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June 22, 2015
by iansales Leave a comment

Best of the half year, 2015

It’s that time of the year again, time to look back at the books I’ve read, the films I’ve watched, and the albums I’ve listened to, and decide which five earn a place on the much-coveted best of the half-year lists. To put these lists into perspective, I have – by 20 June – bought twelve albums (all from bandcamp), watched 234 films (which does include a number of rewatches), and read 74 books (which includes half a dozen previously read books). I’ve also been documenting my reading in a series of Reading diary posts (currently at #7, with #8 to be posted shortly), and my film-watching in a series of Moving pictures posts (fifteen so far this year).

So far, 2014 has felt like quite a good year. To date I’ve read 74 books, which is a slight dip from this time last year but up on the year before. And in both years I comfortably managed to read 150 books (which is just as well as I’ve entered 150 books for my GoodReads 2015 Book Challenge). On the film front, I have as usual failed to make it to the cinema even once, so most of my movie-watching has been on DVD – and I’ve started buying Blu-rays more often now too. Most of those DVDs were rentals, which has helped so far knock sixty titles of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, not all of which, incidentally, I’m convinced belonged on the list. I’ve also spent the year so far tracking down copies of films on DVD by my favourite directors, especially Aleksandr Sokurov. I now own all but one of his DVDs, but since the only copies of it I’ve found are priced around £200 to £250 I might have to use – kof kof – “alternative” sources. Anyway, I’ve been watching a lot of films – 238 to date. Some of them I’ve watched more than once. Finally, music… which has not been as successful this year as books or films. I’ve spent most of my time listening to groups on bandcamp, and have consequently discovered a number of excellent bands – in fact, all of the ones mentioned in this post were purchased there. I’ve only been to two gigs this year – one was Sólstafir, who were excellent; the second was half a dozen bands at a gig sponsored by Femetalism. None of my favourite bands have released new albums so far this year, although one or two have releases planned later in the year.

Anyway, here are the lists, with the usual honourable mentions as well.

books
What the Doctor Ordered, Michael Blumlein (2013). Blumlein has been a favourite writer for many years, but his short fiction has always been more impressive than his novels. And this new collection – only his second since 1990’s The Brains of Rats – amply demonstrates why Blumlein is such a brilliant short story writer. A much undersung writer who deserves to be better known. Incidentally, Centipede Press have done a lovely job with the book.

The Grasshopper’s Child, Gwyneth Jones (2014). A new novel from a favourite author. It’s actually a YA novel set in the universe of the not-YA Bold as Love quintet. There is a fierce intelligence to Jones’s books which shines through her prose, and it’s one of the reasons I consider her the UK’s best science fiction writer currently being published – except she isn’t these days, as The Grasshopper’s Child was self-published. Seriously, that shouldn’t be happening.

A Division Of The Spoils, Paul Scott (1975). The final book of the Raj Quartet, and what a piece of work the quartet is. Scott is superb at handling voices, and in Barbie Batchelor has created one of fiction’s great characters – although this book belongs more to Guy Perron, a gentleman NCO keen to return to the UK now the war is over, but who comes into the orbit of the Layton family (who have been a constant presence running through all four books). I’m already looking forward to rereading the quartet.

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958). I watched the film of this and that persuaded me to read the book. And I’m glad I did. There are Lawrentian elements to it, although a story which valorises the aristocracy and (mostly) presents the lower classes as venal in order to demonstrate the coming of a new world order… would not be my first choice of reading. But Tomasi di Lampedusa manages to give his fading nobles an air of tragedy as their time passes, even if the Salina family’s paternalism feels like a relic of a much earlier age.

Dark Orbit, Carolyn Ives Gilman (2015). Another favourite author. This novel is set in the same universe as Gilman’s excellent novellas ‘The Ice Owl’ and ‘Arkfall’, and while some elements of the novel are not entirely successful, it does make use of some heavy concepts and it handles them really well. A science fiction novel that makes you think – and we really could do with more of them these days.

Honourable mentions. A pair of polished collections – The Lady of Situations, Stephen Dedman (1999), and Adam Robots, Adam Roberts (2013), not every story in them worked, but the good ones were very good indeed. Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux (2013), which surprisingly seems to have been missed by much of sf fandom, which is a shame. A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar (2014), a pulp detective tale with a failed Hitler as the hero shouldn’t work, but this blackly comic take on it definitely does. Touch, Claire North (2015), is perhaps not as successful as last year’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, as its fascinating premise is married to a weak plot; but never mind.

