praised over many years, and not just in genre circles, and of course The Shape of Water won the Oscar. Now I’m not so foolish as to believe the Oscar is any real indication of quality, and often as not the Academy’s choice of winner is baffling to everyone (as is their choice of shortlist). But that’s awards for you. The Shape of Water, in which a captured amphibian human, an experimental subject in  a secret government research programme, enters into a relationship with a mute woman (mute, but not deaf), has been seen by many as a sensitive treatment of the disability. I can’t speak to that, it’s not my experience to discuss. But I can certainly discuss the film I watched. Which opened with an acknowledgement to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and then proved to be a complete rip-off in mise en scène and lighting and the whole look of the film to the oeuvre of Jeunet and Caro, so much so it went beyond homage. Then there’s the fact the amphibian human is basically Abe Sapiens from the Hellboy films, and even played by the same actor, Doug Jones, under the prosthetics. Meanwhile, one of the scientists in the lab is a Soviet mole, and he fancies the mute woman, but his KGB handler is after him to kill the creature. The mute woman helps the amphibian human to escape and hides him out in her apartment. The two start having sex. But the chief US scientist is after them, as is the KGB handler, and it all comes to a violent end. The film is set in the 1950s, and I thought it horribly misogynistic. Yes, the times were misogynistic – and I’ve seen a lot of 1950s films; my favourite film was released in 1955 – but del Toro’s depiction of it felt excessive. It made a film, which felt like a rip-off of better films, quite horrible to watch. Why it won the Oscar is a mystery. I thought it was rubbish. Plus, at one point the amphibian bites the head off a cat, which is not going to endear a film to me at all…

Z*, Costa-Gavras (1969, Algeria). I didn’t bother to look this one up before watching – I mean, it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must Watch Before You Die list, so I was going to watch it whatever. Which meant I cam to it completely cold… and, unlike some of the films from the list I’ve come to cold, I was actually pleasantly surprised and, by the end, very much impressed. The title refers indirectly to the military junta which seized power in Greece in the early 1960s. Among the many things the right-wing military dictatorship outlawed was the letter “Z”. The film is thinly-disguised retelling of events surrounding the assassination in 1963 of the Opposition Deputy after he had given a speech on nuclear disarmament to an audience opposed to the right-wing government in power. The government try to cover up the assassination, but put no real effort into making it plausible. And the investigating magistrate put on the case soon develops a case against senior military officers linked to the government. But this is not the result the government want. After various failed attempts to make it go away, they eventually let the investigation and court case run its course. Several senior military officers are charged and found guilty. A few months later, the army seizes power, the sentences from the court case are quietly forgotten, and the military dictatorship bans, among other things, the Opposition, demonstrations and the letter “Z”, zeta, because it was used by the Opposition to mean “he lives”, in reference to the assassinated Deputy. The story is told in an economical style, which feels very French – and it’s a French language film – for all that it’s set in Greece. There’s a refreshing lack of clutter to the story, which moves through its plot like it’s on rails – and even attempts to, er, derail it, such as the alternative theories to the assassination given by the authorities, which are shown in flashback as if they were true, fail to shift the story from its intended ending. So fake news doesn’t always win. A lot of the films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list have been new to me. Some of them have proven not very good at all; others have surprised me, and I’ve been greatly impressed, despite them not being ones I’d expected to like or enjoy. This one definitely falls into the latter category.

Same Old Song, Alain Resnais (1997, France). This film opens with an acknowledgement to Dennis Potter, and as well it should as it borrows a conceit from Potter’s Pennies from Heaven: the characters break into song at intervals, but they actually lipsynch to the original versions of tracks. I don’t remember much of the Potter TV series, or the later Hollywood adaptation for that matter, although I do vaguely remember seeing the series back in the 1980s. Same Old Song is an ensemble piece. Camille bumps into Nicolas, a man her sister Odile was once close to but who has been away from Paris for many years. Odile is now married to Claude. She is also looking for a bigger apartment, using estate agent Marc. Camille runs historical walking tours of Paris. A regular on these tours is Simon, who fancies Camille but only irritates her by expanding on her lecturettes to the others in each group. He claims to write radio plays, but he actually works for Marc – and he is useless at is job and only kept on out of loyalty to Marc’s father. Camille meanwhile fancies Marc, and enters into an affair with him. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, so he can bring his family back to Paris. Later, he admits he is estranged from his wife and child. At points throughout the film, members of the cast begin singing– well, no, they don’t, they lipsynch. To popular songs performed by the original artist. In several cases, they lipsynch to songs performed by artists of a different gender. I didn’t at first think the gimmick added anything to what was essentially a fairly common type of French relationship drama, but it actually started to grow on me. It helped that the cast were uniformly very good. I liked the film. On the other hand, it all felt a bit lightweight for the director of Muriel or Hiroshima Mon Amour…

WR: Mysteries of the Organism*, Dušan Makavejev (1971, Serbia). I joked on Twitter while watching this that I had persistently misread “Mysteries of the Organism” as “Mysteries of the Orgasm” only to discover that my misread was closer to the truth. Which is not entirely fair. But, to be honest, I have no idea what this film was about. Well, I know what it was about, but I don’t… It’s about Wilhelm Reich and his theory of orgone energy, and is partly a documentary about Reich and his “Orgonon”, his lab in Maine, USA, but it also includes shots of Jackie Curtis eating an ice cream on Broadway, a story about a woman in Communist Yugoslavia who is forced out of her flat because her room-mate is having sex and so lectures on sex and politics to the rest of her apartment block and later enters into a relationship with a People’s Artist ice skater, an interview with a woman who paints people while they masturbate, a man who dresses like a homeless soldier and stalks well-off New Yorkers with a plastic rifle, and several others bits of found footage, interviews and drama… It’s pretty much impossible to summarise the plot, or the various sections. It’s also completely mad. But in a good way. I loved the bits set in Yugoslavia – it was that sort of declamatory film-making I really like. The documentary bits were less interesting, perhaps because Reich’s theories are so off-the-wall they’re hard to take seriously. It’s an odd choice for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. I can see how it might have become a cult favourite, but it does several things that other films do perhaps better – bits and pieces, for example, from the oeuvres of Miklós Jancsó or Sergei Parajanov – although they don’t use the collage (if that’s the right word) technique used here. It’s an interesting film, but I’m not sure if WR: Mysteries of the Organism belongs on the list. If the list includes this, it might as well include Anthony Balch’s Secrets of Sex…

Pina, Wim Wenders (2011, Germany). I have watched many films by Wenders, and some of them I have liked a great deal. I have a box set of his works somewhere. Though at one time Wenders may have had the same stature internationally, I suspect Herzog has since outstripped him. Possibly because Herzog has made a couple of movies for Hollywood. It can’t be because Wenders makes documentaries on obscure subjects as well as feature films, because Herzog does that too. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d classify Pina Bausch and Tanztheater as an obscure subject. The weird thing is, there are several films in which a completely off-the-wall dance routine bumps the movie from very good to borderline genius – and one of them is even by Herzog – and yet I’m not a fan of dancing. (Watching, or doing.) Or Tanztheater. So much of this documentary was wasted on me. It was interesting, inasmuch as it was something I’d not seen before. And the footage shot in  Wuppertal, especially of the city’s unique Schwebebahn, was fascinating. But Tanztheater didn’t strike me as an artform I feel inspired to explore further. Apparently, Bausch died during the filming of Pina, and Wenders planned to abandon the project. But all those who knew Bausch persuaded him to continue, and the film became a memorial to her. In that respect, I think it succeeds extremely well.

