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Moving pictures, #13

Had a fun weekend not so long ago. The Royal Mail managed to lose my address, they somehow managed to not find the place they’d been delivering my mail to for the past ten years. The mail in this case being my rental DVDs from Amazon. On receiving the returned DVDs, Amazon marked my account so no new films would be dispatched until I’d confirmed my address. Which I did. But this managed to break things, so my account got stuck in “do not dispatch”. I contacted Amazon’s help desk, and they apologised and immediately put 3 DVDs from my list in the post. And they added a fourth to make up for the hassle. The help desk person also raised a note to Amazon’s engineering department about the fact my account was stuck. And they fixed it. Which meant their system immediately despatched the next 3 DVDs from my rental list. With the two discs a week I get from Cinema Paradiso… I ended up with nine DVDs to watch that weekend.

busbyGold Diggers of 1933, Mervyn LeRoy (1933, USA). There is, it has to be said, something of a formula to the films in this Busby Berkeley Collection. A producer wants put on a show, but for some reason can’t. Then everyone rallies round… and it happens. Here, it’s a lack of money but once that hurdle is overcome, the show goes on. The story focuses on four actresses – the “gold diggers” of the title – played by Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers (all three of whom appear in several of the other films) and Aline McMahon. Of course, it’s the Berkeley routines for which these movies are remembered – and with good reason. (Although, to be honest, I also think Ginger Rogers is great.) In this one, Rogers sings ‘We’re in the Money’, which probably everyone knows – although they probably don’t know it’s from this movie, I certainly didn’t – including a verse in pig Latin. Another routine features dwarf Billy Barty as a baby in a pram, who later gives Dick Powell a can opener so he can get through the metal lingerie (yes, actual metal) worn by dancers. Er, right. I’ll admit I bought the Busby Berkeley Collection so I could watch a couple of the films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list that were not available on rental (or indeed in UK editions). But I’ve really enjoyed the movies and, unlike some other DVDs I’ve bought just because they’re on the list, I’ll be keeping this box set. Well worth the money (sung to the tune of ‘We’re in the Money’, of course).

christ_eboliChrist Stopped at Eboli*, Francesco Rosi (1979, Italy). This is another one of those Italian Neorealist films that was new to me and which I found myself impressed by. Admittedly, one of the reasons I started watching the films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list was to expand the range of films I was watching. It’s not that my viewing was limited to Hollywood films – I’ve been a fan of a number of non-Anglophone directors for many years, such as Tarkovsky, Bergman, Kieślowski, Suleiman, Haneke, Antonioni… among others. But the list seemed like an excellent source of titles I’d not seen and would probably like… and it subsequently introduced me to Italian neorealism as a film movement I’d not previously been aware of or explored. All of which is probably irrelevant as Christ Stopped at Eboli is not classifed as Italian neorealism – but it is Italian and it is on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and it’s also a film I likely would never have seen otherwise. Which would have been a shame, as it’s very good. In 1935, painter and writer Carlo Levi is exiled to a village in southern Italy for his anti-fascist activities. Since he studied to be a doctor, he ends up practicing medicine for the peasants (the local doctors aren’t interested in treating the peasantry). His politicial sensibilities also result in a rocky relationship with his putative “warden”, the local mayor; and he also forms a relationship with the local priest, also an exile, whom the mayor hates. Christ Stopped at Eboli is an odd film – it was filmed in 1979 but set 44 years earler… and from the looks of it horribly little set dressing was required. The pace is languid, content to let the relationships between the characters slowly be revealed and the scenery to speak for itself. The end  result is a movie which is slow to start but slowly drags you in. So much so, in fact, that by halfway through the film I was very much impressed. Worth seeing.

calvaryCalvary, John Michael McDonagh (2014, Ireland). Several people recommended this film to me, and I’d heard good things of it, so I bunged it on the rental list and lo it dropped through onto the doormat one day… It’s set in present-day Ireland, a man gives his confession to his local priest and tells him he will kill the priest because the man giving confession was abused as a boy. The priest knows who it is, but there’s nothing he can do about it. However, the priest has a week to get his affairs in order – and so he does. Sort of. He goes to the bishop, but the bishop tells him he should go to the Garda (the bishop comes across more like a politician or middle manager than a man of God). At one point, someone sets fire to the church. Calvary is sort of a gentle black comedy, if such a thing exists, and very much based on its characters – none of which, it must be said, are especially sympathetic, with the exception of the priest, played by Brendan Gleeson, who has been threatened with murder. His assistant (verger?) is an idiot; one of the locals is a doctor and a nasty snide piece of work; another is innocent to the point of stupidity… At times, some of the characters teeter on the edge of caricature, and I suspect it’s only the presence of Gleeson anchoring the film which keeps them from doing so. A film worth seeing, but not I think a great film.

weekendWeekend*, Jean-Luc Godard (1967, France). I was convinced my Godard theory held water – colour films good, black-and-white films not good. True, it was based solely on the fact that the two Godard films I really like – Le mépris and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – are both colour films. It wasn’t much of a theory, it has to be said – for a start, I’ve only seen nine of Godard’s films, the most recent of which is, er, Weekend, and which is also a colour film. On the one hand, I didn’t like Weekend as much the other two films, but I did like more than the black-and-white films I’ve seen. It’s a less pretentious movie than Godard’s others, but it’s also more… chaotic. A bourgeois couple drive out to the country to visit the wife’s dying father. Each has decided to murder the other, so their relationship is somewhat fraught. As they drive through the country they become involved in various violent events. An odd film, and plainly deliberately so. That sort of appeals to me – although it did, in places, do that Godard thing I’m less fond of, where characters talk at each other. And the scenes set in the wood were dubious at best. I guess, on reflection, my Godard theory still holds, although I think Weekend probably requires another watch.

excitedI’m So Excited!, Pedro Almodóvar (2013, Spain). I spotted this one in a charity shop, and I’ve always enjoyed Almodóvar’s films… albeit not as much as I once did… but I thought it worth a quid and… Oh dear. Talk about light and frothy – I’m So Excited! (original title Los amantes pasajeros translates as “the fleeting lovers or “the passenger lovers”, according to Wikipedia; and seems better suited) is set aboard a flight to Mexico, and it’s probably only the frothiness of the script that keeps the aircraft in the air. A cock-up on the ground, perpertrated by Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz in cameos, results in one of the aeroplane’s undercarriage not folding away properly, which means the aircraft will not be able to land when it reaches Mexico City. So they go into a holding pattern above the airport they departed from while things are figured out. The economy class passengers and cabin crew are put to sleep with tranquilisers, leaving only the dozen or so first class passengers, four cabin crew and the two pilots awake. All of whom, it transpires, have some sort of known or unknown relationship with each other. It’s not that I’m So Excited! isn’t a fun film – because it is. It just feels like a somewhat OTT comedy-drama sketch stretched to feature-film length. The brightly-coloured production design, and the fact much of the movies takes place in the aircraft’s first class section, only heightens this resemblance. One for fans, probably.

busbyDames, Ray Enright (1934, USA). This is the one with the Berkeley routine with giant Ruby Keeler heads which freaked me out. Not because they were Ruby Keeler, just the sight of loads of giant heads dancing about it. (Not real heads, of course; they were actually giant cut-outs.) In pretty much all other respects, Dames follows the pattern as followed in the other films in the Busby Berkeley Collection. Well, almost. In this one, an eccentric millionaire promises to leave his fortune to a relative, providing said relative can prove he leads a moral life. Unfortunately, the relative’s daughter is a dancer in a musical show, and the millionaire thinks muscial shows are the height of immorality. Dames is more of an outright comedy than the other films in the box set, but the Berkeley routines – in all their shark-jumping glory – are all present and correct. Not just the previously-mentioned one with the giant heads, but also one in which Joan Blondell sings to washing hanging on a line and the various garments start dancing. (Sadly, no Ginger Rogers in this one.) Again, a good box set to get. I’ve really enjoyed the movies in it.

some_came_runningSome Came Running*, Vincente Minnelli (1958, USA). There are quite a few movie adaptations of Great American Novels on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and this is the second by author James Jones (his other is From Here to Eternity). An Army veteran, Sinatra, wakes on a bus on his way to his home town, having been put on it while drunk. He doesn’t really want to go, but he’s there now. The vetervan was a published writer and is estranged from his brother, who put him in an orphanage when their parents died, even though the brother had just married. This brother tries to patch things up, but Sinatra is not interested – although he is friendly to his niece, and falls in love with a friend of his brother, an English teacher. Then there’s Shirley Maclaine, who had been as drunk as Sinatra and joined him on the bus – but sober, he’s not interested in her, although she has fallen in love with him. Meanwhile, the teacher persuades Sinatra to start writing again. And he’s also fallen in with a group of gamblers, headed by Dean Martin. Some Came Running is very much a Great American Novel film – it’s all there: the romantic triangle, the class commentary, academia, the military, writing, small town America… If there were a checklist, Some Came Running could probably manage a good 75%. Sinatra is good in the lead, Maclaine was nominated for an Oscar (but lost to Susan Hayward in I Want to Live!), and Martin plays Martin… I suppose your appreciation of this movie depends on how you feel about Great American Novels. I enjoyed it, but I’m not entirely sure why it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