As usual, I’ve been collecting stats on my reading. And it breaks down as follows…

I hadn’t realised I’d read so many recent books, and I’ve no idea why the 1980s is the next most popular decade – perhaps it’s due to the books I picked to review for SF Mistressworks. The one nineteenth century book was HG Wells, the two 1920s ones were DH Lawrence.

I alternate genders when choosing fiction books to read, but I seem to have slipped up somewhere, and women writers currently outnumber men in my reading.

It never feels like I read a lot of science fiction, but at almost half of my reading I guess I must be doing so. Mainstream is the next highest genre, but only twenty percent. To be fair, it seems the mainstream books are often more memorable than the genre ones. But at least the numbers explain the good showing by genre in my top five and honourable mentions.

films
Playtime, Jacques Tati (1967, France). I’d never actually seen a Tati film until I rented Les Vacances de M Hulot last August. I enjoyed it, but something I read somewhere persuaded me to add his Playtime to my rental list. And I watched it for the first time early this year. And loved it so much, I bought a Blu-ray of it. And then I spotted that a Tati Blu-ray collection was on offer on Amazon, so I bought that too. But none of Tati’s other films blew me away as much as Playtime, although Mon Oncle comes a close second (and so makes my honourable mentions below).

Elegy of a Voyage, Aleksandr Sokurov (2001, Russia). I’ve watched this three times since I bought it, as part of my 2015 love affair with Sokurov’s films. As the title suggests, the film is a meditation on travel, and art, with Sokurov in voiceover describing a journey he takes which ends up at a museum in, I think, a German city. Elegy of a Voyage is everything that Sokurov does so well, that makes a film a Sokurov film. Not to mention the somewhat idiosyncratic artistic choices Sokurov makes, such as using a 4:3 aspect ratio, distorting the image so it almost resembles a painting, and the use of colour filters to further distance the viewer from the picture. The beauty of Sokurov’s films is not that they bear repeated viewings, but that they require it.

Day Of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1943, Denmark). This year I also became a fan of Dreyer’s films – his Gertrud had been a favourite for a couple of years – but in 2015 I bought DVDs of all his available movies. And worked my way through them. The silent films are astonishingly modern – especially The Passion of Joan of Arc – but I do prefer the later films, and after Gertrud, Day Of Wrath is I think his next best – and like Gertrud, it’s about women and women’s roles in society, but this time set in 1623 and describing how a young woman saves her mother from a charge of witchcraft by marrying the local pastor. And then it all goes horribly wrong.

Jodorowsky’s Dune, Frank Pavich (2013, USA). One of the reasons I bought a Blu-ray player capable of playing multi-region Blu-rays was because I wanted to see this film – to date it has not been released in the UK. Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary about the unmade film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, which only exists in concept art by Chris Foss, Moebius and HR Giger… and a complete storyboard “bible” which Jodorowsky’s producers sent to a number of US studios. A fascinating look at what could have been a fascinating film.

Stone, Aleksandr Sokurov (1992, Russia). A young man looks after the house Chekhov once lived in, and then one night a man who might be Chekhov mysteriously appears… Filmed in black and white, elliptical and, in the second half, featuring Sokurov’s trademark timelapse photography of a snowy landscape. While Elegy of a Voyage is a documentary, this is fiction, but deeply allusive fiction – which is why I woke up the morning after watching this and discovered I’d gone and ordered a pair of Chekhov books from Amazon…

