As Libya is on the verge of shrugging off the chains of the most comic-book of the villainous Middle Eastern dictators, I thought it would be fun to look at some slightly more fictional varieties of Gaddafi et al. With his elite guard of female killers and penchant for a fancy costume and ranting speeches, I reckon he’d fit in nicely amongst this lot.
Continue reading Gaddafi’s Role Models: Five SF & Fantasy Despots
Just a quickie for now, although I may well update later. On a train into That London, for to meet with the mysterious docoBanksy.
The project that has taken well over three years of our life is now close to completion. A virtually complete version is going out to film festivals worldwide. We meet today to plan, strategise and plot our next move. We’re pleased and excited about the end project, and hope you will be too.
In 2011, docoBanksy will have you.
It’s looking more and more likely that Libya will be the latest of the domino nations to shrug off an oppressive regime, and hopefully find a better alternative. The power of social networking will be heavily cited as a prime factor in the destabilisation of hitherto unbudgeable despots like Mubarak and Gaddafi. Or, if you’re Malcolm Gladwell, nothing whatever to do with it.
A busy day in the kitchen yesterday. A fresh loaf, a blueberry cake, and hell, I’m in the kitchen anyway, I might as well go the whole hog and make a fish pie.
This is more or less Nigel Slater’s famous recipe, and I’ve been making it for long enough that I can quote it from memory. It’s a messy job, there’s no doubt about it, but I’ve tweaked it enough that it’s reasonably straightforward. Even if it wasn’t, fish pie would be worth the fuss.
I start with about half a pound of fish in my big saute pan. Enough milk to cover goes in, with a bay leaf if you’ve got one and some peppercorns. Bring it to a simmer, and cook until the fish is about done. Should take about ten minutes. While that’s bubbling, chop a couple of big leeks and some mushrooms (enough to give you a couple of big handfuls of dice) and a stick of celery. I also put four fist sized potatoes in the steamer to cook, as they are, in their skins.
Fish done. Fish comes out of pan, and put somewhere to stay warm. If you’re a big ole cheaty-head like me, you’ve used a fish pie mix that’s skinless, boneless and already chunked up. If not, the skin and bones will come away easily from the cooked fish, which you should keep in chunky pieces. No mince here. Pour the fishy milk into a jug through a strainer. Keep this with the fish.
Wipe out the pan. Back on the heat with a little oil and butter, and cook the leeks and celery over a lowish heat with the lid on until the leeks are soft and bright green. Whip those out, reheat the pan and do the mushrooms, letting them soak up the oil and butter. You can do these in two pans if you like, but do them separately to stop the mushrooms going wet and sloppy, rather than flavoursome and slightly caramelised.
Once the mushrooms are nice and brown, add the leeks back in, and sprinkle over a couple of tablespoons of flour. Let this cook for a minute of so until you can’t smell the flour any more, then throw in the milk. Let this bubble until the sauce you suddenly have in the pan thickens a bit to a nice creamy texture. A big spoonful of creme fraiche, lots of salt and pepper, then stir the fish back in. If you fancy chucking in any fresh herbs, flat leaf parsley, maybe some celery leaves, hell, even basil, now’s the time. Give this another five minute love in. The sauce should be creamy and rich, not at all runny or sloppy.
While that’s doing, check your spuds. They should be done. Do what you have to do to turn them into mash. I’m not going to tell you how to do it. You’re a grown up. Be comfortable with your mash-making technique.
Pile the mixture into a baking dish. Now the spuds. I use a ricer, and squish cooked unpeeled potato straight on top. Saves on peeling, and gives a nice light result. Then cheese. People say you shouldn’t put cheese on a fish pie. Screw them. I like cheese. I used a nice strong Wyke Farm cheddar with horseradish for a little doink of heat. If you’re going to be all huffy about it, just dot some butter over your mash.
Hot oven (about 200C, Gas 6) for 15 minutes or until there are nice brown toasty peaks on your mash.
Serve to someone you love (you’re not gonna go to all that effort for someone you don’t at least fancy) with some peas and a little soft music.
Worry about the washing up later.
One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.
There are several reasons why I choose to allow my Sunday posts to be quiet and reflective. The main reason, I think, is that I am in a quiet and reflective place at this time of the week.