1001 Movies You Must see Before You Die count: 737


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Reading diary, #24

I wish I could read as many books a year as films I watch. I did manage to complete the 150 book challenge on Goodreads last year – although I am apparently 6 books behind schedule for 2016 – but that’s not even close to 570, the number of movies I watched last year… I did try reading for 30 to 60 minutes when I got home from work, and managed to keep that up for at least a week. I really need to make it part of my daily routine. I also need to get into the habit of reading on the weekend again, too. Back when I lived in the UAE, I used to spend most of Thursday and Friday reading – in fact, it wasn’t unusual for me to catch a taxi to the Daly Community Library on a Thursday morning, take out four books… and have read two of them by that evening. Admittedly, I read quite a lot of crime and thriller novels – the library didn’t have many science fiction books – and they’re fast reads. But I also read a lot of literary fiction as well. Maybe I’m just slowing down in my old age…

sistersSisters of the Revolution, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (2015). I supported the kickstarter for this as it sounded like a project worth supporting and, after a period that was longer than expected, it finally arrived. And… it was worth the wait. It’s a strong and varied selection, its contents mostly new to me – around ten of the twenty-nine stories in the anthology I’d read previously. I’m amused by the back-cover blurb’s description of thr anthology as a “highly curated selection”, as if the VanderMeers put MOAR EFFORT into it than every other anthology editor. Having said that, I don’t know how many stories they read in order to make their choices. but judging by comments on Twitter, Facebook, etc, it was a hell of a lot. I don’t think every story they chose works, although that’s more a matter of personal taste – I’m not a fan of genre fiction that plays fast and loose with rigour, or indeed any mode of fiction that does, nor stories that are too allegorical or too consciously presented as fables. Which is not to say there are not some bloody good stories in Sisters of the Revolution – in fact, the opener, ‘The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.’ by L Timmel Duchamp, is one of the best stories I’ve read in a long time. And Ursula LeGuin’s ‘Sur’ was not only new to me but also one of the best by her I’ve ever read. James Tiptree Jr’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’ remains as scarily effective as it was the day I first read it. Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’, Kelly Barnhill’s ‘The Men Who Live in Trees’, Angela Carter’s ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’, Joanna Russ’s ‘When It Changed’ and Eileen Gunn’s ‘Stable Strategies for Middle Management’ are all worth the price of admission. I’d definitely say Sisters of the Revolution is one of the strongest anthologies I’ve seen for quite a while.

ocean_outpostOcean Outpost, Erik Seedhouse (2011). I picked up a copy of this cheap on eBay, which is good as Springer-Praxis books are not cheap. But they are interesting. The subtitle of this one reads “The future of humans living underwater”, and it covers a variety of different methods of doing so. The first section covers diving – free-diving, technical diving and saturation diving – but while the studies on free divers is interesting, the section on rebreathers reads like a technical sales brochure. The second section is about submersibles, but covers only Mir, Alvin and Shinkai before turning into an advertisement for hydrobatic submersibles (ie, ones that “fly” underwater). Section III deals with the reasons for colonising the ocean bottom, such as mineral exploitation, and the final section is about medical intervention to allow survival underwater. It’s fascinating stuff, despite the book’s tendency to read at times like it’s quoting verbatim from technical sales material; and while it’s good on the science and engineering of the current state of the art, it’s not so good on the history – the chapters on submersibles, for example, make no mention of the Trieste or Ben Franklin. But then it is a relatively slim book, only 187 pages, including appendix, epilogue and index. Nonetheless, pleasingly detailed.

star_huntersStar Hunters, Jo Clayton (1980). This is the fifth of the seven books from the nine-book Diadem series that I bought at Fantastika in Stockholm back in 2013. I’ve been slowly working my way through them for SF Mistressworks. The first couple were a bit hard to take – the series heroine is a super-special snowflake who is subjected to an almost-constant barrage of sexual violence, but there’s an abrupt swerve in tone in the fourth book and Aleytys is presented as a much more typical competent space opera protagonist with agency. Her wardrobe, if the cover art is anything to go by, doesn’t improve, however. My review of Star Hunters is here.

louisianaLouisiana Breakdown, Lucius Shepard (2003). I went through a phase several years ago of buying Lucius Shepard books. And he produced quite a few, including many short novels and novellas from small presses. Such as Louisiana Breakdown, which was originally published by Golden Gryphon. There’s is not much, to be honest, in this short novel which makes it stand out, other than Shepard’s writing. The story feels like a well-used cliché, a story that’s been told far too often about Louisiana. A musician en route from California to Florida, well, breaks down in Louisiana, just outside some small backwards town. The local cop tries to strong-arm but is stopped by the timely arrival of the town’s Big Man, descendant of the town’s founder and rich playboy. There’s also a woman who is in magic thrall to another man – although he’s not in the town itself – and she decides that the musician is the man to break her free. It’s a story that almost writes itself, and if it weren’t by Shepard I’d not have bothered going past by the first couple of pages. Even so, it’s not one of his best.

balastIn Ballast to the White Sea, Malcolm Lowry (2014). The story goes that, after Lowry’s first novel, Ultramarine, was published, he submitted In Ballast to the White Sea, but his publisher decided not to take it. So Lowry continued to work on it. He was a notorious fiddler, forever editing and polishing his work, so it’s no real surprise he published so little. But before he could finish the next version of In Ballast to the White Sea, the wooden shack in which he and his second wife, Margerie Bonner, lived in Vancouver caught fire. The ms of In Ballast to the White Sea was almost entirely destroyed. However, a couple of years earlier, Lowry had left a copy with his mother-in-law (a copy of the earlier, rejected version, that is), but Lowry had either forgotten about it or chose not to remember its existence. In any event, he gave up on In Ballast to the White Sea and moved onto something else – and Lowry’s second novel was considered “lost”… But the ms put away for safe-keeping turned up in the 1970s and Lowry’s first wife, Jan Gabrial, set about editing it for publication (as she had done in the 1960s with Lowry’s forever-being-worked-on novella, Lunar Caustic). But In Ballast to the White Sea never saw print – until now, in this “scholarly edition” from the University of Ottawa Press. And… it’s plain it needed more work. Some chapters are entirely dialogue. The character of the captain, the father of the protagonist, Sigbjørn, doesn’t feel quite settled; and Nina, Sigbjørn’s ex-girlfriend, swoops in from nowhere, takes up a couple of intense chapters, and then vanishes. Like Ultramarine, In Ballast to the White Sea is partly autobiographical, and is based both on Lowry’s time at Cambridge and at sea – in fact, the suicide of Sigbjørn’s brother, which occurs off-stage between chapters II and IV, was based on the suicide of a friend and fellow student. And Sigbjørn’s fascination with the author of a Norwegian novel which, in broad shape, is similiar to the novel Sigbjørn is planning to write echoes Lowry’s own fascination with Skibet gaar videre (The Ship Sails On) by Nordahl Grieg, a novel he felt had “written” his life up to that point. The “A Scholarly Edition” on the cover of In Ballast to the White Sea refers to the fact the novel is copiously annotated – not just the references and allusions with which Lowry larded his prose, but also some aspects of British life and geography which may not be familiar to non-Brit readers. There’s also a couple of essays on the provenance and history of the manuscript, and on the editing undertaken by Lowry scholar Chris Ackerly. If you’re a fan of Lowry’s fiction, it’s a fascinating, perhaps even necessary, read.

invadersInvaders, Jacob Weisman, ed. (2016). You know when lit fic writers try their hand at genre, although of course their story appears in a lit fic venue not a genre one, and everyone goes on how astonishlingly inventive it is but genre fans just shake their heads sadly because they’ve seen it all before… Well, if that ever happened, and I suspect it hasn’t done for a number of decades, there’s enough proof in Invaders to demonstrate that science fiction and fantasy are now so prevalent that an author doesn’t need to be steeped in genre from the age of thirteen in order to write good genre. Which is not say every story in Invaders works, either as lit fic or as genre fic. But the anthology sets out to prove a point, and it does that pretty well. I read the book to review for Interzone.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 122