The Oath, Laura Poitras (2010, USA). This is the second film this year I’ve watched with this title. The first was a good thriller from Iceland (see here). This one is a documentary about two men who were involved with al-Qa’eda during the 1990s. And, like any documentary about the War on Terror, the US comes out of it looking like the biggest villains. At one point, a military lawyer representing the US in a case against one of the two guys mentions “crimes against humanity” – and this from a state which has imprisoned people without due process, without a trial, has secretly abducted them from sovereign nations and smuggled them to their illegal prison, breaking no end of international law, tortured them (in direct defiance of international law and a treaty to which the USA was a signatory), and, in this case, even manufactured a crime they could find the defendant guilty of because he plainly wasn’t guilty of the one for which he was arrested. Anyway, Abu Jandal was a bodyguard for bin Laden but left al-Qa’eda shortly before 9/11 after a difference of opinion over the organisation’s tactics. When he saw 9/11 on the news, he was so disgusted he gave himself up to the Yemeni authorities. And after a couple of years in prison was rehabilitated via the National Dialogue Conference. He then fed intelligence to the US regarding al-Qa’eda, and now talks regularly to young Yemeni men – and has been interviewed on Arabic television – about his history, about what al-Qa’eda means, and about how best to fight US hegemony in the Arab world. Abu Jandal’s brother-in-law, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was bin Laden’s driver. He was not a combatant, he was not privy to tactical or strategic information. But the US arrested him, renditioned him to Guantanamo, tortured him, and then put him in front of a military court. But Hamdan’s lawyer challenged the verdict as unconstitutional (now there’s a joke!) and it went to the Supreme Court. So the US government quickly invented a crime – “giving material aid and support to terrorists” – that they knew they could make a case for, and he was duly found innocent of all charges except for two of the five charges of giving material aid. This is a fascinating documentary, and tells you more about how the US has prosecuted the War on Terror – like a bunch of war criminals, basically – than it does on the War on Terror itself. When those who fight terrorists employ even more immoral and illegal tactics than the terrorists, then they need to be brought down too. Once, history may have been written by the winners, as they say; but now, with the internet, so many narratives spring up around every event it’s no wonder the authorities have to resort to accusations of “fake news!” in order to get their version of events accepted…

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 904


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Moving pictures 2018, #20

I know most of the films I watch are blindingly obscure, and only of interest to a limited group of people, but occasionally I watch – or, at least, write about – popular films. Not always, it has to be said, approvingly. And there’s a glaring example in this post: Blade Runner 2049. There’s a tendency among genre fans to love movies because they’re respectful of genre, whether or not they’re good films. Throw in good visuals – or even ersatz art house visuals – and said fans are pretty much wetting themselves. If you judge a film by fan service, you’re doing it wrong. On the other hand, I do have a somewhat idiosyncratic taste in films. As is evidenced by my DVD collection…

Paradox Alice, Erika Dapkewicz (2012, USA) I forget where I saw mention of this, but the premise sounded intriguing. A routine flight to Europa to harvest ice returns to Earth, only to witness the planet being destroyed. The one female member of the four crew is murdered. A remaining member of the crew (now all male) then inexplicably transforms into a female. Which means there are now only two male crew-members left: an old sensible one, and a young nutjob who thinks he’s some sort of Waco messiah. And that last tells you as much as you need to know about this film. In other words, it was fucking awful. The CGI was shit, but never mind, it seemed to be doing its job… but then the three of them were left the only humans alive and the quality nosedived very quickly. The nutjob messiah character was played one-note, and the female character immediately started acting like a victim. And was then tortured and raped. I had thought the film was recent, but after watching it I was surprised it hadn’t been made forty years ago. The sexual politics were offensive and a generation old at least. Do yourself a favour: avoid.

Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve (2017, USA). This and Arrival, another Villeneuve film I did not like, have received much love from the genre community. The first might be partly due to the fact the film was an adaptation of a story by Ted Chiang; and, okay, Blade Runner 2049 is plainly a sequel to the much-loved Blade Runner from 1982, as the title clearly indicates, so that’s going to get it some love from the genre community straight off. Because when it comes to movies, the genre community – AKA fandom – has pretty poor taste, or rather, its critical faculties completely desert it. “Woo, Hollywood made a film of a book we like… Quick! Give it a Hugo!”. Which is not to say that only fandom has fallen for Villeneuve’s superficial charms. He has been lauded by the film community too. Blade Runner 2049, I will freely admit, looks gorgeous. But it is still a bad film. It is deeply misogynistic: only one female character survives to the end. It is needlessly violent. In the original, the only people killed by Deckard were replicants he had been authorised to “retire”. In this version, the protagonist kills far more people, and often for no good reason. There is one scene, which does not advance the plot, in which the protagonist’s vehicle crashes in an area outside the city and he has to kill a number of people who attack him. Because that’s what people do in the future obvs. They attack people who have car accidents. And, I don’t know, maybe they eat them. Then there’s Jared Leto’s character, Niander Wallace, who is clearly meant to be the new Tyrell, but Tyrell was proud of his accomplishments while Wallace is mostly contemptuous. The more I think about it, the more I think Blade Runner 2049 is a deeply offensive film, and I wonder what that says about twenty-first century science fiction and twenty-first cinema. Villeneuve is like Winding Refn, a director lauded for their visuals by critics who are happy to overlook their misogyny and violence. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. A good film is more than just pretty pictures.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Taika Watiti (2016, New Zealand). I had never heard of Watiti until I watched Thor: Ragnarok. And then, having learnt who he was, I wondered about Disney’s wisdom in putting him in charge of a MCU film. But he pulled it off. More than that, he made probably the most entertaining MCU film so far. And since that film pleasantly surprised me, I decided to give some of his earlier work a go. It has been horribly mis-sold. I hate whimsical shit. I cannot stand the films of Wes Anderson. Someone has tried to sell Watiti as New Zealand’s answer to Anderson. For me, this is a massive turn-off. Fortunately, it is complete bollocks. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a straightforward drama told with a slightly sideways dead-pan comic point-of-view. It is, thankfully, not at all fucking whimsical. A kid in care is dumped on a well-meaning, but none too bright, couple on a smallholding outside the city. The kid tries to run away several times, but he’s overweight and knows nothing about the bush. Eventually, the wife’s kindness wins him over. The husband is a gruff type who doesn’t want him there. But then the wife dies unexpectedly, and the kid runs away because he doesn’t want to go back into care. The husband tracks him down, but injures himself in the process, so the two end up staying in the bush for weeks while he recovers. Meanwhile, everyone thinks the husband has kidnapped the kid… Sam Neill plays the husband, and he gives it his best, but his career tells against him – he’s played too many scientists and urbane types to convince as a taciturn bushman. The kid, in, I think, his first professional role, is really good. I think what makes the film is that all the characters are well-meaning but really dim. Often, they’re comically stupid. And that played well against the seriousness of the story. I’m told Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a bit of a Marmite film, and I generally find myself on the hating side of such films. But I really liked it. And it wasn’t at all whimsical, thank god.

Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle, Paul Sng (2017, UK). Maggie’s great sell-off of council houses was the most financially successful of all the Tory policies. It brought in more money than any other sell-off. And in itself, it was no bad thing. Except. The social housing that was sold was never replaced. Sheffield is currently doing the same with its trees: cutting them down, but not always planting new ones. (They cut down two on my street… and replaced only one of them.) And that’s what happened to social housing in the UK. The number of council houses plummetted. So now we have people living on the street. And in London, land once occupied by social housing has been developed and turned into luxury apartments which the rich use as investments and never actually occupy. Empty flats should be taxed 90%. More. It is absolutely fucking disgusting that people are left homeless just so some one-percenter can park money in property. One story repeatedly told in this film, which should be watched by everyone, is that of people who had bought their council house/flat, but their estate was now being developed, so they were offered £150k for their home, but the market price of an equivalent property in the area was £600k or more. Much of the impetus for redevelopment comes from the poor condition of the estates, where maintenance has been neglected for decades. In some cases, the neglect is deliberate in order to justify a sell-off to a developer; in other cases, it’s the result of central government cutting back funding to local authorities. Tory central government, of course. They used council houses to pay a ton into the Treasury to offset the tax cuts they’d given their mates, to make up for the shrinking of the economy caused by policies such as Austerity… And yet the claim to be the party that’s good for business! On what planet? Dispossession mostly covers estates in London, but does also film in the Gorbals and at Red Road and other locations in Glasgow. I seem to remember it also covering Sheffield’s Hyde Park. This film should be require viewing in schools – although the scumbags at Eton and the like will probably think it’s a comedy. But that’s doesn’t matter because there are more of us, and we can vote them out of office. and then ensure that they are charged for their crimes.

Underwater Love, Shinji Imaoko (2011, Japan). This was a birthday present from David Tallerman. After mentioning that I’d loved The Lure (see here), he told me I’d probably like this too. And he was right. Although not as much as I loved The Lure. A woman who works in a fish factory and is engaged to the boss. But then she bumps into a kappa, a Japanese water sprite, sort of half-man half-turtle, who proves to be a past boyfriend who drowned when they were both seventeen. She sorts of befriends him – and there is some comedy around her trying to hide him from her fiancé – and through the kappa she meets other water sprites. Oh, and every now and again, they all break into song. It’s sort of eighties music, but not really – and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s Japanese… Comparisons with The Lure are, I’m afraid, inevitable – and not only because I watched the two within a short period of time. The Polish film is the more visual of the two, and, it must be said, the more musical. But Underwater Love is a romance, not horror, and so entirely different in tone. The protagonist in Underwater Love is, of course, a great deal more sympathetic – slightly ditzy, slightly harassed, but generally happy. The protagonists in The Lure are, er, carnivorous mermaids. And the more I think about it, the harder it is to compare the two films. Underwater Love was fun, if lightweight, and I’ve seen enough Japanese cinema to be reasonably familiar with its conventions. The comedy didn’t always works for me, the frank depictions of sex were a surprise but seemed to fit, and I can’t really complain: it was a good present.

The Mother and the Whore*, Jean Eustache (1973, France). This was the first feature film by Eustache, previously known for shorts and documentaries, and it is highly regarded – not just featuring on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, but praised by many critics both inside and outside France. It is also 219 minutes long, and shot in black and white. It is about a self-obsessed twenty-something Parisian, his girlfriend, and a woman he meets with whom he has an affair. Much of the film takes place in cafés and bars, and consists of the man talking at women. Sometimes, there is even a conversation. I read the Wikipedia entry, and it sounded interesting. Not Nouvelle Vague, which I find a bit hit and miss, but very French. And it was clearly highly-regarded. But such films… sometimes it’s hard to see what their reputation rests upon. Over three hours of bullshit uttered by a young man trying to carry on affairs with two women? Maybe I missed something, maybe there’s more to this film than appeared on the screen. It felt… glib, and far too common a scenario. Especially in French cinema. And length is not always a sign of deeper exploration. I shall probably give it another go sometime, but I honestly could not understand why it was so praised. I like French cinema, I like a lot of Nouvelle Vague films (which, to be fair, this wasn’t), I even like some long films by French directors (well, mostly by Jacques Rivette…). I feel like I missed something with this film, but perhaps it just wasn’t for me. Ah well.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 902


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Easter parade

Yes, I know, Easter is over. And I don’t think they have parades at Easter, anyway. At least not in this country. But it’s still April, and here is a parade of books wot I have recently added to the collection.

This is the third set of novellas from NewCon Press – I didn’t bother with the second set as it was horror – and, as you can see, the covers form a single piece of art. By Jim Burns. I’ve already read The Martian Job (see here), and The Martian Simulacra and The Greatest Story Ever Told (see here), but have yet to read Phosphorus.

Three new-ish science fiction books. Well, A Thorn in the Bush is not really new – it was written decades ago but never published – and it’s not actually science fiction either, as Herbert initially set out to be a writer of thrillers. But never mind. Songs of Leaving was the only book I bought in the dealers’ room at Follycon 2. I’m a big fan of Duchamp’s writing, so I’ve been after a copy of The Waterdancer’s World for a while.

I started reading Litt’s novels several years ago – although not in alphabetical order, as I started with Journey into Space (Litt has titled each of his books alphabetically; he’s currently up to N). I thought I ought to fill in some of the gaps, hence Beatniks. The True Deceiver was a charity shop find. Sea and Sardinia is another for the DH Lawrence Phoenix Edition collection. Such Good Friends was the consequence of drunk eBaying, bought after seeing Preminger’s not very good film adaptation, reading up about it on Wikipedia, and thinking the original novel sounded mildly interesting…

Some birthday presents from last month from my sisters. I’ve heard good things about Frankenstein in Baghdad. A Primer for Cadavers I’ve already read (see here). I’ve always wanted to work my way through Clarke’s short fiction, so I’m glad I now have The Collected Stories. And I’ve been a fan of Irwin’s writing since reading his book on classical Arabic literature years ago, and Wonders Will Never Cease is his latest novel.

Some collectibles. The Elizabeth A Lynn is actually titled Tales from a Vanished Country, although none of the books in the 29-volume Author’s Choice Monthly series from Pulphouse Publications actually put the titles on the cover. Anyway, I’m slowly completing the set. The Natural History of the P.H. is an essay by Roberts on something that drove his fiction in his later years. It was published by Kerosina. Judgment Night is a facsimile edition of the first edition, published by Red Jacket Press. Gerfalcon, is from the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library, although annoyingly I don’t think it’s the original cover art for the book.

Finally, some graphic novels. Memories from the Future (see here) is the final volume in the Valerian and Laureline series. While Crosswind (see here) is the first volume in a new series. And Inside Moebius Part 1 is, er, also the first in a series, of, I think, three volumes.


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Moving pictures 2018, #19

Have I mentioned before that I occasionally surprise myself by the stuff I end up watching? And liking? It happens.