Honourable mentions. Fear Eats The Soul, Effi Briest and The Marriage of Maria Braun, all by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974, 1974 and 1979, Germany), and all from a DVD box set I received for Christmas, these were I felt the best three. The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller (1980, USA), I’m not a big fan of WWII films but this is a good one, and even manages to rise above what is obviously a smaller budget than most such films get. Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati (1958, France), more modernist low-key humour, which may not be as cinematically beautiful as Playtime, but comes a close second. James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge, John Bruno, Ray Quint & Andrew White (2014, USA), another Blu-ray not available in the UK which motivated my purchase of a multi-region Blu-ray player, this documentary covers Cameron’s descent to Challenger Deep in 2012. Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard (1967, France), although not a Godard fan I do love some of his films, such as this one, a study of a bored housewife who works on the side as a prostitute; I’ve already bunged the Criterion DVD on my wishlist. Whispering Pages and Spiritual Voices, Aleksandr Sokurov (1994 and 1995, Russia), a completely opaque drama and a deeply philosophical documentary (about Russian soldiers), yet more evidence of my admiration for Sokurov’s works. Moscow does not Believe in Tears, Vladimir Menshov (1980, USSR), an odd drama about three women in Moscow in the 1950s and the 1970s, which makes a pleasing antidote to US “evil empire” propaganda. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Aditya Chopra (1995, India), a superior Bollywood film about UK-based NRIs and arranged marriages, with amusingly broad comedy, well-staged musical numbers and a pair of likeable leads. The Man from London, Béla Tarr (2007, Hungary), my first Tarr and probably the most plot-full of his films, and while I’m still not quite plugged into his brand of slow cinema, it’s definitely the sort of cinema that appeals to me.

As with books, I’ve been collecting stats on the films I’ve watched…

I still seem to be watching mostly American films, but that’s likely because so many on 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list are American – or, at the very least, the US ones are easier to find (ie, readily available for rental). The good showing for Russia is, of course, Sokurov – several of his films I’ve watched two or three times already this year.

A reasonable spread across the decades, although I would have expected the fifties and sixties to do better than the seventies, as I much prefer films from those earlier two decades. The first decade of this millennium doesn’t seem to have done very well either, which is odd.

albums
Ghostwood, Navigator (2013). A US prog rock band I stumbled across on Bandcamp, and then began listening to repeatedly. In parts they remind me of Australia’s Chaos Divine, and though they describe themselves as “for fans of: Porcupine Tree”, I think I prefer this album to those by Steven Wilson’s band. There are a few bits of electronica in there somewhere, but also plenty of heavy riffing- the title tracks boasts especially good riffage. And very catchy melodies. Good stuff.

Sidereus Nuncius, Apocynthion (2013). A Spanish death metal band with a death metal / post-metal sound not unlike NahemaH’s – who were also from Spain, but have sadly disbanded after only three albums. I hope Apocynthion stay together and produce many more albums. The opening track with its insistent drumbeat is especially good.

Secret Youth, Callisto (2015). I bought a Callisto album several years ago, and though I enjoyed their brand of heavy post-metal I never bothered with any of their subsequent albums. But then Zero Tolerance magazine streamed this, their latest, I gave it a listen, discovered it was very different to their earlier album… and liked it so much I bought it. It’s still post-metal, but the growls have been mostly replaced by clean vocals, and in places there’s almost an early Anathema-ish sound to it.

Worst Case Scenario, Synesthesia (2015). This was very much a lucky discovery and while at first they reminded me quite heavily of The Old Dead Tree – who, like Synesthesia, are also from France – repeated listens proved they definitely had their own thing going. Like The Old Dead Tree, they drift between death and goth metal, but they also throw quite a bit of prog into it, and it’s a mix that works well, even if in places they sound a bit Muse-ish.

Ótta, Sólstafir (2014). These Icelanders were excellent live, so I bought their last two albums (the only ones available on Bandcamp), and it’s hard to say which is the better of the two. There are a couple of cracking tracks on 2011’s Svartir Sandar, but I decided Ótta was just a little bit the better of the two, if only for the banjo-accompanied title track.

Honourable mentions. Doliu, Clouds (2014), a UK doom band, and the track ‘if these walls could speak’ is absolutely brilliant. Entransient, Entransient (2015), a US prog metal band with a bit of post-rock thrown in for good measure. Good stuff. The Malkuth Grimoire, Alkaloid (2015), a German progressive death metal supergroup, containing (ex-)members of Necrophagist, Obscura, Spawn of Possession, Aborted, Dark Fortress, God Dethroned, Blotted Science and Noneuclid, this is quality stuff, in the same area as Barren Earth but a very Germanic version. Svartir Sandar, Sólstafir (2011), see above. Half Blood, Horseback (2012), as the album’s Bandcamp page puts it, “shifts from Americana twang to fiercely evil buzzing guitars to hypnotically meditative kraut-drone”, which is as good a description as any; file alongside Ultraphallus.