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Moving pictures, #12

You do realise I’m never going to manage to see all of the films on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. Some of them are no longer available – not just in the UK, but anywhere (I’ve had to purchase some from the US already, just to see them). Sadly, this doesn’t mean I will never die. But if I can say I’ve seen over 950 of them – with dates – then I’ll be happy. And, oh look, there’s another three from the list in this installment…

boyznthehoodBoyz N the Hood*, John Singleton (1991, USA). This was not a film on my radar but, as the asterisk indicates. it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list… so I bunged it on (one of) my rental list(s), and lo it duly arrived. And, to be honest, I can remember very little about the film. I seem to recall expecting some sort of gangsta movie with a rap soundtrack, and being surprised to discover it was actually about growing up in South Central LA. At least, the first part of the film is… And then it’s about the Crips and the Bloods, and Cuba Gooding Jr trying to avoid becoming a gang member even though most of his friends are in the Crips. While I was watching it, I tweeted “A+ for social commentary, D for direction” and “oh, and D for casting Cuba Gooding Jr”. Later, I added “the Kenny G soundtrack is not helping this film”. I can see how Boyz N the Hood belongs belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list for its cultural impact, but it wasn’t a film I found especially interesting or impressive. But at least I can cross it off.

clerksClerks*, Kevin Smith (1994, USA). It seems to me Kevin Smith trades on his geek credentials, but has actually proven relatively successful because he is sophomoric. I’ve seen a number of his films over the years, and never been much impressed – but I’d somehow managed to miss the film which made his career, Clerks. I’ve now seen it… and all those years, well, I don’t think I’ve missed much. Two whinging slackers work in neighbouring stores, a mini-mart and a video rental. Their conversation is either prattish or sophomoric. The attempts at humour are not actually that funny, and the continual whinging tone gets annoying very quickly. I can sort of understand how the film would appeal to a particular demographic – but I’m not in that demographic, and so Clerks simply doesn’t work for me, and I can think of no good reason why it belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

busbyFootlight Parade*, Lloyd Bacon (1933, USA). I tweeted while watching this film that Busby Berkeley had made a career out of jumping the shark. And this film provides as much evidence as any in which he was involved. James Cagney plays a fast-talking director of musical theatre, but audiences are declining thanks to that new-fangled cinema. So Cagney comes up with the idea of “prologues”, short musical numbers performed on stage in a cinema prior to the main feature being shown. Much of Footlight Parade is a sort of like Chorus Line, as Cagney tries to stage his numbers while a rival steals his ideas. Dick Powell grins his way through the proceedings as usual, Joan Blondell plays Cagney’s secretary who’s secretly in love with him, and Ruby Keeler removes her glasses and goes from secretary to my-gosh-you’re-beautiful star dancer… But it’s Berkeley’s staging of the musical numbers which is the main draw. And with good reason. ‘By A Waterfall’ is jaw-dropping. I suspect it’s what invented synchronised swimming. One hundred chorus girls dive into a glass pool and form shapes like a giant human kaleidoscope – and all allegedly taking place on a tiny cinema stage! I had to buy a Region 1 Busby Berkeley DVD collection in order to watch this film – the set also includes 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Gold Diggers of 1935 and Dames – and I’m quite glad I did. I knew who Berkeley was, of course, and in the past I’ve seen some of the muscial numbers he’s famous for – although don’t ask me which films, because I’ve no idea – so I pretty much knew what to expect. But even if it’s easy to see why Cagney switched to playing gangsters, and all five films in the collection follow the same Chorus Line-like plot, they were worth the money because of the Berkeley numbers alone. Footlight Parade is one of three films in the set on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list – and yes, I can understand why they’re on it.

storyofwomenStory of Women, Claude Chabrol (1988, France). This film does not appear on the 2013 edition of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, which is the one I’m using, but does appear on the amalgamated version on listchallenges.com – so at some point it was, or will be, on the list. Given that it was released in 1988, I suspect it was on an earlier version – and, if so, it’s a shame it was dropped. Because it’s a damn sight better than many films which remained. And I say that as someone who has yet to really click with Chabrol’s oeuvre. But then, perhaps it’s the subject matter of Story of Women, which is based on a true story. During the German occupation of France in WWII, in a small town in Normandy, a middle-class mother played by Isabelle Huppert (one of the best actresses currently making movies) helps a pregnant friend abort (husband away at a German work camp, Nazi lover…). This becomes a lucrative business. She also rents out a room to a prostitute friend. Her husband, an injured war veteran, returns home, but she is no longer in love with him. Eventually, he grasses her up to the authorities. They arrest her, and decide that performing abortions is treasonous – so they sentence Huppert to death, and guillotine her. It’s an offensively male argument – that France needs to regain its moral strength after its defeat by the Nazis, and Huppert’s death will do this. Yet, for much of the film, during the period before she is arrested, Huppert’s character is resolutely pragmatic – she betters the lot of her family by providing a much-needed service, for which she charges. She has an affair with a collaborator, because she is focused on herself and her children, and her husband is inconsequential. I find Chabrol a mixed bag, but this was a strong film, undoubtedly carried by Huppert’s performance. I suspect it deserves to be back on the list – and I can think of at least a dozen movies whose place it can take…

showgirls2Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven, Rena Riffel (2011, USA). Several years ago, I went through a phase of enjoying “so bad they’re good” films, despite being all too sadly aware that the films were “so bad, they’re actually really bad”. You know, stuff like the “mockbusters” released by The Global Asylum, or those shitty straght-to-video sf films you find on 4-movie sets sold in Poundland… Happily, I grew out of it. Or at least, I thought I had. Now, I like Paul Verhoeven’s movies, and I have a lot of time for him as a director, and though his Showgirls has a lot of problems and is clearly his worst film, it is sort of watchable. But the moment I discovered there was a sequel to it… I decided I had to watch it. And now I have. And I sincerely wish I hadn’t. Rena Riffel played a minor character in Showgirls and, after a couple of decades in Europe making soft porn films, she realised that what the world really needed was a sequel to Showgirls – and not just any sequel, it needed a parody sequel. Argh. “Parody”. If you see that word in the description of a film, avoid the film. Showgirls 2 spoofs scenes from Showgirls, but on a budget of $30,000 and with a cast that can’t act to save their lives. A few of the original cast do make appearances – not the main stars, of course – but the film is very much about Riffel’s lap-dancer Penny Slot, and her attempt to become the lead on a cheap TV show called ‘Star Dancer’. It’s not funny, and it’s certainly not clever. It is, however, embarrassingly, cringe-inducingly, bad. Words cannot express quite how awful this film is. One to avoid, if you value your sanity.

terminatorTerminator Genisys, Alan Taylor (2015, USA). And from the sublimely stupid to, er, this one. Which, on paper, should not be the hot mess it proved to be. On paper, the idea has merit – let’s tell the Terminator story from the point of view of Kyle Reese, the man sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor, and who becomes John Connor’s father… but let’s mix it up a bit and have the T-80 arrive earlier and so be a fixture in Sarah’s life when Kyle arrives. And let’s mix it up EVEN MOAR and make John Connor a villain – the going-back-in-time thing is all a plot to enable Skynet not disable it. And, you know, it could have worked. But they recast all the leads (because, let’s be honest, they’re getting on a bit, and CGI-ing them back to their 1984 appearance would be very weird), except Arnold Schwarzenegger, and while they wrote in a reason for his ageing, the years have not been kind to him or his minimal acting ability… And while a new cast is not in and of itself a reason for failure – recast reboots have been successful, although no example springs readily to mind – and when you add in the self-referentiality of the project… so why did it turn out be so crap? Well, itt’s completely lifeless. I don’t know if it’s because the lead characters are charisma-free zones, or if Schwarzenegger sucks in their charisma to power his own over-written role. Or maybe it’s that the plot sheds sense as it progresses. I’m not really sure. All I can say for certain is that this was a dreadful film and my expectations were not especially high to begin with. A proper review of it would be more analytical, but these posts are not intended to analytical and to be analytical of this film would require I watch it with a great deal more attention than it actually deserved. A film to be avoided, at all costs.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 734


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March madness

Well, not strictly March – after all, we’re less than a week into the month. Some of the following were bought during February. Obviously. So far this year I’ve managed to chip away at the TBR, by reading more books than I’ve bought each month… but I think I might have a bit trouble doing that in March. Especially since it’s the Eastercon at the end of the month… Oh well, never mind. I’m sure I’ll get around to reading them all. One day…

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Some first editions. I’m not a huge fan of Wolfe’s novels, but PS Publishing recently set up a discount website, and they only wanted £6 for a signed and numbered edition of Home Fires. That’s also where I bought Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God. For £4. Bargain. I recommend visiting PS2. Other Stories I’ve been eagerly awaiting for more than a year as I am a fan of Park’s writing. Murder at the Loch is the third of Eric Brown’s entertaining 1950s-set murder-mysteries. And my mother found J: A Novel for me in a charity shop.

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Aeroplanes… I’ve been picking up copies of Wings of Fame whenever I see good condition copies going for a reasonable price on eBay. Now that I’ve finally found a copy of Volume 9, I have eighteen of the twenty volumes. I’ve also been doing the same for Putnam’s Aircraft Since 19– series, although I forget why I began buying them in the first place. And with Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft Since 1913, I now own sixteen of them. X-Planes of Europe and X-Planes of Europe II I saw on Amazon, and I’m fascinated by the aircraft designed during the Cold War which didn’t make it into production.