Sign of the Pagan, Douglas Sirk (1954, USA). Sirk made some blinding melodramas during the 1950s, but he was more often a director-for-hire, and not all of the films he made show the same subversive quality as his best work. Like this one. I mean, my love for All That Heaven Allows knows no bounds, but this straightforward historical drama about Attila the Hun and Roman emperors Valentian III and Theodosius is ordinary stuff. Palance, effectively blacked-up, plays Attila with the… relish he brought to all his roles. The remaining cast are forgettable, even Jeff Chandler, who plays a centurion who provides a through-line for the viewer. Much, if not all, of the film appears to have been shot in a studio, which gives everything a weirdly Shakespearean feel, although that’s somewhat offset by the typically Hollywood dialogue. I mean, there are touches to it that are pure Sirk – among other things, a tendency to write the women much better than is typical for the period; and some of the framing is clearly taking the piss. But Hollywood has never been good at historicals, especially ancient, and the 1950s weren’t exactly a high point for that genre. Sirk’s films have slowly been appearing on DVD, the ones he’s best known for first, of course, but it does seem a bit random which titles appear next. This isn’t really one they needed to rush out.

Guardians, Sarik Andreasyan (2017, Russia). I joked on Twitter than this might be Russia’s answer to the X-Men, the Ж-Men, but no one thought it was funny. Oh well. During the Cold War, a Soviet scientist experimented with giving people superhuman powers. He succeeded, but the programme was shut down. In the present day, the scientist – who had also experimented on himself, giving himself super-strength and the power to control machines – re-surfaces, takes control of some state-of-the-art Russian battle robots, kills all the generals and scarpers. So the Russian super-secret Patriot programme, a sort of Russian SHIELD, tracks down the original experimental subjects and persuades them to form a team to combat the rogue scientist. Who has stolen a TV tower, which he plans to erect in Moscow and use as a giant antenna to seize control of all technology through the world muahahaha. So the Patriot team – a woman who can turn invisible or into water, a man who can turn into a super-strong bear (super-strong compared to bears, that is), a man with super-speed and two very sharp swords, and a man who can control rocks and earth. The plot is pretty standard for the genre, even down to the nod at possible sequels at the end. The special effects are mostly effective, but the superheroes all look a bit off, a bit like CGI characters from late nineties or early twenty-first century films. Missable.

India Song*, Marguerite Duras (1975, France). You know when you come to a film totally cold, and you love it so much you want to watch everything by the director? It’s happened to me several times. And it has happened again. I really had no idea what to expect from India Song. It certainly wasn’t a film in which actors silently performed their roles to a voiceover narrative. The story is set in, er, India, and is about the wife of a French planter and her affairs. But it was actually filmed in Boulogne. It takes place in the 1930s, and consists mostly of the cast sitting around in the planter’s mansion and having the sort of conversation privileged people back in the 1930s in expatriate colonies had. The story is told entirely in voiceover. None of the cast speak – or rather, their voices are never heard on the soundtrack. It’s a bit like watching a play, a bit like a documentary, and a lot unlike most other films. I found it fascinating – so much so, I now want to see other films by Duras, to see if India Song was a one-off or most of her films were like it. Unfortunately, I’ve had trouble finding any.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Alison Klayman (2012, USA). I know Ai’s name, but not much about his art – other than his involvement in the design of the Birds Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics – so this film was a good introduction to the man and his work. And while I’m not convinced by the latter – I look askance at any artist that runs an “atelier” and just signs the work, like James Patterson – there’s no denying the political work done by Ai. He spent years, for example, collecting the names of schoolchildren killed by the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, despite official resistance. It’s true that his stature insulated him to some extent from the consequences of his views – although not entirely, as he was disappeared by the Chinese authorities for 88 days at the end of this film (it provides the end-note of the movie). Modern art is… well, it’s not art, it’s message – inasmuch as the message bypasses traditional art channels. Which is why people don’t understand it as art. Also, most people don’t understand the message of traditional art. This is hardly unsurprising, as the language is often specific the period in which the art was produced. All those Renaissance paintings? They’re coded. And so are Ai’s works. But there’s no commonly-accepted language for art these days, and hasn’t been for a long time, and so works need to be decoded in context. Some artists provide context, some don’t. Ai does for some of his pieces in this film. But without context, art can lose its meaning. But even context has weight, and Ai’s is among the heaviest – if that makes sense. He’s a dissident in the most repressive, and most successful, regime on the planet. He directly criticises his masters. His survival is not a consequence of his refusal to be silenced but their failure, for whatever reason, to take action. Which they eventually did, just before this film was released. They arrested him at Beijing airport, and held him incommunicado for three months. Vocal critics, even ones with international reputations, of repressive regimes have a tendency to disappear. But that’s the right wing for you: for all their talk about law and order and traditional values, they are quick to ignore the law when their power is threatened. The UK government, while by no means as repressive as the Chinese authorities, has been happy to overlook the illegal election spending of both the Conservative Party in the last election and Leave campaign in the EU referendum. A mandate generated by illegal actions is no mandate at all. In China, they don’t give a shit. The authorities are so desperate to maintain their wealthy lifestyles they’re happy to play fast and loose with their laws. We need supra-national institutions like the EU to prevent shit like that from happening in Europe. And the UK. Oh, wait…

I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie (2017, USA). A colleague at work likes war movies, and I mentioned in passing I’d watched I, Tonya, and he said, it’s good innit. So there you go, you can never tell what films people like or not. I, Tonya is a comedy-drama based on actual events, which sounds horrible when you think about it. Tonya Harding is best-known as a US Olympic ice-skater who was later banned from the sport because she had conspired to injure her chief rival Nancy Kerrigan. The film is made entirely from real quotes from the people involved. Harding comes across as driven but none too bright. Her husband likewise. But the man they employ as their bodyguard takes the biscuit as dumbest person on the planet. If he comes across as implausibly stupid in the film, interview footage with the real person in the end credits shows they characterised him quite accurately. To be fair, Harding comes across as unfairly punished. Kerrigan recovered, and took silver at the Olympics that same year. Harding finished eighth. But Harding was banned from competitive ice-skating for life, and ended up as a female boxer. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that Australian comedy actress Margo Robbie is too old for the role, particularly Harding’s early teen years.

