It all comes down to preference. Critics will view a film, particularly one based on a long-standing franchise, in a certain way, fans in another. The general public will largely stay away, not willing to spend time on a property that requires knowledge of a back-story, or investment in a main character that may not be to their liking in the first place. It’s a common story that has bitten many potential money-spinners hard, and Andrew Stanton’s lush, expensive version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books has suffered more publicly than most this year. Which is a shame. Because there’s an awful lot to enjoy.
Category: review
Best of 2011: Rob’s Twopennuth
After sterling work from my guests, it’s my turn to talk up the work that floated my boat over the last twelve months. This is by no means a complete list, but we’d both be here all day if I went down that route. In no particular order, then, but sorted in terms of delivery vector, here we go. Titles are clickable and lead to further reading, viewing or listening.
Probably, if I was to be brutally honest with myself, my film of the year. The triumphant return of Lynne Ramsay to the director’s chair, a career-best performance from Tilda Swinton and a new rising star in Ezra Miller made this brutal examination of a woman’s relationship with her bad seed son a must see.
Best soundtrack of the year, for sure. Nicholas Winding Refn’s homage to the driver movie gave Ryan Gosling the breakout role of the year, and provided some of the most powerful visuals of 2011. A touching love story and a chilly, unflinching crime film all at once. If nothing else, everyone has an opinion of the lift sequence.
Best horror film of the year, hands down. Pollyanna Mackintosh astonished in the title role, never vulnerable, always in control, even when chained to a garage wall. The Lucky McKee and Jack Ketchum script explored issues of power, gender and the myth of normality in a world of Lynchian suburbia. Funny, thought-provoking and bloody scary.
David A. Russell’s The Fighter was a remarkable and Oscar-worthy piece, but for me the fight film of the year was Warrior. Gavin O’Connor’s film gave the much-maligned field of mixed martial arts a sense of gravity and worth. Nick Nolte as an ex alcoholic boxer and Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy as his two sons who are pitted against each other in a winner-tale all tourney give riveting and utterly believable performances. A Rocky for 2011.
Animation of the year, in a tough field that included Miyazaki’s beautiful Arrietty. But Gore Verbinski’s loving and lunatic acid western was genuinely like nothing else on screen this year. Full of mind-boggling moments and set-pieces, screamingly funny and life-affirming, this was Pixar by way of Jodorowsky.
If there was one must-see film for all the wrong reasons this year, it was Charles Ferguson’s documentary on the collapse of the global financial markets. Flint-eyed with a righteous fury, Inside Job skewered the greed, venality and hubris of the men who believed they were too big to fail. Show this to anyone that thinks our financial woes are down to public sector pay or pensions.
My foreign language film of the year. Shocking, brave and sumptuous, Takashi Miike brought us a work of astonishing grace and authority. Like Inside Job, this tells the story of powerful men who believe they are untouchable. Unlike Inside Job, those men face a town full of traps and the sharp end of a sword. There’s no justice anymore.
Tender as a first kiss, heady as your first pint, Elbow’s 2011 album made friends with everyone and cemented their reputations as the country’s finest boozy balladeers. A big fat woozy hug of an album, that sticks to your ribs and will definitely keep you warm this winter.
Tom Waits: Bad As Me
Any year with a Tom Waits album in it is a year to celebrate, and 2011 saw the arrival of his best work in years. Perhaps not his most experimental work, but one where he hammered new fences in and prowled his property with a snarl and a shotgun. No-one else does it like Tom, and Bad As Me was the moment where he proved it. You will be satisfied.
This is an album that goes from minimal bleeps and drones to lovely, weary pop stylings to hammering motorik–on the first track. Wilco have never been more ambitious, more experimental, more widescreen than on The Whole Love. But they’re still accessible and effortlessly rewarding. There’s no art of almost here; this is the real deal.
The Decemberists: The King Is Dead
It’s been a grand year for folk-rock, and although a lot of people have been raving about Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver’s sophomore efforts, the more satisfying album for me was The King Is Dead. Filled with lovely ballads and proper stompers, this was a rich and enduring treat. A simpler album than their epic The Hazards Of Love, but that’s no bad thing when the end product is so uplifting and heartfelt.