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Some of yer actual science fiction. Invaders is an anthology of genre fiction by literary fiction writers; I’m reviewing it for Interzone. Patchwerk was given to me by the author; I wrote about it here. The Price of the Stars I bought to review for SF Mistressworks (it has a male co-author, but that’s no reason to ignore it). Sargasso I found in a charity shop, and looks to be a techno-thriller potboiler about an Apollo mission. And finally, Aphrodite Terra is a thing at last – a paperback thing, that is; it’s been an ebook thing since the middle of December (although Amazon have yet to figure out the two editions are of the same book…).

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I bought a couple of these Anatomy of the Ship books as research for A Prospect of War back in the day, and ended up picking up copies whenever I saw them going cheap on eBay. Like The Cruiser Bartolomeo Coleoni and The Destroyer The Sullivans. I have more than a dozen of them.

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Finally, some translated fiction, some Malcolm Lowry, and a Lawrence Durrell. I read Munif’s Cities of Salt a couple of years ago and thought it very good, so I picked up the second book of the trilogy last year, and now I have the final one, Variations on Night and Day. I recently read Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition, also part of the Canadian Literature Collection series, and the first time Lowry’s “lost” second novel had seen print. So I decided to get these two critical editions, also published in the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Literature Collection series – The 1940 Under the Volcano (I’ve read Under the Volcano, the final published edition, of course), and Swinging the Maelstrom (which I read under the title Lunar Caustic, but which was apparently a version cobbled together posthumously from a number of different manuscripts). Finally, Pope Joan is for the Durrell collection. Not an easy book to find in this edition.


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Moving pictures, #11

I’m pretty much up to date now, and this post only includes a single film from the list. In all other respects, a fairly typical spread, featuring directors I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

naked_kissThe Naked Kiss, Samuel Fuller (1964, USA). Fuller’s Shock Corridor, filmed around the same time, is on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I watched it and was much impressed. This movie appeared as a trailer on the DVD I watched of that film, so I decided to buy Criterion Blu-ray editions of both. As you do. But only now have I got around to watching The Naked Kiss. And… it’s exactly what I expected. And exactly as good as I expected. Which is: pretty damn good. Constance Towers (the girlfriend in Shock Corridor) plays a prostitute who flees her pimp after he abuses her, and ends up in the small town of Grantville. The local head copper directs Towers to a brothel across the river, but she decides it’s time to go straight and – because the man from the big house, and most eligible bachelor in town, has financed a wing for disabled children at the local hospital – decides to become a nurse’s aide on that wing. She gets to meet the big man, the two fall in love and become engaged… The copper, of course, is convinced it’s all an act, although it does in fact seem genuine. But just before the marriage, Towers catches her fiancé abusing a child, brains him and accidentally kills him. The copper sees this as vindication, but when the child is found and confirms Towers’s story he has to re-assess his opinion of her. This is pretty strong stuff, but then Fuller was never one to shy away from difficult material. Towers is good in the lead – she carries the film, in fact – and even Fuller’s shock opening, in which Towers attacks her pimp – filmed as if the camera were the pimp – and he rips off her wig revealing she is bald, is both arresting and highly effective at establishing her character. Worth seeing.

alice_creedThe Disappearance of Alice Creed, J Blakeson (2009, UK). I stumbled across this on Amazon Prime, and the reviews seemed positive so I gave it a go and… It’s one of those tight little thrillers with a small cast – three in this case – which work or fail depending on the quality of the cast. Fortunately, in this case they have Gemma Arterton, Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston, all of which possess the acting chops required. Arterton is kidnapped by Marstan and Compston, and the film pretty much takes place entirely within the flat where they hold her prisoner. However, there’s more going than there initially appears – not just between kidnappers and victim, but also between the kidnappers as well. Perhaps the twists were signposted a little too heavily, but I’ve seen much worse thrillers with much bigger budgets and A-list casts – in fact, I’ve given up after ten minutes on such movies. But this one is a taut little well-made thriller and worth a watch.

demyLe bel indifférent, Jacques Demy (1957, France). And so I continue to work my way through my Demy collection, and while I certainly think it was worth buying I can’t say every film in it has been a winner. This is a short film, less than an hour long, and consists of a woman wandering around an apartment giving a monologue, while her eponymous lover is, er, indifferent. It’s based on a 1939 play by Jean Cocteau, and Demy films it with a limited colour palette and stages it as if it were indeed a play (with opening and closing curtains too). I found myself somewhat… indifferent to it.

fassbinder1The Merchant of Four Seasons, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1971, Germany). And so I continue to work my way through my Fassbinder collection, and while this first volume of films from 1969 to 1972 has, I think, proven less satisfying than the second volume of films from 1973 to 1982, I’m still glad I have it. As for this film, it seems to be Fassbinder’s try at a kitchen-sink drama, inasmuch as it’s a domestic drama which contains everything but the kitchen-sink. The fruit peddler of the title is in a loveless marriage, and pines for his past career as a policeman. His mother doesn’t like him, his wife thinks he’s having an affair, he drinks heavily… and then he has a heart attack. After he recovers, he reconciles with his wife and then meets an old friend from his Foreign Legion days… who he first gives a job and then invites to live with him and his wife, and so finds himself replaced… Grim, German realist stuff. Perhaps not the most engaging Fassbinder I’ve seen so far, but a step up from some of the earlier experimental films.

trouble_paradiseTrouble in Paradise*, Ernst Lubitsch (1932, USA). Posh con man meets posh con woman, it’s love at first sight. Years later, they get involved with the profligate heiress of a perfume fortune… and why is this on the list exactly? The leads – Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall and Kay Francis – are all perfectly watchable, the script has plenty of snappy one-liners, and there are clear character arcs. But it’s all a bit ordinary, and though it may well have done really well when it was released , I can’t honestly see what makes it a candidate for the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list.

barbary_coastBarbary Coast, Howard Hawks (1935, USA). A gold digger, Miriam Hopkins, arrives in San Francisco in 1850, only to discover her fiancé has been murdered. So she takes a job as a croupier at local gangster Edward G Robinson’s casino. And the rest of the film is basically Robinson strutting around like the worst kind of cinema villain, while everyone else in San Francisco runs around scared of him. Obviously – the title is sort of a clue, although it was apparently the actual name of San Francisco’s red light district from the 1860s to the 1910s – that’s the intent… but it makes for annoying viewing. He’s so reprehensible and powerful a villain that his eventual downfall is inevitable and his depredations prior to that somewhat unbelievable. There’s a good guy, of course, Joel McCrea, who plays a  complete naïf who manages to confound Robinson and win Hopkins’s heart. But it’s not enough to offset Robinson’s pantomime villainy.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 731


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Moving pictures, #10

Here we go again, more movies watched by yours truly. Only two from the list this time around.

drugstoreDrugstore Cowboy*, Gus Van Sant (1989, USA). Even if you show how degrading junkie culture is in a movie, the very fact it is in a movie is in some way celebrating it. And there is seriously nothing to celebrate about junkie culture. Drugstore Cowboy is apparently based on a memoir, and depicts how a drug addict, and habitual robber of pharmacies, tries to go straight after one of his gang ODs. Matthew Dillon is a good-looking bloke; both Kelly Lynch and Heather Grahame are extremely attractive – a junkie might look in the mirror and see a Hollywood star, but that’s not what everyone else will see. Not only do films like Drugstore Cowboy sanitise and beautify their subject, but they also legitimise the lifestyle. I have no problem with people taking drugs, of whatever class (the drug, that is) – it’s their body and they’re free to abuse it how they like, using whatever substance they choose. But, short of legalising all non-ethical pharmaceuticals, which will likely never happen as long as governments remain broadly right-wing, the culture that illegality has created, not to mention the industry and power-structure, is not a fit subject for celebration in movies. Which sort of renders any criticism about this film as a film per se sort of moot. Nevertheless, its presence on the list didn’t seem justified.