Wavelength*, Michael Snow (1967, Canada). Here’s another one I came to cold. I guess I could have researched it before watching it, but why bother? I was going to watch it as it was on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. Anyway, it proved to be avant garde cinema, the film that created the genre “structural film”, if such could be considered a genre. It basically consists of a camera locked off on a view of a room, in which things happen as a consequence of events outside the room. There is no plot, just the after-effects of events, the consequences, out-of-context drama, and even that last description is overstating it as it’s barely drama and the context remains a complete mystery. There are also sequences where the screen flashes and noise overwhelms the soundtrack. I loved it. Unfortunately, the copy I saw was a bad rip on Youtube, and it didn’t do the film any favours. I’d like to see a good quality version of this, but I don’t think it’s ever been released on DVD, despite being chosen for preservation by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. Hopefully, one will be made available.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 901


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Reading diary 2018, #6

More reading all over the place. And cheats too – a bande dessineé and two novellas. Oh well. At least I’m staying ahead of my Goodreads reading challenge target…

Fleet Insurgent, Susan R Matthews (2017, USA). I’ve been a fan of Matthews’s Under Jurisdiction books since they first appeared back in the 1990s. They were definitely among the more interesting commercial sf being published in the US back then. Although apparently not interesting enough, as Matthews moved publisher after the first three Jurisdiction books, and two unrelated novels, and then lasted two Jurisdiction novels with her new publisher before being dropped. The next book came out from small press Meisha Merlin… who promptly folded. And it was another decade before Baen picked the series up, published two omnibuses, before continuing the series with Blood Enemies (see here). Fleet Insurgent, however, is a collection, some of it previously published, much of its contents intended to fill in gaps in the published series so far, or shed new light, or a new perspective, on some of its episodes. So it’s more like a companion volume than anything else, rather than a pendant volume. Which, as a fan, doesn’t overly bother me. If anything, the stories in Fleet Insurgent provide welcome insight – as Matthews is not a writer who likes to make things easy for her readers. The writing is a deal better than I remember from recent rereads of the first two books of the Under Jurisdiction series, but that’s hardly unusual. However, it’s certainly not a good entry point for the series, as most of the stories will make zero sense without knowledge of the novels (despite an introduction to each story by Matthews). I seem to recall that Matthews had plotted out a quite a number of books in the series. I hope we won’t have to wait another ten years for the next instalment.

Valerian & Laureline 22: Memories from the Futures, Jean-Claude Mézières & Pierre Christin (2013, France). This is not the twenty-second volume in the story of Valerian and Laureline. Except it is. What I mean is, it’s not part of the story-arc which takes place over the previous twenty-one volumes, but rather pendants to the prior episodes. Most of these only occupy a double-page spread, and they don’t make much sense if you don’t know the volumes to which they refer. I’m not entirely sure why it needed to exist – they were contractually obliged to deliver a twenty-second volume? I don’t know. If you’ve read the previous twenty-one volumes – and I highly recommend them; ignore the crappy film – then you’ll know what to expect, and you’ll want the book anyway to complete the set. Now it’s all finished, I guess I’ll have to find another bande dessinée to read… perhaps in the original French? Now, where did I put my French-English dictionary…

Dreams of the Technarion, Sean McMullen (2017, Australia). I was sent this for review by Interzone. I don’t think I’ve read anything by McMullen before, a few short stories perhaps. Some of the stories in this collection appeared in Interzone, although I don’t recall them. As sf collections go, Dreams of the Technarion is strong on ideas, if not on story – one or two feel like premises in search of a plot. But what makes the book is the final story… which isn’t a story at all but an essay on the history of Australian science fiction. It’s fascinating stuff – and amusing too, albeit not always intentionally: when discussing early Australian pulp magazines, McMullen writes, “This is not the sort of thing to make the average SF reader do handstands, but it was good enough for an average Australian male caught in a toilet without a newspaper”, which I’m not entirely sure means what McMullen intended it to mean… Anyway, I almost certainly wouldn’t have read this had I not been sent it for review, but I’m glad I did. There’s certainly much worse out there, often much more acclaimed, and the essay on the history of Australian sf is fascinating stuff.

A Primer for Cadavers, Ed Atkins (2016, UK). My sister bought me this for my birthday, although not from my wishlist. I’ve no idea why she chose it – when I asked, she said it looked “interesting”. Atkins’s name means much more to me now than it did this time last year, since I saw one of his video installations, ‘Ribbons’, at Kiasma in Helsinki, when I was in Finland for the Worldcon last August. I’m a big fan of video installations, and Atkins’s was one of the two in the museum I thought really good. So I was quite pleased to have a copy of his book. It’s a collection of… I’m not entirely sure what they are. Stream-of-consciousness pieces, I suppose. Neither poetry nor prose, but having some characteristics of both. One or two, I think, maybe the scripts from his video installations – they certainly share titles, such as ‘Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths’. Much of the writing is visceral, as in, er, about viscera, detailed narratives about parts of the body – one is more or less an annotated list of parts of the brain as mapped by Korbinian Brodmann (isn’t that a great first name?). Most of the pieces are peppered with cultural references – there’s a plot summary of the film Sphere in one of them. I’m not sure if I liked or enjoyed A Primer for Cadavers, as it’s not the sort of book you can like or enjoy. Bits of it are extremely well-done, and a good deal of the writing is very clever. I guess that, like video installations cross over that line between cinema and art into art, so this book crosses over a similar line between literature and art into art. I’d already planned to keep an eye open for Atkins’s work when I visit modern art museums in the future, and after reading A Primer for Cadavers I’m even more keen to do so.

The Martian Simulacra, Eric Brown (2018, UK). This is the second of the latest quartet of NewCon Press novellas, all of which are set on Mars. It’s subtitled “A Sherlock Holmes Mystery”, which is a bit of a clue to the plot. As is the cover art. It’s set after Wells’s Martian invasion. Although the invaders died, a second lot, claiming to be good Martians and the enemies of the invaders, arrived, and have pretty much taken over. Holmes is approached by a Martian ambassador, who asks for his help in solving the murder of an important Martian philosopher. On Mars. So he and Watson travel there, meeting a yuong woman en route, who appears to be involved with some sort of Martian underground. Because the good Martians aren’t so good after all. It’s exactly the sort of story you would expect from a mash-up between Sherlock Holmes and The War of the Worlds. Brown keeps it pacey, although he perhaps relies overmuch on stock tropes and imagery. A fun novella.

The Greatest Story Ever Told, Una McCormack (2018, UK). This is the fourth novella in the series – for some reason I skipped the third, not that they’re at all related in terms of story. And I think it’s set on Mars, like the other three, but it’s hard to be sure as there are no references to the Martian landscape. It’s not even as if the story needs to be set on Mars – The Martian Simulacra is a mash-up with Wells’s novel, so Mars is a given; and even The Martian Job (see here) required the Red Planet as its setting for its story, and almost certainly for its ending. The narrator of The Greatest Story Ever Told is a scullery maid in a household that trains “dance-fighters”. The society consists of masters, free people and hands. The hands are basically slaves. And they rebel. Led by the two most famous dance-fighters. After several months of freedom, by which time they’ve gathered several thousand to them, the masters send an army. You can guess the rest. Interspersed with the main narrative are short fables, framed as told by the narrator to other characters in the main narrative. Some of them have obvious morals, others I couldn’t see what point they were trying to make. Everyone in the story uses female pronouns. Of the three novellas from the quartet I’ve read so far, this was the least satisfying. The setting didn’t feel like Mars, I don’t think slavery belongs in science fiction stories, and the narrator’s voice was a little irritating. The stories-within-a-story, while hardly new, gave the novella a little more depth, but I suspect it was over-used a little. Not my favourite of the four, so far. And I still have one more to read.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 131


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Moving pictures 2018, #18

I managed to crack off a few from the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list recently. So to speak. And ended up with an unexpected entry on my best of the year list…

