Now You See Me

I like the look of this, particularly as it seems to involve robbing banks and giving the money to deserving people, an agenda I can always get behind:-

 

It’s out early July.

Filler content with evil abiding

This review appeared on the old TTA Press website on the 24th of October 2007:-

ABIDING EVIL by ALISON BUCK
Alnpete paperback, 500pp, £9.99

So, a new publisher and a new writer, but to some extent the same old, same old, with a story straight out of the backwoods horror school of Hollywood fright flicks, plus grace notes courtesy of Richard Laymon and Jeepers Creepers.

For openers we get a hundred pages of scene setting, the scene in question being isolated woodland in America where a monster preys on young children, appearing at intervals of twenty years. Skip forward to the present day and cut to the chase, with four assorted couples stranded in a snowbound hotel deep in the aforesaid forest. And then the children disappear, leaving the adults to mount a rescue operation and piece together a terrible story of evil stretching back over the generations.

This is all pretty much standard fare, a book that I enjoyed reading in a pass the time sort of way, but which never really seemed to come alive, partly because of the predictability of the plot (we even get the ‘surprise’ ending where the monster comes back to life, which is okay if not obligatory in a horror flick, but after 500 pages I expected something a bit more in the way of closure), the convenience of having a ghost put in an appearance and the occasional flatness of Buck’s writing (she seems to shun metaphors and similes, but doesn’t quite have the wherewithal to do without), which is workmanlike rather than enjoyable per se.

On the plus side, the back story is intriguing, with newspaper clippings and official documents put to good effect, and some credible motivation is supplied for the monster’s behaviour, even if we’re never really quite sure how he became a supernatural being in the first place. The woodland setting is handled tolerably with a genuine sense of tension as the adults scour this snow girt landscape for their missing children, while Buck is at her best in characterisation. There is singer Annie with her husband Bill and their young kids Lisa and Mikey, acerbic lawyer Neil and his garrulous partner Dave, drunken Phil with his young partner Lou and their baby, Jeff and Rita with rebellious teen Emma, each of these people given individual traits and distinctive voices, with obnoxious Neil as the one you love to hate and want to see get his comeuppance; a man who could put the cause of gay liberation back fifty years without even trying.

It’s formulaic stuff certainly, but well executed and an undemanding read when you have time to pass, with slightly more to recommend it than not.

 

 

 

Song for a Sunday – The Sound of Silence

Last Sunday I was listening to these guys.

This Sunday you get to listen to them.

Sound fair?

A Tale of Two Tuesdays…

…written on a Saturday.

(WARNING: Will contain spoilers.)

Back in May I went to the cinema twice, each time on a Tuesday (because that’s the day I can get in cheap with my discount card), and these are the films I saw:-

Iron Man 3

Okay, so there is a new menace on the block, a ruthless terrorist known as The Mandarin, and he’s threatening the US in oh so many ways. Cue Tony Stark/Iron Man making himself a target to draw the bad guy out, but he succeeds a little too well, and ends up in boonies USA with only a kid to help him out. Of course you can’t keep a hero of IM’s calibre down for long, so he eventually tracks down The Mandarin only to find that the guy is a front for homegrown baddies Advanced Idea Mechanics, led by a couple of people Tony snubbed back in the day. And cut to the no holds barred showdown.

Mixed feelings about this. It was better than the second, but not as good as the first. Robert Downey Jr was, as ever, riveting as wisecracking Tony Stark, the playboy genius in a metal suit, a role that he has truly made his own, to the point that I will now never be able to imagine anyone else as Stark. Gwyneth Paltrow provides sterling back-up as the feisty Pepper Potts, a woman who knows her own mind and can give Tony a piece of it when his own is lacking. I liked the rest of the supporting cast as well, some well rounded characters given flesh by skilled actors, and the scenes with the young boy were a comedy delight. Of course, this is a superhero movie, and there was plenty of the kind of action you’d expect, with loads of explosions and derring-do, cinema as pure spectacle, with an army of Iron Men taking on a host of fiery bad guys in the finale.

So what’s not to like? Well, there were moments when Ben Kingsley threatened to steal the film as the megalomaniacal Mandarin, a distillation of pure evil, and then they went and pissed it all away by showing him as a whiny English thespian playing straight man to the real villain, Aldrich Killian of AIM. It sounds like a clever plot twist in principle, but I hated it. The Mandarin was one of the iconic villains of the Marvel Age of Comics, a character I grew up with, and here they just trivialised him. You can of course find all sorts of subtexts, such as fear of the yellow peril shown as unfounded while the true bad guy, as ever, is the representative of corporate America (and there is an element of chauvinism in that interpretation), but to me it simply felt wrong, a travesty of all that I’d expected, the monster having his mask taken away in the final reel. So yes, I enjoyed this film, it had so much going for it, plenty of bang for your buck, but in my heart I felt cheated.

Give me back my Mandarin, you bastards.

Oh yeah, Stan Lee showed up as a beauty pageant judge.

Star Trek – Into Darkness

The second film in the Trek franchise reboot opens with Kirk breaking the Prime Directive on an alien planet to save Spock’s life. He is relieved of command of the Enterprise, but you can’t keep a good man down and no sooner has the terrorist Harrison launched an attack on Star Fleet than Kirk is back in the saddle and charged with tracking the enemy down and bringing him back to face justice. The mission is slightly complicated by the fact that Harrison is hiding on a planet in Klingon space. In fact not a lot here is what it first seems – Harrison is revealed as Khan, one of fifty odd superior beings bred for war in a previous age and kept in cryogenic suspension ever since, and Khan’s end game is to set his comrades free, but he himself, along with the Enterprise, is being used in a plot by a Star Fleet admiral who wants to spark a war with the Klingons.