bedknobsBedknobs And Broomsticks, Robert Stevenson (1971, USA). Disney have apparently allowed a whole bunch of their films to be streamed free via Amazon Prime, so I’ve been working my way through the ones I’d never actually seen before. I didn’t mention my watches of Pinocchio or The Love Bug as I’d seen both as a kid, and besides I wasn’t impressed enough with them to want to write about them. I thought I might have seen Bedknobs And Broomsticks before, but as soon as I started watching it I realised it was all new to me… Except, well, it wasn’t. The animated section, set on the Island of Naboombu, I’d certainly see before. I even remembered the undersea sequence and the song ‘The Beautiful Briny’. So I must have seen that at some point. The rest – Angela Lansbury as a witch, the evacuee kids, the whole Portobello Road dance routine, even Bruce Forsyth as a spiv, never mind the actual story in which they hunt for the final parts of the spell for “substitutiary locomotion” – well, that was all completely new to me. Apparently, the film had been planned as an epic to capitalise on the success of Mary Poppins – I’d watched Saving Mr Banks over Christmas, but I don’t recall ever sitting all the way through Mary Poppins, although I probably have done – but was cut down from its planned 3-hour length, and eventually released as 117 minutes long. There’s currently a 139-minute “reconstructed” version available on DVD. I watched the theatrical release version on Amazon Prime. It was all a bit Hollywood England, and very nineteen-seventies (even though it was set during WWII), but better than I’d expected – but if I had to pick ten best Disney films… I could probably manage about three or four… this wouldn’t be one of them.

demyLa naissance du jour, Jacques Demy (1980, France). And so continues my journey through Demy’s oeuvre, as represented by the intègrale Jacques Demy DVD collection I bought earlier this year. La naissance du jour is a television movie adaptation of the novel of the same name by Colette. Watching it, I found myself wanting to read the novel – which, to me, a sign of the success of an adaptation. The main character, Colette herself, is living alone in a house and the film depicts her relationship with her neighbour, Vial, a a studly young man she sort of fancies, as well as her friends in the area. It’s set in the 1920s, roughly at the time of writing, and appears to be autobiographical – indeed, Colette spends a lot of time writing something in longhand, which might well be the novel La naissance du jour. It’s one of those typically French films in which the cast sit around a table outside eating their dinner and pontificating on love – and if that’s not the entire film, it ‘s certainly a pivotal scene. I hadn’t expected to enjoy La naissance du jour, and it didn’t feel especially Demy to be honest, but I did like it – and I suspect that was more a consequence of the source material than Demy’s adaptation. Nonetheless, I’m still glad I bought the collection.

justineJustine, George Cukor (1969, USA). The Alexandria Quartet is one of my favourite novels – as the title indicates, it’s properly four novels but is most often found these days in an omnibus edition… and Durrell rewrote chunks of it for the omnibus edition anyway. Only one attempt has ever been to adapt the quartet for cinema or television – it would make an excellent television mini-series, it must be said – and that was this one, Cukor’s 1969 movie, which sort of munges together the plot of all four books into the first and uses its title. The end result is hugely unsatisfying – and not just for the casting of Michael York, who could be out-acted by a plank of well-seasoned oak – but for a series of casting decisions, and a script, that does neither the film nor the book any favours. And yet… in Anouk Aimée, they managed to find the perfect Justine. Go figure. And speaking of casting… John Vernon as Nessim Hosnani and Robert Forster as Narouz Hosnani is just plain indefensible white-for-black casting. But Dirk Bogarde, much as I love him, is totally the wrong person to play Pursewarden – he’s just not dissolute enough. George Baker, on the other hand, while he’s far too bluff for Mountolive, it sort of works in the movie. Having said all that, the major character in The Alexandria Quartet has always been the eponymous city. I have never visited Egypt – although I’ve always wanted to – but the city as revealed in the film certainly resembled the Alexandria I had imagined from Durrell’s novels. It’s a shame so little else in the movie did.

cinderellaCinderella, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske (1950, USA). Cinderella is generally reckoned to be one of Disney’s best animated feature films, and being a fan of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, I was keen to watch it. Happily, Disney have made a whole bunch of films available on Amazon Prime – a situation of which I have taken advantage of, so to speak. I’m fairly sure I’ve seen Cinderella before – familiarity with Perrault’s story is not enough to explain memories of the Disney mice… Which is not to say I ‘d remembered everything from the movie. I had, in fact, been expecting not to like it much, having almost convinced myself that Sleeping Beauty was some sort of weird Disney aberration… except, well, it has to be said… okay, the mice are really irritating… but the animation in Cinderella is really quite lovely. I’d discussed Disney animated feature films earlier that day with David Tallerman, and texted him that night while watching the movie to say how much I was enjoying it. (He, incidentally, was watching Pinocchio that night, and enjoyed it a great deal more than I had.) I have by no means seen all of Disney’s best-known animated feature films, but I have seen a number of them. And so far, to my mind, Sleeping Beauty is easily the best, by quite a long way. But Cinderella is in second place. Fantasia holds a tentative third – albeit based on last watching it a couple of decades ago. A few years ago, Pornokitsch posted a “year of Disney” series of posts by Dreampunk.me – and while I’ve no desire to embark on anything remotely similar, I ‘ve seen a number of the films covered in the posts and… I was surprised at the lack of love for both Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. And I hated Frozen. But I’d otherwise agree that Treasure Planet (a recent watch – see above re Disney films free on Amazon Prime – but not mentioned on this blog) is a lovely-looking animated film, but that’s about all it has going for it. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I may at some point – thanks to Disney and Amazon’s “generosity” – end up in a situation where I have watched more Disney feature films than I ever thought likely; and, given my love of lists, I will likely order them according to some criteria or other which makes perfect sense to myself… But at this point in time, I can recommend both Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella as excellent films. Later, I may do the same for others from Disney.

cinema_paradisoCinema Paradiso*, Giuseppe Tornatore (1988, Italy). My mother admitted to me this was one of her favourite films. so I bought her a copy for Christmas – and she lent to me and now I’ve seen it and… Yes, it’s a good film, but I doubt it will ever become one of my own favourites. This is no way different to my comments above regarding Disney films. To think a film is good is one thing, but to think a film is great requires you to love it in a way that can’t be explained as you would explain a film you think good. It’s the point where objectivity and subjectivity battle it out and subjectivity beats off all comers (while it sits on objectivity’s shoulders, of course). There are movies I love, and I can think of no rational reason why I love them. None of which is relevant. Cinema Paradiso is about the cinema in a small town in Sicily. A young boy becomes an unofficial apprentice to the projectionist, and when the latter is injured during a fire which guts the cinema, he becomes the projectionist in the newly-rebuilt cinema. The film is framed as the boy’s reminiscences, now that he is a grown man and a successful film-maker, which leads to some odd scenes set outside what is essentially a very long flashback. It’s a good film, and one that likely belongs on the list, perhaps more for revitalising Italy’s film industry than for the film itself – though I’d likely think that, given I’m more of a fan of Italian Neorealism than I am sentimental films like this. Nonetheless, worth seeing.

1001 Movies To See Before You Die count: 730


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Reading diary, #23

It’s really not difficult to maintain gender parity in your reading. After you’ve read a book written by a man, you read one written by a woman; and vice versa. Or, as it seems is the case in this Reading diary post, two books by women followed by two books by men. And then, when you have to write about science fiction or science fiction books, or indeed any branch of literature, you’ll have as many female authors you can cite as examples as you have male authors.

Having said all that, the books below are a bit of a cheat… I’ve been a fan of Helen Simpson’s short stories for many years and have all her collections (she has never written a novel). The Emshwiller I read for SF Mistressworks. David Tallerman is a friend. So the only book I actually chose to read unaffected by non-textual factors was the Tregillis… and well, you can see below what I made of it.

cockfostersCockfosters, Helen Simpson (2015). As far as I remember, I first came across Helen Simpson in an anthology of “best short stories” of some sort – I do know, however, that it was her story ‘Heavy Weather’, and I fell in love with it. This was in Abu Dhabi. So on a later visit to the library, I checked out one of her collections – her second, in fact, Dear George & Other Stories. And I’ve been a fan ever since. And yet, the only place I’ve read her fiction has been in her collections – the stories in Cockfosters, for example, originally appeared in Granta, New Statesman and daily newspapers, none of which I read. But hey, that’s what collections are for. There are nine stories in Cockfosters, one of which is genre. In ‘Erewhon’, a husband lies awake at night, worrying about the day ahead, while his wife sleeps oblivious beside him. It’s only as the story progresses, and the hours tick away, that you realise the gender roles are reversed in the world of the story. ‘Kentish Town’, a discussion amongst the members of a book group, is a particularly scathing criticque of Tory Britain. The longest piece, ‘Berlin’, is about a party of middle-aged tourists visiting Germany to see various of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and how the narrator and her husband slowly come to an appreciation of the operas. Those are the stand-outs, but the others are still highly-polished pieces of prose. Simpson is very, very good at what she does, and Cockfosters amply demonstrates it.

thestartoftheendThe Start of the End of it All, Carol Emshwiller (1990). I’d read a few of Emshwiller’s stories before in various anthologies, and had always found them the sort of science fiction not to my taste. While there was no denying their quality, they didn’t offer me the things I looked for in genre fiction. And while this collection certainly shows that Emshwiller is a good writer, I found it something of a mixed bag in terms of what I enjoy reading. I’ve been working on a review of it for SF Mistressworks, but it’s been taking a bit longer than expected.