The Heartbreak Kid*, Elaine May (1972, USA). I think I’ve said before that some of the picks for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die are, quite frankly, baffling, and this is certainly one of them. There you are on your deathbed, and you’re thinking about the movies you wished you’d got around to seeing… and a smug comedy about a man who abandons his wife on their honeymoon to run off with a younger, and WASPier, woman, with no guarantee of a relationship, can hardly be near the top of the list. True, this is a Neil Simon script, although I’ve never really understood his appeal, and a female director, and it’s a very American Jewish story but… Charles Grodin is an up-and-coming sporting goods salesman in New York. Like every young man his age, Jewish or Gentile, his life revolves around relationships with women. He meets a young woman, also Jewish. They get married. And go to Florida for their honeymoon. Where Grodin meets Sybill Shepard. He splits with his wife and follows Shepard back home to Minnesota, declares his undying love, and eventually persuades her father to let him marry her. At which point he realises he has given up his life and culture for something he never really understood and cannot relate to. And, to be honest, it’s hard for the viewer to care. The story is so universal the Jewish elements seem almost irrelevant. They could, in fact, have applied to any self-identified cultural group in the US. True, the Minnesotans’ (#NotAllMinnesotans…) antisemitism is laid bare as the plot unfolds – and the fact of its existence likely comes as little surprise to anyone who watches this film. It’s like the old bloke at bus stop who complains that there were no black people in the UK when he was growing up. He’s a racist; he’ll always be a racist. That’s hardly a twist ending.

Zero Kelvin*, Hans Petter Moland (1995, Norway). This is much more like a candidate for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, a Norwegian film set in the 1920s and filmed in the Arctic Circle. A poet in Oslo signs a contract to assist a pair of trappers in Greenland. He ships out there, and meets them – one is a taciturn scientist-type, the others is a rough-and-ready alpha male type. The poet and the alpha male type do not get on very well. The former is friendly with the dogs, the latter mistreats them, because, he claims, if your life depends on them then they’ll respond better if they fear you. A common excuse used by psychopaths. Their – er, the poet and the alpha male, that is, not the dogs – relationship has its ups and down, partly mediated by the scientist. And embalming alcohol. But it all goes horribly wrong, as things do, and their hut burns down, the scientist dies, and the two head off across the arctic waste to the nearest settlement. It’s all pretty intense stuff, and the scenery – it was filmed on Svalbard – is astonishing. After The Heartbreak Kid, this is definitely a film that belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. And Stellan Skarsgård as the trapper is on top form. Worth seeing.

Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard (2012, France). I’m pretty sure I stuck this on my rental list after seeing a trailer on another disc. Having now seen it, I wonder what it was in the trailer which persuaded me to add it to my list. It’s good film, there’s no doubt about that, the sort of dysfunctional romance the French do so well (in fact, they’re probably the only country to have made a genre of it; indeed some French directors have made entire careers out of it). Matthias Schoenhaerts is a single father with a young son, a drifter and unemployed, who ends up in Antibes. Where he gets a job as a bouncer. Marion Cotillard is a trainer at a marine world, working with orcas. She likes to go out dancing, but gets into a fight at the night-club where Schoenhaerts works. He intervenes, and ends up driving her home. Soon after, there’s an… accident at the marine world, and Cotillard loses both her legs. Her life falls apart, and just about the only person who doesn’t reject her is Schoenhaerts. She accompanies him as he tries to make money bare-knuckle fighting, and thanks to his support she starts putting her life back together. It is, as I said, very French. A well-acted drama, with two good leads, and if not a cheerful story then a well put together one.

Science Fiction Volume 1: The Osiris Child, Shane Abbess (2016, Australia). I’ve no idea where I came across mention of this movie, but I hadn’t known it was Australian until I came to write this. Certainly there are no clues in the film, and all the cast speak with American accents. I have to wonder about that title, however. Science Fiction Volume 1? Although it was apparently retitled Origin Wars in Ireland. For, er, reasons. But that original title has to be a hostage to fortune. I mean, this is bog-standard space opera – in science fiction terms – although the film-makers have done a good job in realising it on screen. A pilot for an off-world military contractor finds himself trapped on Earth when his fighter is shot down, and he must travel to a nearby city to rescue his young daughter. He is captured by an escaped convict, and the two form an unlikely alliance. And there are these genetically-engineered creatures from the prison the guy escaped from, which are out to kill everyone. The Osiris Child‘s biggest problem was that it couldn’t decide what it was: The Force Awakens or a Mad Max movie. It tried for both. It didn’t help that the villains of the story – the genetically-engineered creatures – looked like something out of Dark Crystal. Having said that, there was nothing bad about it. It felt like a mostly unoriginal sf novel that was quite well-written. The special effects were good, the mise en scène effective, the acting quite good… but it all added up to bits and pieces seen before. The director had tried to mix things up by adding a prologue and epilogue, making the film’s main narrative a flashback, but it didn’t quite work. All the same, I’ll keep an eye open for Volume 2.

The Rapture*, Michael Tonkin (1991, USA). Mimi Rogers plays a telephone operator who enlivens her humdrum existence by picking up couples with her partner and engaging in sex. But then one day she is accosted by a pair of earnest young Christian door-knockers, and converts. She converts acquaintance David Duchovny, and the two marry and move away and have a little girl. Some years later, Duchovny is killed when an employee goes postal, so Rogers and kid move to a national park and start living rough. But, convinced the Rapture is near, Rogers kills her daughter. But she cannot kill herself, so she is arrested and put in jail. So far, so humdrum. There are countless stories about people finding God, losing God, finding Him again, losing him again, whatever. And it’s dull as shit. Especially to an atheist. Despite Rogers’s excellent performance, and the generally well-made nature of The Rapture, I’d have written it off as a well-played but uninteresting drama that failed to make a cogent point, except… Tonkin takes it all the way. He totally commits to his concept. The actual Rapture takes place, and Rogers ends up wandering a strange empty wasteland. Her daughter tries to persuade her to forgive God, but she refuses. It’s not unknown for films to take a sudden turn in the final act which totally redeems what has gone before. And, to be fair, the title was probably a big clue. But I hadn’t actually expected it, and it really did make the movie. I suspect it deserves its place on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. Worth seeing.

Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan (2017, UK). I’m not a Christopher Nolan fan. I thought Memento was brilliant, but nothing by him since has impressed me. Interstellar, his film most likely to appeal to me, looked fantastic in parts, but was a horrible mess. Having said that, he’s the nearest thing Hollywood currently has to an auteur, and is successful and powerful enough to pretty much pick his own projects and do them the way he wants to. Which brings us to Dunkirk, a film I had every intention of avoiding. In these days of Brexit, the last thing I wanted to watch was some luvvie-heavy depiction of past glories as some sort of motivational mandate for our current economic death spiral. But I ended up watching it anyway. And it is completely brilliant. Seriously. It has no plot. It’s just the day of the BEF’s evacuation from the beaches of Normandy in mind-numbing and brutal detail. Yes, there are luvvies in it, but not that many; and they don’t have character arcs or narratives, or even overplay their parts. But it’s all so solid on the details – you have guys on fishing boats wearing ties! It doesn’t need to editorialise about the events, they are their own commentary. I don’t how much of the audience were familiar with the actual events, although I suspect most thought of Dunkirk as some sort of British success, which in actual fact it was the final indignity of a failed campaign by the British Expeditionary Force in France. It’s nothing to be proud of. Our army was so badly prepared, they fled in retreat. And we had to use fishing boats to rescue them. “Dunkirk spirit” means failing so badly we have to rewrite history in order to make it a victory. Nolan stitches together a variety of tales from the evacuation, and presents them in convincingly accurate detail. He’s not making a point about Dunkirk and British spirit. He’s just showing what happened. There’s no through-line. I tweeted while watching Dunkirk that it may well be the film of the early twenty-first century as it’s pure spectacle, with no story just pure historical voyeurism – and given the present fad for finding narratives in current affairs, that’s refreshingly contrary. Oh, and the film looks absolutely gorgeous too. I might even invest in my own copy on Blu-ray…

1001 Movies you Must See Before you Die count: 899


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The con in the north

I think Harrogate is the furthest north in England the Eastercon has ever been. Certainly, it’s the most northerly Eastercon I’ve attended. Blackpool, Manchester and Bradford are in the North, but still south of Harrogate. York and Leeds, also south of Harrogate, were before my time. And Glasgow, of course, is in Scotland.