All is still here. A cup of tea, steaming faintly. An empty plate, toast crumbs stippling the surface. Upstairs, the sounds of my wife preparing for the day. The light outside is cool. The sky seems a flat, gray bowl, but if I look carefully, I can see the faint colour changes of the cloud cover, slightly deeper hues shading away from the monochrome into blue. A bird flits from branch to branch on a tree outside, as busy as I am still.
For a moment, I let the day sink in, and distraction slip away.
The big news this weekend for music fans is the sudden appearance of the new Radiohead album, The King Of Limbs, which I’m happily downloading as I write. But if you like horror, then there’s another reason to celebrate.
Simon Aitken’s smart, grown-up vampire film Blood + Roses is finally, finally available to buy from Amazon. OK, yes, I have a deep connection to the film. I have a big fat colourist credit, and edited the behind the scenes documentary Love Like Blood. But I believe in the film. I think it’s a clever update on the mythology and iconography of the vampire trope. It’s well written, and has a sterling brace of leading performances from Benjamin Green and TV’s own Marysia Kay (she’s on Take Me Out tonight on ITV1). Those in the know are already calling Blood + Roses “Twilight For Grown-ups”. I’m really pleased that you all have the chance to enjoy a film that I’ve been banging on about for the last couple of years. Do yourself a favour, and snag a copy of Blood + Roses, Readership. You know it makes sense.
I’m thinking out loud here, so please do indulge me.
Adrian Faulkner tells a story on his excellent blog about a work colleague with a newly acquired e-reader, and his attitude to the cost of content for the device. In short, he thinks e-books are overpriced, and has taken to torrenting. Adrian recoils at this, and I agree. But at the same time…
I’m in the same position as his workmate John. I received a Kindle as a birthday gift, and love it to bits. But I was immediately struck by the disparity of pricing on the online store. Like most people with a new Kindle, I zealously hit the free or dirt cheap options, grabbing the complete works of Dostoyevsky and Dickens for less than I’d pay the lovelies at AMT Coffee for my morning cup of joe. But there were also Penguin editions of the same works that cost exactly the same as the paperback editions. There will, granted, be differences in translation, and of course e-books are liable to VAT, but apart from that I can’t see how that justifies a 700% difference in price point.
Modern authors also exhibit this disparity. Stephen King’s Under The Dome is a whopping £16.99 in the Kindle Store. You’ll pay half that for the paperback. I love Stephen King, but I’m caught in a bad place here. I don’t want to lug a breezeblock sized brick of paper around with me. That was a prime factor in buying an e-reader in the first place. At the same time, I’m buggered if I’m paying the thick end of £20 for it. Thus the dilemma that John has easily solved by merrily downloading his books for free. I don’t agree with what he’s doing, but I can kind of see his point. (In my case, I shall get the book out of the library, assuaging my conscience and supporting an essential public resource at the same time).
Part of the problem is the perception of worth. John thinks e-books are worth less than a hardback book. He sees craft and manufacturing cost in the heft and weight of a fat wodge of paper. He seems unaware of the fact that the paper is simply a carrier for the important stuff, the words on the page. But it’s not surprising he’s confused. There’s no consistency of pricing. A best selling CD, book, or DVD will cost you different amounts depending on where you buy it. And frequently when you buy it. Wait a few months after release, and a lot of titles suddenly have a huge discount applied, or turn up in twofer deals. Or sometimes free on the covers of newspapers.
Here’s a challenge. Given the choice between a vanilla DVD title in a cardboard sleeve with no extras for nothing, and a “normally” priced copy of the same thing with all the extras, I will lay money that the majority of people will plump for the freebie. I’m not talking your film buff or cineaste here. I’m talking about the man in the street. The sort of person that doesn’t want a director talking over the top of their Saturday night movie. The sort of person who doesn’t care about deleted scenes because if they were any good, they’d be in the film, wouldn’t they?
Of course, these films aren’t free. They’re promotional items, and you pay for the newspaper to get them. But they have the word FREE all over them. In the same way, musicians are now expected to put tracks online for free, again as promotion for full works. And here’s the problem. There’s already confusion over an object’s perceived worth. The idea of not paying anything for your entertainment has become an encouraged, acceptable option, regardless of the intention behind giving it away.
Neil Gaiman has extolled the virtues of this approach, citing the uptick in sales after doing just that for an audiobook of American Gods. Thriller writer Stephen Leather has done the same thing, putting his early work on the Kindle store for under a quid a shot. Again, this has been highly successful. But these are established artists, able to control the pricing structure of their material. If you’re a struggling author or film-maker, the appearance of your work on a torrent or Rapidshare feed chews up your revenue stream in a moment. If the film or book is all there is, if there’s no back catalogue for which you can use that free item as a loss leader, then the strategy seems to have failed.