patchwerkPatchwerk, David Tallerman (2016). Dran Florrian has invented a machine he calls Palimpsest and, afraid it might be used as a weapon, he decides to do a runner with it. But his arch rival, Harlan Dorric, tracks him down and tries to take Palimpsest for himself. Oh, and Florian’s ex-wife, Karen is now with Doric too. Palimpsest apparently provides a means of viewing, and even manipulating, alternate realities – as is revealed when Doric and his goons attack Florrian, and Florrian and Karen find themselves in a completely different world (a steampunkish one, in fact). And so it goes. As the chase continued across alternate realities, it occurred to me this was a very cunning way to expand a short story to novella-length. Because the resolution of the story is not dependent on the realities Florrian and Karen visit – in fact, all they do is delay, or perhaps even obstruct, the resolution. But this is hardly a problem as the story is fast-paced, very readable and manages a more-than-sufficient level of invention. Perhaps the various backgrounds are a little sketchy, and Florrian has a tendency to over-analyse at times; but at short-story length this would probably have been too light on detail to be satisfying, and there really isn’t enough plot to justify novel length. But it works just fine as a novella.

bitter_seedsBitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis (2010). I “won” this book on Twitter – a friend did a giveaway and… I can now understand why he gave it away. Bitter Seeds is a reworking of World War II – although it opens during the Spanish Civil War – in which the Germans have half a dozen super-powered teenagers, who need electricity wired directly into their brains to manifest their powers. The British are forced to make deals with the Eidolons, enigmatic and omnipotent demon-like creatures, who exact a blood price each time they deign to help. It’s an interesting idea, a mishmash of Nazi occult science mythology and the sort of potboilers Dennis Wheatley used to churn out. Unfortunately, it reads like a novel that’s been through far too many writing workshops, where the writer has tried to follow every “rule” and address every critique levelled at the manuscript. So when it’s not overwritten, it’s trying too hard do everything it thinks prose should do. And then there’s the research… Although much of the story is set in Britain, it’s not in the least bit convincing. Everyone carries billfolds. The book’s hero marries his wife in the garden of his boss’s house. The second son of a duke wears a bowler all the time (and the ducal estate is in Bestwood, which is actually a colliery village but never mind). There’s a pub which resembles no British pub ever. And the dialogue sounds like it was based on that spoken in 1970s and 1980s UK television series. There are apparently two sequels to this book. I won’t be reading them. But I might well be doing a giveaway on Twitter for Bitter Seeds…

atoms_afloat_smallAtoms Afloat, Edward Radlauer & Ruth Shaw Radlauer (1963). The NS Savannah, the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship, was one of only four ever built. She was launched in 1962 and served as a passenger and cargo ship until 1965, and then as cargo-only until 1972. She was designed as a demonstration model for nuclear power and a show case for Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” project. And she was quite a stunning-looking vessel. The interior was also designed to be in keeping with ship’s “atom age” styling, and looked fantastic. Atoms Afloat is the only book I’ve been able to find on the NS Savannah – and it’s aimed at middle-grade readers. It’s also more about the construction of the ship, and how her nuclear reactor works, than it is her design. But there are some nice photos in the book. I also have a copy of a brochure, published in the late sixties by the shipping line which operated her, and that contains some nice colour photos of Savannah’s passengers spaces. The NS Svannah was a design icon of her age, and someone really should do a proper book on her, filled with lots of colour photographs.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 122


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Moving pictures, #9

Eighty percent of this post’s films are from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, although that was more by accident than design. The Exorcist, for example, was a charity shop find; and the rest were just the ones the rental services sent me.

price_achmedThe Adventures of Prince Achmed*, Lotte Reiniger (1926, Germany). Another film on the list that would otherwise have never pinged on my radar – and not just because of its age, since I do, after all, like quite a few silent films (particularly those by Murnau, Dreyer and Lang). But The Adventures of Prince Achmed is also an animated film, done using a silhouette puppetry technique like the shadow theatre of Indonesia. It’s also apparently the oldest surviving animated film. The story is based on one from 1001 Nights, in which a prince visits a strange land on a flying horse, falls in love with the beautiful ruler, fights off an attack by demons, but she’s kidnapped by an evil magician, who traps Achmed under a boulder, but a witch rescues him, and then Achmed rescues Aladdin who is being attacked by a monster – cue 1001 Nights style flashback giving Aladdin’s back-story – and then the witch and the magician fight and the witch wins, so Achmed and Aladdin can rescue the princess, which involves fighting a hydra, but eventually Achmed wins that too, with the witch’s help, and they all live happily ever after… At 65 minutes, this does tend to drag a bit, even though there’s a lot of story to get through. The copy I watched had English narration and English intertitles, although only the intertitles were really necessary. The narration did emphasise the 1001 Nights nature of the story, however. I’m glad I’ve seen it, and can cross it off the list, but I’ll not be adding it to the wants list.

exorcistThe Exorcist*, William Friedkin (1973, USA). Back when I was at school, I worked my way through the first three of the Omen novelizations, although it was many years before I actually saw the films. The Exorcist, however, is an adaptation of a novel, which, despite reading the Omen books, despite, at that time, reading novels by James Herbert and Guy N Smith, I’ve never read. Nor did I ever see the film. But then I was never much of a horror fan, and even less so for films than books. And I’m far too squeamish to watch torture porn. But, The Exorcist… I knew the story, of course; and I’d heard about some of its more famous scenes. But it still came as a surprise when I started watching it that a) it begins at an archaeological dig in Iraq, and b) the lead character at that point is played by Max von Sydow. Also surprising is that The Exorcist is very much a 1970s film, in fact, it’s more a 1970s film than it is a horror film. If that makes sense. I’d relied on the film’s age meaning it was unlikely to trigger my squeam, if only because horror effects were so much more cinematic and less realistic back in the day; but in the event I wasn’t in the slightest bothered by even the most gruesome parts of the film – the projectile vomiting, the 360 head-turning thing – and even then they didn’t make an appearance until well near the end of the movie. I can see how the film has become iconic, although there’s not much in it that actually stands out. It is in all respects a typical 1970s movie adaptation of a novel, with a cast of vaguely familiar faces, a story that crams in far more of the book than is really needed, and solid directing and cinematography. I’m not sure it belongs on the list, however – and that’s not just because of my prejudice against horror films.

presidentThe President, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1919, Denmark). I count Dreyer’s Gertrud among my favourite films, and think extremely highly of his Day Of Wrath and The Passion of Joan of Arc (not that his other films are far behind). But Dreyer spent the first part of his career making silent films in Denmark and Sweden, few of which were especially successful, before heading to France to make The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Danske Filminstitut has released several of Dreyer’s early films on DVD and Blu-ray (his later movies are available in excellent editions from the Bfi), and Præsidenten (The President), Dreyer’s first feature film, is one of them. And having now seen it, I think I understand why it may not have hugely successful. It’s very, well, talky. There are pages and pages of intertitles. And the story, based on the novel Der Präsident by Austrian writer Karl Emil Franzos, is pretty complex for a silent film of 75 minutes. It’s also pretty grim. A Danish aristocrat returns to his home town as the president of the local judiciary, and one of his cases he’s due to see turns out to be a charge of infanticide against his daughter. He’d had an affair with his uncle’s governess, but refused to marry her because his father had advised him to never marry a commoner. He recuses himself and pleads for clemency – but the woman is sentenced to death. The aristocrat is assigned to another town, but before leaving he arranges for his daughter’s escape. Years later, he bumps into her and learns she is affianced to a plantation owner from Java. He returns to his home town to confess he organised her escape but is told that to do so would undermine the judiciary – and if he insists on confessing, then they will track down his daughter and see that her sentence is passed. All those intertitles, and the film even starts with a flashback… it makes for a confusing story.

apuThe World of Apu*, Satyajit Ray (1959, India). This is third and final film of Ray’s Apu trilogy, following on from Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) and Aparajito (The Unvanquished) – um, I should really be consistent and use the Bengali titles for all three, so this third film is Apur Sansa. Anyway, I saw the first of these back in 2009 and the second in 2014, but in the last year or so – after seeing Jalsaghar (The Music Room) – I’ve come to a new appreciation of Ray’s films and am determined to see more of them. Anyway, Apur Sansa is the third film to feature the titular character, but unlike the other two is not based on a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Apu is a young man, unable to enter university because of lack of money, and struggling to find a job. He fancies himself a writer and is working on a novel. He accompanies a friend back to his home village for a cousin’s wedding. But on the wedding day, the groom has a mental breakdown. Another groom is desperately sought, since the wedding date is auspicious and to not marry off the bride would blight her life forever. After some persuading, Apu reluctantly agrees to take the groom’s place. He and his new wife return to Kolkata, and soon settle into a loving relationship. But when the wife, Aparna, returns to her home village, she dies giving birth to their first child. Apu blames the child for his wife’s death, and leaves his job and his home. He travels about India, taking odd jobs, and is only reunited with his son five years later when his friend comes looking for him and persuades him the boy needs him. The final scene, as had been long recognised, is a killer. There’s a starkness to Ray’s cinematography and staging, not to mention the social realism of the poverty he unapologetically documents, that gives Ray’s films a solid foundation of emotional power. Certainly a film that belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I plan to watch more Ray.