More recently, I’ve been attending conventions much further north – in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. But that’s by the by. Follycon 2, this year’s Eastercon, took place at the Majestic Hotel, which is a huge Victorian hotel that has seen better days, in Harrogate. And now that it’s all over… I’m not entirely sure if it was a good Eastercon or a bad one.

Majestic Hotel to the left, Premier Inn straight ahead

The venue was large, with plenty of room to sit down and chat and have a drink. The layout had been knocked about in the past, resulting in odd staircases that appeared to go nowhere, and a poky reception that actually had the main entrance on hotel’s rear, and an original entrance hall which boasted a nice mural above the dado but felt more like a space without a purpose – at least, normally; during the con, it was the main social area. And since there were programme rooms on either side, you’d get a throng crossing it whenever programme items ended. Having said that, the service was occasionally appalling, and I heard a few stories about delayed meals.

View of the Majestic from my hotel room

However, the Majestic is literally a stone’s throw from Harrogate town centre, so it was a quick walk to plenty of good places to eat. So I ate well during the con. Which is unusual for me. I can recommend Major Tom’s Social on the Ginnel, off Parliament Street, which serves pizza – including two vegan ones – and craft ale. There’s also a good all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant on Cheltenham Crescent, although it’s not a buffet – and the concept of all-you-can-eat from a menu did confuse a couple of members of our dinner party…

(I wasn’t actually staying in the Majestic, but in the Premier Inn, which was pretty much next-door. My room was large and comfortable – it had a chaise longue! – and the staff, sorry, “team”, were helpful and attentive. The breakfast was also pretty good.)

Then there was the con’s programme. It pretty much had something for everyone, not that I attended any items. Well, other than the one I was on, about AI, which went quite well. There were a couple of other panels I’d liked to have seen, but they seemed to fall at times when I had other plans, like lunch. I heard mixed reports from those who did attend panels, although most people seemed to have enjoyed them.

I no longer attend conventions for the programme – I haven’t done for years – even if I always promise myself I’ll see more of the programme, make more of what’s offered over the weekend. Instead of just sitting in the bar and chatting to friends. Which is pretty much what I did. There was a good real ale bar, which helped. And one of the two bars – the Regency Lounge – was more like a gentleman’s club, with panelled walls and leather(-ette?) armchairs (and peeling plaster above the dado). It was a good place to socialise.

The dealers’ room – I remember when they used be called book rooms – was poor. The usual small presses, a few self-published authors, jewellery and T-shirts… but no secondhand books. I can understand why dealers no longer bother – if they’re not making a profit, or even covering their expenses, then it’s not worth it. But it is disappointing.

No description of the hotel would be complete without a mention of the gents’ toilet near the dealers’ room. It was enormous. There was even a bench at one end for people to, er, sit down. It had seen better days, but was still pretty impressive.

The infamous gents’ toilets

The BSFA Award ceremony took place during Follycon. I usually attend this, but didn’t bother this year. It was pretty much a done deal. I’d expected Nina Allan’s The Rift to win – it’s a very good book and a worthy winner – although I thought Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time slightly better. But Charnock took the short fiction award for her novella, The Enclave. Which is also very good. Although I think the category was reasonably open. Best artwork went to Jim Burns, who must have a garden shed full of BSFA Awards by now, for the cover of a novel published by NewCon Press (who also published The Enclave), jointly with Victo Ngai for illustrations for a JY Yang story on Tor.com. The non-fiction award was won by Paul Kincaid’s book Iain M. Banks, which was the most likely winner of a strong shortlist… and has also been shortlisted for the Hugo. During recent years, books, novellas and artwork published by NewCon Press have regularly appeared in the BSFA Award shortlists. True, the BSFA is a small organisation, and it takes only a handful of votes for a work to be nominated… and probably not many more for it to be shortlisted. I suppose, the same might be said of PS Publishing and the BFS Awards.

But then I think popular vote awards – and the term “popular vote” is a total misnomer – are neither popular nor useful. Like the Hugo Awards, the shortlists for which were announced over the weekend. And, ho hum, the same old faces. It’s good the puppies appear to be a spent force, but all that means is we’re back to the old way of doing things, ie, a small group of writers dominating the shortlists. It’s telling the Hugo Award shortlists (voted for by fans) and the Nebula Award shortlists (voted for by pros) often have considerable overlap. Authors, especially popular authors, bend awards out of shape. I’ve said it before, and each year it proves my point.

But the Hugo shortlists… Jemisin is the new Card, the new Bujold, the new Willis… The Broken Earth trilogy is good, but not so good it contains the best genre books published three years in a row.  I’ll read the third book, The Stone Sky, as I’ve read the first two books of the trilogy. And I’ll read Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 too, as I’ve been a fan of his books for many years. But I’ve zero interest in the rest of the shortlist. I suspect Jemisin will win, which will be  disappointment, as it’s a safe choice, but neither do I want any of the others to win. And, to be honest, I could say the same for the short fiction categories. Once upon a time, they were dominated by the Big Three print magazines – Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF – but a new Big Three of online magazines now rules the roost – Tor.com, Clarkesworld and Uncanny. But then, at a time when the short fiction is notoriously vast, it only takes a few extra votes to get a story onto the shortlist. I guess we’ll find out later in the year exactly how few votes it takes to be on the short story shortlist.

Oh well. It’s not that I can’t get excited about the Hugo Awards, because I haven’t been for years. Even back in the day, the tastes of its voters never really aligned with mine.

Anyway, I left Harrogate on Monday morning, once the trains to Leeds were running – as the British weather had managed to  bollix the service. Now our railways are privatised, they are so much better, honest guv. (When will it be okay to punch a Tory? Their entire ideology is built on dangerous lies which have a habit of doing the exact opposite to their claimed benefits: trickle-down, home ownership, privatisation, low taxes, Austerity, Brexit… One Tory even went on record saying he doesn’t think rented accommodation needs to be “fit for human habitation”! There’s a Tory who deserves a fucking good kicking.)