Laura Marling: A Creature I Don’t Know
Miss Marling had always been an almost girl for me; great songs, but I was never quite drawn in. But A Creature I Don’t Know grabbed me by the lapels and yanked me in for a big sloppy snog. I finally figured it out: she’s embraced her inner Joni Mitchell, and grown up into a smart urban troubadour in one graceful move. There’s still mud on her strides, but she wears really nice boots now.
Hip-hop doesn’t get any more high concept than this. Geek MC and one-man music empire Akira The Don puts together a mixtape based around the soundtracks of all his favourite old-school anime, invites a ton of lairy rappers over to freestyle over the top, and comes up with an absolute gem. Why watch the throne when you can watch Fist Of The Northstar?
Lazily praised as The Sopranos with swordplay when it first came out, the HBO version of the GRR Martin fantasy series is richly textured, strange and beautiful. The shocking plot twists and brutal deaths of central characters made the show one of my few TV musts of the year. Immersive and utterly addictive. And unlike The Sopranos, this has dragons.
I’m late to the party, but a USB stick with the first two seasons has changed my mind. The most geek-friendly comedy on the box (those of you screaming for the I.T. Crowd or The Big Bang Theory need to watch this) is an extraordinary feat of sustained metatextuality and full of characters that change and grow and don’t again. Remarkable stuff that frequently has me snorting my morning coffee through my nose on the train into work.
The surprise of the year. An unpromising pilot through the Channel 4 Comedy Lab last year and a late night Thursday slot rang warning bells, and I missed the first season. My mistake. This ensemble show on the life of the staff at a suburban mobile phone franchise has cracking performances and a part-improvised script that shows off a cast on top form. It’s consistently hilarious and deeply twisted.
Also back for a second season, this sweet-natured show featuring Tom Hollander as a put-upon priest in the worst diocese in London avoids all the cliches and comes up with a programme that works on all sorts of levels. Like all the best sitcoms, it’s part social commentary, part character study–and all funny.
More in the nature of an intriguing experiment than a success, Warren Ellis and Matt “Disraili” Brooker’s SVK is a book that quite literally works on two levels. The detective story, which Ellis described as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”, ships with a UV torch that you can shine onto the page to reveal hidden dialogue and thoughts–a neat way of showing the lead character’s telepathic ability. A slim volume, but packed with ideas.
Speaking of books packed with ideas. Matt Fraction and Los Bros Ba return with a second run at the exploits of reality-shafting, universe-killing superspy Casanova Quinn and give the whole shebang a decidedly metaphysical spin. Darker and tougher than Volume One, there’s still room for Matt, Gabriel and Fabio to crank up the gleeful strangeness. Any riff on Kung Fu Panda is always welcome.
I’ve been a fan of Kate Beaton since she had a madeonamac blog, so I’m enormously smug to see everyone else catch up this year. Her history-obsessed strips are effortlessly hilarious, and her comic timing is impeccable. She makes it look easy, damn her. Probably the purest and most talented cartoonist working today, and you need the collection of her strips on your shelves. She’s made Napoleon COOL again, dammit!
This. Blew. Me. Away. Best graphic novel of the year by a light year, Craig Thompson’s massive tome takes ideas of love and loyalty, the language we use to express them and the way it both unites and divides us to create a story nested within a tale folded into a romance in every sense of the work. One to come back to and cherish again and again.
rediscovery: A Princess Of Mars
The upcoming live-action movie of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic led me to reread the original, which I remember loving as a kid. Yeah, sure, it’s rough round the edges, and a bit old-fashioned in attitude and language. But it’s also a proper no-holds-barred pageturner, stuffed full of imagination, action and adventure that starts on the run and just speeds up. It’s a fast read, and available for free on Project Gutenberg. Proper storytelling from a master of the pulp form.
Goddamn, I love John Lee. Curmudgeonly, contrary, innovative. He shook off easy rhyme patterns in favour something twitchy, febrile and earthy (“I see my baby walking down the STREET/She looking good from her head down to her TOES”). Spotify are pushing John Lee a lot recently, and it’s given me the chance to reacquaint myself with an old friend.
in 2012 I’m looking forward to: Prophet/King City
Comics discovery of the year for me, shamefully, putting me back behind the curve, is the astonishing Brandon Graham. His loose yet detailed, cartoony yet precise art does my head in. A more relaxed Geof Darrow, his books are filled with asides, footnotes and rambling offramps. He has two big releases out for 2012. A writing gig with Simon Roy on a reboot of a cheesy Rob Liefeld Image book, Prophet, reads like the most excitingly French SF-style book of the new year. A survivalist-punk story of a supersoldier revived far too late for a mission that no longer exists, in a world that has evolved without him. A far-future Conan. Has a preview.