jfkJFK*, Oliver Stone (1991, USA). I can remember when Stone could seemingly do no wrong, and even though each project he worked on seemed, frankly, a bizarre choice, he still managed to impress both audiences and critics. But his career has long since waned. JFK was possibly his high point – fourteen award nominations and five wins. There’s not much point in giving the plot of the film – is there anyone on this planet that doesn’t know about the Kennedy assassination? Or indeed the various conspiracies which have sprung up to explain it? Stone takes Jim Garrison, a Louisiana DA, who obsessed over the case, and was the only person to ever bring a case related to the assassination to court (he lost, of course), as played by Kevin Costner. Over 3 hours, Stone goes through many of the inconsistencies ignored by the Warren Commission, and presents considerable evidence that contradicts the Commission’s findings… But I’m not quite convinced by his solution. Nor by James Ellroy’s, for that matter. The government;s preferred solution, lone gunman, is obviously complete bollocks. And certainly those Cubans who lost everything when Castro took over had motive… but assassinating a president, and getting away with it, requires help from the very highest levels of US government, industry and military. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” makes for a handy villain – and certain the loss of future profits seems a viable motive… But such people can generate conflict whenever they want, wherever they want, and the president of the US is unlikely to have much impact on that – Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Isis, notwithstanding. Any way you look at it, there were – and probably still are – a group of powerful people in the US who are so arrogant they believe they can effect a regime change simply in order to better their own situation. It’s tempting to think a group of right-wing industrialists and technocrats arranged Kennedy’s death, and while subsequent history has given them more than they could have possibly wished for, it’s hard to believe they were that forward-thinking, or prescient, back in 1963. I can believe a small group of people in the intelligence services and military, for whatever reason, set it all up – but why? Afraid of budget cuts? Frightened the Cold War might come to an end? They’re not… visceral enough motives. It takes real hate, and a perception of real benefit, to plan something like the assassination of a president. We may well find out fifty years from now that it was all to do with something completely different, some other power group JFK had attacked… Or we may never find out. Still, it hasn’t stopped endless speculations.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 728


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Moving pictures 2016, #8

Almost up to date now – so it’ll back to the usual, somewhat irregular, schedule for these Moving picture posts after this one. A bit of a mixed bag this time – three from the US, two from France, and one from Spain (that isn’t actually Spanish); mostly from the 1980s; and mostly drama.

demyParking, Jacques Demy (1985, France). I’m really not sure what to make of this one. It’s like a cross between Cocteau’s Orphée and Xanadu, although without being anywhere near as awful as the latter. It’s actually a retelling, more or less, of Orphée – and Jean Marais, who played the title role in Cocteau’s film, plays Hades in this – but rather than a beatnik poet, Orpheus is a rockstar. Who wears a white jumpsuit and a red headband. And his music is awful – bland, insipid elevator rock, the sort of music Kenny G would sing if he’d been a singer. While rehearsing on stage, Orpheus is electrocuted. But when he gets to the afterlife, Hades can find no record indicating he was due. So he sends him back. Then a woman he met there, Hades’ personal assistant, Claude Perséphone, contacts Orpheus and offers to represent him. He refuses. But Orpheus’s girlfriend, Eurydice, commits suicide, so he tracks down Perséphone and persuades her to lead him back to the underworld in order to rescue Eurydice. The sections set in the afterlife are in black and white, with the occasional red, and the underworld itself resembles either an underground car park or the basement of some huge building. Those scenes are reasonably effective, although they’re not a patch on Orphée‘s, but the movie is completely hamstrung by Orpheus’s music and the baffling success he has apparently had with it. Not one of Demy’s better efforts.

sex_liessex, lies and videotape*, Steven Soderbergh (1989, USA). This film apparently had an enormous impact on the independent film industry in the US, and Soderbergh has always been one of the more interesting US directors… and, to be fair, time has been relatively kind to it… but it’s a type of drama I don’t find particularly interesting. A school friend of a philandering lawyer drops into town to stay for the weekend, but decides to stay on for longer and rents a house. The lawyer’s wife helps him furnish the flat, and thwe two swap personal histories. The friend admits he cannot perform sexually with another person, and has taken to interviewing women on video about their sexual histories. Meanwhile, the lawyer is having an affair with a sister-in-law, and she becomes interested in the friend with the videotapes… and it only really ends badly for the lawyer, who pretty much deserved it. For all its polished dialogue and cast, I found it all a bit dull. But given the film’s impact, I suspect it belongs on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and I can at least now cross it off.

koyaanisqatsiKoyaanisqatsi*, Godfrey Reggio (1982, USA). I knew of this film but had never heard it mentioned all that approvingly, and despite knowing roughly what it was – ie, footage of cities and landscape, with music but no voiceover – and being a fan of James Benning’s films – it had never occurred to me to actually watch Koyaanisqatsi. But it’s on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, so I bunged it on the rental list, and in the fullness of time it dutifully dropped through the letterbox. And I watched it. And, unsurprisingly, I loved it. Using slow-motion and time-lapse cinematography, Reggio filmed various parts of the US countryside, such as the Canyonlands National Park, as well as various cities – including footage taken on the streets of pedestrians, some of whom actually take notice of the camera. Over it all is a repetitive, but quite appropriate, electronic score by Philip Glass. It’s an easier watch than any of Benning’s films – despite the lack of voice-over, there’s a plain narrative to follow, and the visuals are, of course, quite stunning. The rental service screwed up when sending me this – although I suppose it might have been me – and a Blu-ray arrived rather than a DVD. So I got to see it in even better quality than expected. And it came with the sequel Powaqqatsi – see below.

aviators_wifeThe Aviator’s Wife, Éric Rohmer (1981, France). I do like Rohmer’s films – at least those I’ve seen – albeit some more than others. This one strikes me as… middling Rohmer. A young man is afraid his girlfriend is still seeing her ex-, an airline pilot, and witnesses the pilot leaving her flat. Later, he spots the pilot with another woman, and decides to follow the pair. In a park, he bumps into a fifteen-year-old girl, who quizzes him on his behaviour, and the decides to help him trail the couple. Which is what they do. Around Paris. And the two of them discuss what the couple they are trailing might be up to. It’s a typical dialogue-heavy and leadenly-paced Rohmer film, and despite its plot and cast, it’s unfortunately somewhat light on charm.

falstaff_dvdFalstaff – Chimes at Midnight*, Orson Welles (1966, Spain). Welles has done quite well on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, with half a dozen – that’s around half of his feature film output – on the list. Three of them I’d seen many years before, one I watched and liked so much I bought the Criterion Blu-ray… and now there’s the only Shakespeare film of his that makes the list. And I hadn’t really expected to like it as much as I did. Possibly because I hadn’t been that impressed by The Immortal Story, seen only a few weeks before. And, it has to be said, Shakespeare is hard to do well… and Welles not only plays the title role but created his story, and dialogue, from Falstaff’s appearances in various of Shakespeare’s plays. And yet… it works really well. It doesn’t much feel like a Shakespeare play, despite the Shakespearean dialogue – and the scenes depicting the Battle of Shrewsbury are surprisingly brutal and effective. Welles’s make-up, to be fair, does appear a little over-done, much as it did in The Immortal Story, but it’s only noticeable in some of the scenes. I am not really a fan of Shakespeare’s plays, and watching the BBC adaptations was more prompted more by a desire to see what they were like, and I’ve never really found myself all that enamoured of the various film adaptations I’ve seen – such as those by Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh, etc – but I’ve seen two since I’ve been working my way through the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, and was somewhat surprised to discover they’re both very good – this one and Laurence Oliver’s Henry V. Go figure.

koyaanisqatsiPowaqqatsi, Godfrey Reggio (1988, USA). This is the second of three films – the third, Naqoyqatsi, didn’t appear until 2002 – and where the first film’s title translates as “life out of balance”, Powaqqatsi means “life in transition”. It focuses on the developing world, not the US, but follows the same pattern. This time, however, the Philip Glass score is much more intrusive, and seems to work to work against the visuals rather than with them. It don’t think it’s as successful a film as the first, although the cinematography is just as good. But now, I want the entire trilogy – apparently there’s a Criterion Collection Blu-ray trilogy, so that’s gone on the wants list (for some reason the Region B release, by Arrow Academy, only contains the first two films).