March 5, 2015
by iansales 5 Comments

Moving pictures, #4

Yet more movies. What I have watched. I’ve been averaging two a night, due to the fact there’s been nothing worth watching on the terrestrial channels or cable television.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*, John Huston (1948, USA). Humph is stuck in Mexico, too poor to leave and look elsewhere for work. He’s offered a job, which he accepts, but when the job finishes, his employer doesn’t pay. Apparently, he’s known for doing this. That’s capitalism for you, folks. One man gets rich while others do the work; and all the better if he can get away without actually paying for it. Humph and a friend from the job hook up with an old prospector – played by the director’s father – and go looking for gold in them thar titular mountains. Which they find. But the prospect of great riches turns Humph all paranoid. And then bandidos turn up, bandidos with no stinking badges. Things go from bad to worse, Humph totally loses it, and it all ends badly. Not bad, although I thought Humph’s paranoia was a bit overdone. Huston senior was a complete star, however.

The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki (2013, Japan). This is the Studio Ghibli one based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Mitsubishi Zero, Japan’s most successful fighter plane of WWII. It apparently caused a bit of a fuss when it was released on the grounds it celebrated the life of a man who had designed a highly efficient killing machine. Despite all that, the film is well, a bit dull. Miyazaki livens things up a little by throwing in some weird dream sequences, featuring Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Batista Caproni. He also chucks in a doomed romance – the woman Horikoshi loves has tuberculosis, and dies shortly after they’re married. Horikoshi’s real wife was perfectly healthy. This element of the story was apparently adapted from a completely unrelated novel (and to which the film’s title is a reference). Incidentally, Werner Herzog provides the voice for a German character (in the English-language version), and it’s really quite strange hearing him in a Ghibli movie.

Mon Oncle*, Jacques Tati (1958, France). This is how karma bites you on the ass. My rental agreement with Amazon involves them sending me 3 DVDs at a time, I watch them, return them, they send me 3 more. Except the copy of The Great Gatsby (see here) they sent me wouldn’t play. I reported it as faulty and returned it. They said they’d send me a replacement and it wouldn’t affect my agreement. Except they sent the replacement as one of my next lot of 3 DVDs. I complained, they apologised, and sent me an immediate fourth disc (The Virgin And The Gypsy, in fact). Situation resolved. And then they send Mon Oncle in my next 3, even though I’d bought the Jacques Tati box set only a week before – I’d forgotten to take it off my rental list. Argh. Anyway, this is definitely the next best Tati after Playtime, and it riffs off a similar conceit – but rather than city life being impersonal and oppressive, here it’s a single gadget-filled house, in which live Hulot’s sister and brother-in-law. There’s more of an actual plot than in Playtime, but again the film is built around a series of well-observed and cleverly executed set-pieces. More, please.

Arrietty, Hiromasa Yonebayashi (2010, Japan). And this is the Studio Ghibli film based on The Borrowers, about a group of tiny little people who live behind the skirtingboard in a house. And, er, that’s it. Boy spots Borrower protagonist, who then reveals existence of Borrowers to him. Boy is ill and due to go into hospital for a risky operation. Parents discover evidence of Borrowers, and rings up a pest removal company. Boy helps Borrowers escape from pest removal experts. If I thought The Wind Rises was dull, this one has it beat. It didn’t even seem much like a Ghibli film.

Moscow does not Believe in Tears, Vladimir Menshov (1980, USSR). An odd film, this. It won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1980, the third Soviet film to do so (the others were War and Peace in 1968 and, er, Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala in 1975). It opens in the 1950s, with three young women from the country now living in Moscow. One works as a mechanic, but wants to go to university to train as an engineer. Another works in a bakery, but believes in having fun and finding a rich husband. The third has a boyfriend who’s a farmer and they intend to marry. The baker and mechanic are asked to house-sit a rich relative’s apartment. They pretend the place is theirs and throw a party for eligible men (it’s the baker’s plan, the mechanic goes along with it reluctantly). The mechanic’s university plans are then scuppered when she falls for a television engineer, who makes her pregnant but refuses to marry her. The baker meanwhile marries a rich and famous hockey player. The film then jumps ahead to the 1970s. The mechanic is now the director of a successful manufacturing plant and a single mother, the baker’s marriage ended badly when the hockey player became an alcoholic, and the third one has been happily married to her farmer for two decades. And then a tool and die maker at a scientific lab picks up the director woman, not realising she occupies such an important position, and the rest of the film is their romance. While the movie carefully ignores many of the hardships of living under the Soviet system, and presents the USSR as a relatively affluent society, there are a number of details which are peculiar to its setting – in the 1950s, the three women live in a women’s dormitory, for example; or the mechanic is interviewed on television at one point because she is a female mechanic. It’s a well-handled drama, and despite a tendency to soap opera melodramatics in places, gives an interesting glimpse of a society that no longer exists. Worth seeing.