The BIG news is a proper release for his magnum opus, King City. A slacker Transmetropolitan. Frank Miller’s Hard Boiled without the bombast. It’s got all the side shenanigans, puzzles and games that were in the original flimsies. This will be one to stow alongside Habibi on your shelves and cherish, true believers.
also: GBV
I mean, we’re all excited about this, right? The return of the most clangularly tuneful hookladed beer-fuelled band on the planet! We’re all practising our Salty Salutes, yeah? To the band whose out-takes and bootlegs outnumber the official releases by a factor of fifteen and are frequently better than the real records? The glorious reunion of Pollard and Tobin Sprout? Anyone?
Fine. Be like that. But 2012 is all about Guided By Voices to me.
and: The Muppets
because The Muppets. Because. The Muppets.
We’ll be back after Conspicuous Consumption Day for the X&HT Review Of The Year. If you thought this post went on a bit, you’re in for a shock. Whoooole lotta stuff happened in 2011.
Happy Saturnalia, Readership.
Best of 2011: Clive’s Picks
Stepping up to the challenge next is Leading Man Clive, who’s dropped a decent size list of goodness. Some of his music tips are amongst my best of 2011, and I’m gratified to note one of my favourite albums of all time as his rediscovery of the year.
Best of 2011: Trailers
I’ve asked a couple of X&HTeam-mates to help me out in the run-up to the New Year. First up, Simon Aitken has done me proud with a list of the best trailers of the year. Some good choices in here, and I’m in total agreement with his No. 1. What do you think, Readership?
Deceive The Deceiver: X&HT Saw The Ides Of March
“It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.”
Niccolo Macchiavelli
Continue reading Deceive The Deceiver: X&HT Saw The Ides Of March
Bad Seed: X&HT Watched We Need To Talk About Kevin
The evil child has been a powerful symbol in horror and fantastic fiction for decades. The Children Of The Damned. The Children Of The Corn. The Others. Most boys called Damian.
To that roster we can finally add Kevin Katchadorian. In Lionel Shriber’s acclaimed novel, he stalked the pages while never really springing out at us. The book’s structure, built as a series of letters, provided a sense of distance from him. That may have been a kindness. Thanks to the extraordinary work of director Lynne Ramsey and the actor she chose to play Kevin, Ezra Miller, we are drawn uncomfortably close to Kevin. Close enough to see the fire rising in his eyes.
The story is simple, and resonant. Told through the eyes of Kevin’s mother Eva, we are led through Kevin’s life, and how from the very beginning he was somehow … different. Incapable of love. Manipulative, to an extent that Machiavelli would have admired. Utterly free from morals, from any iota of empathy with the world. A monster.
Ramsey plays with time, sliding us back and forth along the eighteen years from Kevin’s birth to the awful event that he engineers to define himself. We realise early on what he has done, but the director is canny enough to keep one big shock from us until the end. Meanwhile, the monster grows. Throughout, we see Kevin as Eva sees him. In some ways, she is the only person who Kevin chooses to be honest with. With her, he doesn’t hide his true state. With her, he is always truthful.
The film is soaked in crimson, scarlet, bloody washes saturating the screen. It’s the most painterly film I’ve seen in a long time, giallo-garish, lush as an Argento. Ramsey, her DoP Seamus McGarvey and colourist Stuart Fyvie have done extraordinary work here, flooding the screen with coloured light.
The performances throughout are equally remarkable. Ezra Miller, and the boys that play him as a child, create a brooding, demonic presence. A trickster, charming when he needs to be, terrible when the mask slips. Tilda Swinton shines through the horror, bruised, wounded yet never defeated. The final meeting between her and her son tells you everything you need to know about a mother’s love for her son, no matter what the cost. Thinking about it, it also tells you why she stays in a town that despises her – and why, to a certain extent, she is blamed for Kevin’s actions. The greatest horror of all is how unconditional, how illogical, how unbreakable that love can be.