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 724


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Moving pictures 2016, #7

Carrying on with getting my film posts to get up to date…

come_and_seeCome and See*, Elem Klimov (1985, Russia). The opening of this movie did not bode well. Two boys, playing at war, while one of them puts on a hoarse voice intended to sound adult… but then the older of the two starts digging where corpses have been buried and finally unearths a rifle. Later, partisans visit his home and recruit him, against the wishes of his mother, who knows that her survival, and that of her daughters, is uncertain if he leaves. But he goes, and becomes a Soviet partisan fighting the Nazis. And the film goes from meh to good and then to great in relatively short order. The boy is separated from his unit, and hides out with a girl his own age. They return to his village, but everyone has gone (they have been massacred – he does not realise this, but she does). The two meet up with the partisans, but their leader has been badly injured by the Germans. Eventually, the boy infiltrates a village and pretends to be resident there. But an SS unit arrives, locks everyone in the church and sets fire to the building. This is pretty brutal stuff. Perhaps the Soviets are all a bit more noble than they actually were (cf Larisa Shepitko’s Ascent) and the Germans are painted as complete animals – when likely all sides exhibited such behaviour – but, considering I’d known nothing about this film before renting it, and its title is not exactly much of a clue, I ended up thinking it very, very good indeed. And definitely a movie that belonged on the 1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die list. I’m surprised it’s not better known than it is.

demyL’évènement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune, Jacques Demy (1973, France). Marcello Mastroianni is a driving instructor, married to Catherine Deneuve, a hairdresser. One day, Mastroianni is not feeling well, so he visits the doctor… and is told he is pregnant. He becomes the centre of a big media circus, and other men begin reporting pregnancies too. (The film, incidentally, was released in the US as A Slightly Pregnant Man, which is a pretty naff title, whereas the original title is, er, long.) Sadly, while the quirky humour in the film never really quite works, the brightly-coloured production design is a lot of fun. Okay, so Deneuve is too elegant to really carry off the 197s outfits she wears, but Mastroianni fits his role perfectly. It’s all a bit of colourful French fluff, not only of its time but also screaming from every frame that it’s a film of the early seventies. I quite enjoyed it – which I guess means the intégrale Jacques Demy collection is currently batting about 50:50, which is not bad odds for a DVD collection.

hawkHawk the Slayer, Terry Marcel (1980, UK). I remember this from year ago – decades ago… After all, who can forget the elf who can fire arrows like a machinegun, or Bernard Bresslaw playing a giant with two eyes, or a dwarf eating a fish whole, or Jack Palance as the villain chewing up the scenery with gusto… Um, that last applies to most genre films of the 1980s, but never mind. Anyway, I remembered Hawk the Slayer with some fondness from all those years ago, so I thought it worth watching again (that is, when I stumbled across a copy for £1 in a charity shop). And so it is. Daft, of course, with a cast of familiar faces from UK films and TV, who are clearly in it for the money but determined to have fun. The plot echoes that of a zillion sword & sorcery stories, and there’s nothing really new that Hawk the Slayer brings to the genre. The various fight-scenes were plainly staged to resemble those of Westerns, and it sort of worked; but it’s not like this movie will ever be considered Great Art, or even Slightly-Better-than-Average Art. One thing I hadn’t realised, however, is how much the soundtrack rips off Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds. There are riffs and melodies which are uncannily similar to Wayne’s magnum opus. Not that such music seems all that appropriate to a high fantasy film… although it does seem weirdly appropriate to a nineteen-eighties high fantasy film. Go figure.

graceGrace of Monaco, Olivier Dahan (2014, France). I’m a fan of Grace Kelly, she’s one of my favourite actresses. Her career was famously cut short in 1956 by her marriage to Prince Rainer of Monaco, and I can’t help wondering what would have happened had she continued acting. Longevity certainly didn’t harm the careers of any number of her contemporaries, from Maureen O’Hara to Cyd Charisse (um, on the other hand, Charisse was in Warlords of Atlantis…). Anyway, while Kelly made some stone-cold classics, displayed, and was recognised for, her acting chops, she also made several pretty forgettable movies. But Grace of Monaco, in which Nicole Kidman plays Kelly, is about her after she married Rainer… and single-handledly prevented France from invading and annexing Monaco. Ah, you didn’t know about that? Probably because that’s not what actually happened. I hadn’t known Monaco began offering French corporations tax-free status if they moved their operations to Monaco, and this upset the French government. Who responded by telling Monaco it had to a) start levying tax on the corporations, and b) pay the tax raised to the French government. When Monaco refused, France blockaded the principality. Apparently, the rest of the world seemed unconcerned at this – one country threatening to invade another because its tax laws were preferable to companies. You’d never see that happening now, and not just because the corporations these days have so much power they can actually refuse to pay the tax they do owe, even in G12 countries. Anyway, Princess Grace gave a speech about it all at a Red Cross Ball, at which were present the great and good, including President de Gaulle, and it melted his heart and he lifted the blockade. Or something. When I started watching this film, Kidman didn’t really convince as Kelly, but as the story progressed she seemed to settle into the part and her portrayal became more believable. She isn’t Kelly, the resemblance is not even slight, but I suspect she may have been the best actress for the part. (Although, are there Grace Kelly impersonators? I guess so. There are Madonna and Cher and Barbra Streisand impersonators, after all.) Grace of Monaco has been comprehensively panned, and with mostly good reason. It does seem a bit unfair to criticise a biopic for being inaccurate, because you’d be hard-pressed to find one that is accurate. And that is a solid cast there – Kidman, Tim Roth, Frank Langella, Parker Posey, Derek Jacobi…  It also seems to capture the period resonably accurately, as far as I can judge. But, for all that, it’s just not… very dramatic. It builds up tension and then Grace Kelly sort of decides to take her new role seriously – she even learns French! – and then she solves all of Monaco’s woes with a tearful speech. Sadly, not an especially good memorial to Grace Kelly.

demyUne chambre en ville, Jacques Demy (1980, France). This is one of Demy’s sung dialogue films, and I’m still not entirely sure they work. The title refers to a room rented by a striking shipyard worker in the house of a sympathetic baroness. Although he has a steady girlfriend he plans to marry, he spends the night the wife a television shop owner, and the two fall in love. He tells his girlfriend, while the wife goes to tell her husband… who kills himself in despair. So she goes to her mother – who happens to be the baroness. But the shipyard worker is fatally injured during a demonstration, is taken to the baroness’s, where he dies in the arms of the telelvision shop owner’s wife. Who then shoots herself. It is not, perhaps, the most original story in the world. I seem to recall some guy called Bill did something similar about 400 years ago, and there was that Bollywood film I mentioned a Moving pictures post or two ago… It was all a bit fraught, the mid-fifties mise en scène didn’t have the benefit of the bright colours of the Demy film mentioned above, and the sung dialogue doesn’t realyl work for me. I shall probably have to watch it again some time.

watkinsCulloden, Peter Watkins (1964, UK). I had to buy a French DVD collection because Watkins’s films are not available in the UK on DVD. Well, there were BFI editions of The War Game and Culloden, but they’ve now combined them into a dual edition omnibus, Culloden + The War Game, and eureka! have released a Blu-ray of Punishment Park (after I bought the collection, naturally)… But even so, he was a remarkable film-maker and his films should be readily available in this country as a matter of course. Culloden, made for the BBC, is framed as a fly-on-the-wall (so to speak) documentary of the eponymous battle as it takes place. People involved in the battle are interviewed, both before and after, and the narrator puts everything in context reportage voice-over. It is surprisingly effective. Even the fact this is a fifty year old television film doesn’t doesn’t lessen its impact. And it’s informative too. Recommended.

osamaOsama*, Siddiq Barmak (2003, Afghanistan). A doctor, whose husband was killed in the Soviet invasion, lives with her mother and daughter, but the Taliban have shut down the hospital where she works and the lack of man in the household means there’s now no money coming in. So the grandmother persuades the daughter to protend to be a boy, so “he” can get a job and earn enough for them to buy food. But then the Taliban recruit all the local boys for the madrassa – include Osama, as the disguised girl is now calling herself – and her masquerade becomes a thousand times harder. They really were a nasty bunch of men, the Taliban, and Osama pulls no punches in depicting just how evil they were. This is not a movie that is going to leave you feeling good about the world – although clearly that was not its intent. But you could always watch those films about a bunch Spandex-called nincompoops saving the world from alien invasions instead.

fassbinder1Love is Colder than Death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1969, Germany). Another early Fassbinder, again black-and-white, which opens with Fassbinder lying on the floor. It turns out he’s a hood, but he refuses to go work for the local syndicate. So they set another hood to follow him, and they sort of wander about town doing gangster-type things, including shooting people in a restaurant and robbing a local bank. I haven’t taken to these homages to classic Hollywood as I have other films by Fassbinder – and I have to wonder why so many budding film director of the twentieth century, particularly ones in post-WWII Europe, felt a need to make them.

1001 Movies you Must See Before You Die count: 721