The Virgin And The Gypsy, Christopher Miles (1970, UK). I decided to read the DH Lawrence novella from which this film was adapted before watching it, which was probably a mistake. (The novella is also the source of “inexcusable puddings”, although the expression is not used in the movie.) Two daughters return from their French finishing school to their father’s East Midlands vicarage. Yvette, the virgin of the title, is flighty, but Lucille is made of more sensible stuff. Yvette’s character is blamed upon, and often alluded to, the vicar’s absconded wife (although she was Lucille’s mother too). While out motoring about with some local friends, the sisters come across a gipsy, and Yvette is taken with his macho charm. Even for Lawrence, this is all about as subtle as a black pudding in the face. The film ends with a dam burst which floods the area – and Yvette’s life is saved by the gipsy. The film didn’t quite portray the characters as they were written, if anything it seemed to tone them down a little (it also toned down the 1920s racism, thankfully). And it didn’t look like a very expensive production – although it did actually look like it was filmed on location (which it was; it’s more or less the part of the country I’m from).

Michael, Carl Theodor Dreyer (1924, Germany). I think I’ve come to Dreyer’s films backwards, starting with his Danish (sound) movies and then watching his earlier silent films. I’ve still yet to see Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, two of his most famous movies. But, Michael. This apparently didn’t do very well on release, likely because it’s centred around a gay relationship between a famous painter and his model. A bankrupt countess approaches the painter for a portrait, but actually plans to seduce him and then take all his money. But the model instead falls for her, and they go off together. The model steals from the painter, which then inspires the painter to paint his masterpiece. Soon after the picture is unveiled, the painter takes ill and dies, without being reconciled with his lost love. This is not much like the Danish films, neither in subject nor presentation. There are similarities, of course – Dreyer’s use of close-up, for example; but the sets more resemble German Expressionism than they do the Scandinavian starkness of Ordet or Day Of Wrath. There are also a lot of intertitles.

Gagarin: First In Space, Pavel Parkhomenko (2013, Russia). The title is probably a bit of a clue to this film’s story. It’s a fairly straightforward biopic of the first man in space. I didn’t spot any glaring inaccuracies, although I’m no great expert on Gagarin’s life. There was quite a bit of emphasis on the camaraderie of the cosmonauts and Titov’s jealousy, but it also really pushed the idea that everyone thought Gagarin should be first right from the start – which I suspect is casting a somewhat rosier glow on history than was the case. Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spacecraft looked surprisingly roomy on the inside, and the film handled its spaceflight well. I enjoyed the film, but then I’m interested in its subject matter.

Bride Of Frankenstein*, James Whale (1935, USA). A classic piece of horror that tries to link back to Shelley’s novel with an opening scene set in the Villa Diodati (in which a peculiarly stiff Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley). Other than that, the plot can be pretty much inferred from the title. Karloff’s Monster actually learns to speak in this movie, and it’s really quite silly. “Good … gooood! Bad! Bad!” And so on. Despite a couple of neat set-pieces, this is a film that shows its origins and its age far too plainly. And suffers for it.

Trafic, Jacques Tati (1971, France). Apparently, Tati was only meant to co-direct this, but he fell out with his collaborator and ended up going it alone. He plays a car designer who works for a small French company, and is responsible a gadget-filled saloon car-derived caravanette. The company plans to display this at an automobile show in Amsterdam, and so transport it to the Netherlands in the back of a truck. But the journey doesn’t quite go as planned, as the truck keeps on breaking down. Like Playtime, the plot is carried as much by sound effects as it is by dialogue, and there are a number of impressively choreographed set-pieces. The car company’s PR agent, played by American model Maria Kimberley, is impressively high-handed and incompetent. One of the biggest “gags”, a multi-car pile-up, is spoiled a little by a few elements that are a little too intrusively faked. Not as good as Mon Oncle or Playtime, but still bloody good.