That sounds incredibly negative, I know, and there’s no easy answer. Once people get used to the idea of free, then it’s really tough to change their minds. It’s easier than ever to get your work out to an audience, and much more difficult to get them to pay for it. It’s completely doable, of course – look at the success Amanda Palmer has had. She completely gets the vital role in keeping her audience sweet. She works incredibly hard at connecting and communicating with her fans.
There are ways of turning negatives into positives, too. Steve Lieber’s “Die Hard in a cave” comic Underground was merrily pirated by fans on 4Chan. Instead of complaining or issuing lawsuits, Leiber went on the site, and began chatting with the fans of his work, pointing out that the book was available as a print edition. Net result: a massive spike in sales. Similarly, fantasy author J.S. Chancellor asked people who had downloaded her work to leave reviews of it on Facebook and Amazon. It worked, and again, an uptick in sales was the result.
Self-pub and self-distribution is a tricky business to get right. It takes imagination, guile and a lot of effort to make a buck in this new marketplace, and the strategies that work for one artist are more than likely not going to work for another. Persuading your public that your work has value is more than half the battle, but if you can win that battle then good times approacheth. The Johns of this world can be talked into paying for their books and movies, if you talk to them in the right way.
(EDIT: to correct the schoolboy error JS Chancellor pointed out in the comments.)
A little break in transmission while I gather my thoughts after the post frenzy of the past couple of days. Back with a bang (or at least a dull thud) tomorrow.
The crossing where the dark roads of horror and film noir meet is a place of fertile earth, where nightmares are easily grown. The ground, after all, is fertilised with a hefty dose of bone and blood. There are a ton of great films out there that take typically noir traits, and give them a shivery twist. Think of classics like Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs. David Fincher’s Se7en. Kolchak The Night Stalker. Hell, half the X-Files was horror noir. Think of a film where a hard-boiled tec takes on a case, only to find that he’s hunting down something with a little more of the night in it than he anticipated.
Back in the heydays of noir, the 1940’s, this crosspoint was wide and broad. Noir has always been black and white in both visual and moral terms, and like horror, is not overly concerned that good should always triumph over evil. Both genres cast a bleakly jaundiced eye over human relationships, and easily find and stress-test the weak points.
The 1943 film The Seventh Victim saw producer Val Lewton take the psychological horror that he had pioneered in the classic Cat People, and add a noirish feel. Deep shadows and slashes of light were already visual cues for hard-boiled film, and this was a look in which Lewton’s long-time cinematographer Nicolas Musuraka revelled. On The Seventh Victim, he and director Mark Robson went a step further, soaking every frame in pools of darkness.
The Seventh Victim begins as the sheltered world of our heroine, Mary, is quickly stripped away. She attends a boarding school, the fees paid by her only relative, her sister Jacqueline. Jacqueline has disappeared, and the funds have dried up. Offered the choice to stay in the school as unpaid help, Mary instead opts to travel to New York to find her sister.
Once in the Big Apple, the mystery only deepens. Jacqueline has given away the family business, and got into some very bad company. Mary is quickly snared in a web of lies and deceit, and the hunt for Jacqueline will lead her to question the motives of everyone who pledges to help her.
The Seventh Victim casts an eerie, uncomfortable spell right from the first frames. Mary is urged to leave the boarding school and not return by the headmistress’ assistant, who tells her that “you must have courage to really live in the world” – a creepy foreshadowing of future events. Jacqueline is described as a rare beauty by everyone she meets, a light in the dark city – and yet she is obsessed with death, and rents a room above the Dante Restaurant (a powerfully appropriate name) containing nothing but a noose and a chair.
The film contains sequences that are the match of The Cat People in terms of shadowy shocks. Mary and a private detective who has taken her case search the cosmetics factory that used to belong to Jacqueline, at night. The one room they haven’t entered is barred by a black rectangle of shadow at the end of a dark corridor. Both Mary and the detective recoil at the sight of it. They are right to do so. There is death in that room for one of them.