2011 is becoming a bumper year for horrors with strong central female characters, and to my mind We Need To Talk About Kevin fits right in with films like The Skin I Live In and The Woman. These are films that deal with aspects of womanhood, and the darkness at the core of that state. WNTTAK is by far the subtlest of these, keeping the nastiness largely off screen. Yet it still has the power to shock and chill, largely because Ramsey builds a skewed, disturbing atmosphere and allows our imagination to do the rest. This is an astonishing achievement from film-makers at the top of their game. You need to see We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Forty Years Of Fear: The Exorcist, reissued
The following is a crosspost with For Winter Nights, the excellent literary blog from my good friend WetDarkandWild. She doesn’t really do horror, so I volunteered to help out when a review copy of the reissued Exorcist dropped through her letterbox. On this occasion, I was very happy indeed to do the favour…
For any horror fan that knows the genre, The Exorcist is the alpha and the omega. A dark, brutal trap of a film, and one of the few whose reputation remains unsullied and potent.
But the book, published in 1971, came first. A sensation on it’s release, a large part of the success of William Friedkin’s adaptation is due to how closely it cleaves to the original story. Now a fortieth-anniversary edition has been brought out, with tweaks and tidying by William Peter Blatty – an excuse, as he says in the foreword, to polish “the rhythms of the dialogue and prose throughout.” The original, as he admits, was rushed, and subject to editorial meddling. We have been presented with something closer to a director’s cut. Although fear not – there’s no George Lucas-style redecoration here.
Blatty began his writing career as a screenwriter, and those skills are obvious in the book. The story moves like a runaway train, at a pace that becomes ever more hectic. The purple prose that he uses in the prologue, set in Northern Iraq, is something of a red herring – the main body of the book uses a cool, distant style. Reportage that only makes the horrifying events in the book that bit more awful.
Do I need to tell the story? In broad strokes: actress Chris McNeil lives in a rambling house in a suburb of Washington with her daughter, Regan. The girl, a sweet-natured creature, starts to talk about an imaginary friend, Captain Howdy. The good captain gradually takes over, slipping into Regan as if he was shrugging on a suit. Howdy is no friend. Regan has become possessed by a demon.
The book is soaked from the first lines in a thick sense of dread. We’re never sure where Howdy comes from. A relic bearing his likeness is unearthed at the Iraqi dig that begins the book. Regan has been playing with a Ouija board. It’s never clear. It doesn’t need to be. All we need to know is that the girl has been taken, and that she will not be easily recovered.
In some ways, the story unfolds like a police procedural as Chris, and later the priest who becomes entangled in the case, the conflicted Damian Karras, try to find evidence that Regan is sick, suffering from delusions, somehow self-hypnotised. Like Sherlock Holmes, they eliminate the impossible to reach the incredible truth. The exorcist of the title, the haunted Father Merrin, only appears three-quarters of the way through the book. Before then we, like Chris and Father Karras, are struggling to make sense of the senseless.
The book still holds the ability to shock and unsettle. Sweet Regan’s transformation (is it any coincidence that her nickname is Rags? Howdy treats her as a puppet, throwing her around like a rag doll) is rapid and terrible, her foul language a shock when we have witnessed how her mother can’t even swear properly. Blatty’s clear, uncoloured description of what the possession is doing to Regan brings us to horror and revulsion in equal measure. We are rarely out of the Georgetown house, and as the focus becomes more claustrophobic, the tension builds. When Merrin arrives, in a moment that is the most memorable image of the film, the relief is palpable. But the worst is yet to come.
Blatty delivers his shocks like a swordsman’s coup de grace, leaving them to the end of a chapter, often in the space of one line. Then away again, leaving the resonance of what we’ve just read to clatter like a man thrown down a set of steps. It’s key to the pacing of the book. He doesn’t dwell on the horror. He knows that we’re more than capable of doing that ourselves.
The Exorcist remains a remarkable achievement in modern horror, a book that transcends any danger of pulpy exploitation in favour of something much darker and richer. Seen at the time as harsh commentary on the corruption of the American soul during Vietnam, it stands today as an allegory on the ugliness that lurks in everyone, and how it can infect even the most innocent of victims.
Howdy may be otherworldly, but he takes a lot of his material from the people around him. The book digs more deeply into the characters than the film can, drawing you more deeply into their suffering, into their conflicts, and into the awful understanding that is The Exorcist’s black heart. The sacrifice at the end of the book is almost inevitable – you can see it coming from page one. Evil has a price that has to be paid before any form of salvation can be reached.