Anyway, I left Harrogate on Monday morning, once the trains to Leeds were running. I had a fun weekend. I ate well – always a surprise at cons, for me – and I saw some friends I don’t usually get to see (except, perhaps, at Eastercons). I had some good conversations with various people. But, as I remarked to Mike Cobley on the Sunday, we’d made the tactical mistake all those years ago of making friends with people who no longer attend cons. And from what I’ve seen over the past couple of years, young writers, ones that weren’t previously fans who attended cons, prefer to hang out with each other and their publishers. It’s not like UK cons have never been cliquey, but it does seem more marked these days. I don’t see that happening at Nordic cons – although that may well be because Nordic fandom is smaller and they all know each other. Having said that, UK fandom these days – or rather, that subset of it comprising writers and editors and critics – is entirely London-based, and us up here in the provinces can’t generate enough critical mass to get another scene going and sustaining itself.

The fact the Eastercon often takes place in the North means nothing.


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Moving pictures 2018, #17

After a month of watching mostly television series – the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, a season of Rebecka Martinsson, the latest series of Endeavour and Shetland… – I had expected my movie consumption to slow down a bit. But it doesn’t appear to have done so. So I’ve got three or four of these to post before I’m caught up. I know, I know… I promised this year wouldn’t be repeat of last year, with just posts about the movies I’d watched – it was even a New Year’s Resolution, FFS – but I still find myself consuming lots of films… On the plus side, SF Mistressworks is up and running again, and I’m back reviewing for Interzone. Now I just have to start writing some critical posts, and maybe even write some of that made-up stuff, you know, fiction…

Annihilation, Alex Garland (2018, USA). I read Vandermeer’s novel last year, but never bothered with the two sequels, even though they made a nice set. To be honest, it’s not a novel I would have thought open to a film adaptation, so when news that it was indeed being turned into a movie surfaced, I was surprised. And… it’s turned out to be a bit of a Marmite movie. It’s not the book, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It dials back on the much of the strangeness, which is also not necessarily a bad thing. It remains strange, and its “Shimmer”, the film’s version the book’s “Area X”, does much the same job. There’s something about it all which reminds me a little of Apocalypse Now or Embrace of the Serpent, but that may be just the fact it’s an exploration story. On the plus-side, Annihilation has an all-female cast, and it’s presented as perfectly normal, and more films should be like that.

The Fencer, Klaus Härö (2015, Estonia). This was apparently based on a true story, a teacher who upset the authorities in Leningrad and so moved to Estonia, where he ended up teaching kids, many of them orphaned by the Nazi occupation, how to fence. So it’s a bit like Dead Poets Society (I still cringe every time I hear “O Captain! My Captain!” after that film), which I suspect is just one version of a story that goes back considerably farther – Goodbye, Mr Chips, anyone? – perhaps even to ancient Athens or Rome. Anyway, by teaching these kids in 1950s Estonia how to fence, the hero gives them self-respect and ambition, and also jeopardises his own freedom. Because they want to enter a competition in Leningrad, but if he returns there he’s likely to be arrested by the secret police. You can guess what happens. It’s apparently based on a true story, an Estonian hero from the days of Soviet occupation. Not a bad film.

Spider-Man: Homecoming, Jon Watts (2017, USA). Spider-Man, Spider-Man, just as annoying as a teenager can, er, be… It was certainly refreshing to see a Spider-Man re-re-re-reboot aimed at the actual demographic matching Peter Parker’s rather than that of the people who remember reading him when he debuted in a Marvel comic… Peter Parker has been on a mission with Iron Man, but now it’s back to school and he can’t wait to be called up again to help out the Avengers. Except they never call. Meanwhile, Michael Keaton sees his lucrative contract to clean up alien tech after The Avengers (AKA Avengers Assemble!) taken over by a shadowy government department. So he becomes the Green Goblin. I think. He flies, and he’s sort of evil. Oh, and he’s the father of the girl Peter Parker really fancies and wants to take to the prom. I hate that: when the girl you fancy has a supervillain for a dad. Total bummer. To tell the truth, I hated the selfie video opening of Spider-Man : Homecoming, but really enjoyed it once the film had settled down into its story. The third act, unfortunately, was the usual MCU bollocks, which was a shame. But overall I enjoyed it and I hadn’t really expected to.

Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore (2015, USA). See there on the DVD cover where it quotes from a review, “his funniest film by far”… because of course it’s fucking hilarious pointing out that the US is a completely fucked-up country run for the benefit of a rich handful on the misery of millions – which is pretty much also what the Tories want here, and have been driving the UK toward. Moore visits half a dozen European (and one African) countries and investigates one of their social policies, interviewing ordinary people and asking how they feel about it. He does this as part of a running joke about “invading” the country, because the US military hasn’t actually won a war since WWII. The countries he visits are: Italy, to learn about paid holidays and maternity leave; France, for school dinners; Germany, employee rights; Portugal, decriminalisation of drugs and abolition of the death penalty; Norway, the prison system and rehabilitation; Slovenia, free university education; Finland, which has the best pupils in Europe; Tunisia, women’s rights, free healthcare and abortions for women; and Iceland, the role of women in business and government. None of this stuff is difficult to understand, but apparently Michael Moore had to make a film about it so that Americans would get it. I remember some moron from the US tweeting something like “hate speech laws are immoral and public healthcare is imprudent”. FFS, it’s the twenty-first century.

Anna Boleyn, Ernst Lubitsch (1920, Germany). The title alone should be enough to indicate what this film is about. Lubitsch does a silent version of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. (Why “Anna”? I don’t know.) Emil Jannings plays the king and Henny Porten the title role. The story seems to stick reasonably closely to the historical record, although the depiction of Henry VIII follows the usual bullshit portrayal of a carousing fat man, who enjoyed wine, women and hunting, and not the despot he really was. They say he killed more people during his reign than any other English monarch. Much as we Brits – well, English, but I don’t really think of myself as either – like to think well of Henry VIII for breaking the power of the Roman Catholic Church in the UK, let’s not forget he only did it because he was a serial adulterer. Although, to be fair, the Roman Catholic Church has hardly been a force for good throughout the centuries, so booting them out was a good thing. A shame Henry VIII didn’t go the all the way and ban religion altogether.

Attraction, Fyodor Bondarchuk (2017, Russia). Commercial cinema in Russia has been churning out some solid sf blockbusters in recent years – not to mention films about its space programme – and Bondarchuk is a name known to me. His The 9th Company from 2005 was a good film about Soviet troops in Afghanistan; and 2008/2009 Dark Planet (AKA, The Inhabited Island) was an interesting adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ Prisoners of Power, which was annoyingly cut by almost half in its English-language sell-through release. Attraction has been described as YA, and perhaps it is, although it doesn’t feel much like YA properties such as Divergent or Maze Runner. An alien spaceship crashlands in a suburb of Moscow, the local youth take advantage of the alien tech thrown off during the crash, while the military tries to control the situation. One of the aliens – they only look alien in their armour, they’re really human underneath – is attacked on a scouting mission, escapes, and is helped by a young woman (it stands to reason he’s a cute guy). And, ho hum. The alien ship rebuilds itself – it attracts water to itself, for, I think fuel. See what they did there… attraction. The film looks good, the sfx are impressive, the cast are, er, attractive, and it’s all very Russian. You could watch worse. But I hope Bondarchuk’s next movie is better than this.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 896