The final fifteen minutes, in which Jacqueline wanders the streets after being cursed by the Satanists who have swallowed her life and shattered her sanity, are as powerful as any horror of the era. Vulnerable and alone, Jacqueline is threatened by shadows that turn out to be harmless, only to have new real, threats loom out of the darkness. Trapped by her own crumbling will, Jacqueline’s escape route is clear to us all, yet still a punch in the gut when it happens. Mary starts to hope for the future, unaware that her sister has already closed the door firmly on it. It’s an astonishingly bleak ending.
Noir doesn’t often get this creepy, horror doesn’t often have this atmosphere. Fans of both genres should find much to admire in The Seventh Victim, even if it’s a little too cold-hearted to love.
Leading Man Clive put me up to this, but then he knows my proclivities better than most. It proudly appears under the banner of the annual Film Noir Preservation Blogathon, raising funds to get classic and wrongly forgotten movies back into shape so they can thrill and chill a brand new audience. Readership, I urge you to support this worthy cause, which as I’m sure you can imagine is pretty near to my heart.
You can donate using Paypal by simply clicking on the lovely lady under the lamp-post below. Be gentle though. She may look like a kitten, but this cat has claws.
For most, the defining image associated with True Grit is of Rooster Cogburn, grizzled, one-eyed, overweight U.S. Marshal, riding down on his nemesis Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang, a blazing six-gun in either hand. The Coen Brothers don’t argue with this view, and ensure that Jeff Bridges gets his moment to grip horse traces in his teeth in their lush new version of the tale. I shall not add a contrary voice to the consensus.
I am glad to see though that the focus on this re-telling is firmly on the girl who tells the story. Little Mattie Ross, only fourteen and yet taking on the world and all its hard lessons in her pursuit of the man who murdered her father. The hunt, it is clear from the beginning, is her way of grieving, and it would be tantamount to betrayal to abandon the chase, no matter what obstacles lie in her way. The world does not care about justice, it seems, but she does. Mattie will never tell a lie, never break a promise, never walk away from a contract.
Though small enough to be knocked off her feet by the recoil every time she fires a gun, she will sleep in a funeral parlour full of corpses and fearlessly negotiate with a hard-bitten stockman to ensure she has the funds to continue her quest. Set against her, everyone else seems compromised, foolish, crippled by their misdeeds and mistakes. Her prey, Tom Cheney, is a weak, venal halfwit. Laboeuf, the Texas Ranger who falls in and out of her company is a strutting loudmouth, incapable of silence even after he near bites off his tongue. Cogburn, well, Rooster is as mean as a long winter’s night and about as ugly. He’s a drunk, a brute and a killer, who’d be dead at the end of a rope years ago if not for the star that he wears. It’s no accident that everyone but Mattie is a grotesque, with mouthfuls of appalling teeth, scars and extraordinary facial hair. As Cogburn, Jeff Bridges manoeuvres his bulk around like a bear after a stroke, quick and graceful only in combat.
Mattie is no angel. She’s stubborn as two mules, inflexible as a new leather crop. She will shed tears for no man, although shed tears she does, in a truly heartbreaking moment. The world is a simple place in her eyes, a realm where there is no excuse for the wicked to remain unpunished, for the death of an honest man to go unavenged. Mattie is biblical in her wrath, relentless and unbreakable. She seeks a man with true grit to help her bring Tom Cheney down, but in the end it is clear that she has more grit than anyone.
Hailee Steinfeld provides us with a clear, unalloyed view of Mattie Ross. In tight braids, an over-sized hat, breeches and boots, she cuts an unyielding silhouette. She is clear-eyed, tough but with an underlying sweetness. It would be easy to turn Mattie into a vengeful automaton, but that is never the case here. She takes joy in tales told round the campfire, and in the company of her beloved pony Little Blackie. She learns some awful lessons out on Indian territory, but they never dispel her faith that justice will be done, and that the men she rides with will prove as equal to the task as she.
The re-telling of True Grit is a job that has been done with care and skill. Under the lenses of Roger Deakins, the New Mexico landscapes are harsh and clean. The Brothers Coen have provided a lean script, the dialogue florid yet spare, capturing the conversations of Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf with a delight in the eccentricities and formalities of the period. There is violence, and when it appears it is sharp and brutal. But that isn’t the point to the tale, and it’s well over halfway through the film before a gun is fired in anger. True Grit is a story about how when it comes to seeking justice, innocence is frequently the greatest weapon you can wield.
An excellent comic adaptation of the moment when Rooster and Mattie first crossed paths is available on the True Grit site for your perusal here. Fill your hands.