State Of The Noir Nation
Dark fictions flourish in dark times. As we lurch from financial crisis to social meltdown, our reading habits change and our idea of what constitutes light relief gains some weight. This is a simple truth that the editors of new anthology title Noir Nation understand all too clearly. It’s the perfect time to launch, and the premiere issue is stuffed as full of hardboiled treats as an old fashioned sweetie shop.
A well-curated genre collection will take pleasure in the display of a wide range of voices, opinions and stories. Noir Nation hits all the buttons hard. It’s broad, wide and deep in scope, which suits a journal with a truly international remit. Standout stories for me include Tristan Davies “Surgeons”, which introduces us to a doctor who makes Gregory House look like that nice English actor Hugh Laurie, and RF Warner’s “Dog Of A Different Breed”, the story of a drug run gone bad, an unfortunate incident with a dog, and a serial killer with a yen for poetry and gameplay.
Speaking of poetry, there’s also room for a piece by Bonnie Parker. Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie Parker. Seems like she could shoot better than she could sling a rhyme, but it’s a fascinating curio from a famous gun moll.
The first ish also gives us a fascinating discussion on what constitutes contemporary noir (Alan Ward Thomas, the Eastern Hemisphere editor, pulls together a fascinating take that includes transhumanist SF, Alvin Toffler-style future shock, Cubism and Jung) and a forum on whether the genre has a moral compass. The jury’s out on that one, but there are equally compelling arguments for and against.
The one misfire is Jon Danko and Danda’s graphic novel, Fired On Deadline. It’s muddled, and text-heavy, with none of the bite of the prose pieces. It also, at least in my preview copy, looked as if it had been inserted at too low a resolution, leading to blurry, rasterised artwork. That’s a real shame, considering my predilections. It also does Danda’s lovely expressionistic art (he did the cover, shown above, which is a much better showcase of his talents) no justice. It’s apparently the first part of a larger work, and I’d be interested to see where Danko and Danda take the idea of Flamenco Noir. But for now at least, the whole thing looks like something of an afterthought.
But that’s a minor quibble regarding a strong anthology bulging with good stuff. You can pick it up at the Kindle Store and still get change from a poorly cephalopod. Noir Nation shows a genre that is in very rude health indeed. Live and goddam kicking.
They Sure Made A Monkey Outta Me: X&HT (finally) Saw Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
It takes a big man to admit he was wrong. Which must make me some kind of giant, even though I’m feeling quite small at the moment.
A telling off in the comments and quiet disbelief from everyone that had seen the film that I was taking a stand, mated with a quiet Thursday where there was nothing else on at the Vue led to me taking a seat at an afternoon screening of Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.
Continue reading They Sure Made A Monkey Outta Me: X&HT (finally) Saw Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Frightfest part 2: Attack Of The Leading Man
As promised, we are subject to a takeover from the mighty (and mightily-bearded) Clive Ashenden, who went above and beyond when I called out for contributions for the X&HT coverage of Frightfest. Over to you, oh my Leading Man…
On Thursday 25th August hundreds of genre pilgrims descended on the Empire Leicester Square for the annual celebration of all that is best in Horror cinema: Film4 Frightfest.
On Monday 29th August after 5 days, 36 films, and numerous short films, trailers, Q&As, interviews, and special events; they staggered back out into the moonless night, pale and red-eyed, and babbling tales of eldritch things and widescreen terrors.
And your humble correspondent was amongst them. A little personal history before we plunge into the dark meat: This is Frightfest’s twelfth year and my tenth as a weekend passholder. In 2005 my horror short “Snatching Time” (co-written by X&HT’s own Rob Wickings) was screened before “Broken”.
Last year the teaser trailer I wrote and directed for “Habeas Corpus” – the horror anthology movie on which (together with Rob, Brendan Lonergan, Simon Aitken [“Blood+Roses”], and Paul Davis [“Beware The Moon”]) I am attached to direct one of the stories – was screened before “Primal”. So I have a long standing connection and love of the biggest and best horror film festival in the UK, as both a filmmaker and horror fan.
Due to the dual screen format of the festival, it wasn’t physically possible to see all of the films shown. But I managed to catch 24 films, and I’m going to highlight the ten best. So gentle readers, if you feel ready to enter some very dark places, take my clawed hand and I’ll be your guide to the best of Frightfest 2011.
Continue reading Frightfest part 2: Attack Of The Leading Man
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 