I don’t have any reservations about this, aside from a few plot elements which seemed slightly off kilter, but as a big budget space action movie it hit all the right spots. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto et al were fine in roles that didn’t really require much of them except to throw themselves around in a heroic manner and emote manly friendship, though we get a bit more depth/range courtesy of a Spock/Uhura romance, exploring the former’s ability to feel and the latter’s coping ability when confronted with a man so emotionally stunted as to pass for a borderline sociopath. Simon Pegg’s Scotty provided a smidgen of humour, though at times this seemed slightly forced. Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan acted everyone else off the screen, and held the viewer mesmerised for any scene in which he appeared, and the character was far from being unsympathetic, as there was some justice to his cause if not his methods. There were plenty of battles, both between individuals and starships, and it all kept you on the edge of your seat and eyes wide at what was appearing on the screen, wondering how they could top that. At the end, as with Iron Man 3, the real enemy turned out to be ‘one of our own’ pursuing a personal agenda – this seems to be an emerging Hollywood trope, never blame the outsider, never admit that anyone other than those already in the gang could destroy the gang, a curious form of self-deception at the societal level, but at the same time probably a good thing as the power of right wing groups with their hate filled agendas grows. Or perhaps there’s a more subtle subtext/comment, with the terrorist Khan the creation of the society he has set out to undermine.

Which film did I prefer?

Oh, Make Mine Marvel, for all its flaws.

Books Read in 1975

Due to popular demand (well Stephen Theaker seemed to think it was a good idea, and I give him huge respect as the only person I know who seems possibly even more anal retentive about books than I am) I’ve decided to follow Art Garfunkel’s example and list on this blog all the books I’ve read, adding one year each month until we get up to date, or I get bored with it all, or don’t have time, or die, or…

You get the picture.

Anyway, I did some checking and apparently I didn’t start listing books read in 1973, or if I did I can’t find that list.

Pete’s big old list begins on the 26th of August 1975, and between then and the end of the year I read 46 books (as listed below).

Moorcock is the most read author by a long stretch, with Farmer trailing in second.

My big discovery of the year was Gore Vidal, whose Myra Breckinridge I picked up simply because it had a picture of Raquel Welch in a star spangled swimsuit on the cover, a tie-in with the movie in which she’d starred (Vidal had protested she was too masculine for the role, as I recall). I subsequently read everything by Vidal that I could get my hands on, so prurience can lead to higher things.

Actually, I might have read the book earlier and been reprising it here.

On my 21st birthday I was reading Jack Vance.

And it appears that I wasn’t interested in women at this stage in my life, though I did have a soft spot for the Florentine Renaissance.

Here’s the list:-

The Florentine Renaissance – Vincent Cronin

Not Before Time – John Brunner

The Shores of Death – Michael Moorcock

Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal

Seven Footprints to Satan – Abraham Merritt

The Eternal Champion – Michael Moorcock

Phoenix in Obsidian – Michael Moorcock

The Flowering of the Renaissance – Vincent Cronin

I Sing the Body Electric – Ray Bradbury

The Bull and the Spear – Michael Moorcock

The Oak and the Ram – Michael Moorcock

Metamorphosis and Other Stories – Franz Kafka

Methuselah’s Children – Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love – Robert A. Heinlein

The Image of the Beast – Philip Jose Farmer

Occultism – Julien Tondriau

Up the Line – Robert Silverberg

The Electronic Lullaby Meat Market – John Spencer

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

The People Trap – Robert Sheckley

The Space Merchants – Cyril Kornbluth & Frederick Pohl

Count Brass – Michael Moorcock

The Champion of Garathorm – Michael Moorcock

The Quest for Tanelorn – Michael Moorcock

Indoctrinaire – Christopher Priest

The Thirst Quenchers – Rick Raphael

Mindswap – Robert Sheckley

Out of Space and Time Volume II – Clark Ashton Smith

The Planet Buyer – Cordwainer Smith

The Underpeople – Cordwainer Smith

Sirius – Olaf Stapledon

The Anome – Jack Vance

The Brave Free Men – Jack Vance

The Asutra – Jack Vance

The Wind Whales of Ishmael – Philip Jose Farmer

The Moon of Skulls – Robert E. Howard

The Hand of Kane – Robert E. Howard

Solomon Kane – Robert E. Howard

Dare – Philip Jose Farmer

Beyond This Horizon – Robert A. Heinlein

The Alley God – Philip Jose Farmer

The Starbeast – Robert A. Heinlein

The Fabulous Riverboat – Philip Jose Farmer

Stonehenge – Harry Harrison & Leon E. Stover

The Battle of Forever – A. E. Van Vogt

The Day It Rained Forever – Ray Bradbury

House Movies

Both due for release later this month, according to the coming attractions column at the website for one of my local multiplexes:-

 

This film contains strong language, crude sexual humour and drug use. Personally, I feel I might need all three to sit through it. Hasn’t the Scary Movie franchise mined out this seam?

This may also be an uncomfortable watch, but for very different reasons:-

 

Fantasy x3

The recent death of Ray Harryhausen inspired me to watch the first of these three films, and the fact that they were the only recent fantasy purchases I hadn’t yet watched decided me on the other two.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

I loved this film when I first saw it as a teenager and I love it still. It captures perfectly the feel of the Greek myths, which I encountered as a child filtered through the medium of Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes. The gods play their games with us mere mortals, giving a kingdom to one man only to then oversee his death at the hands  of another, and call it all fate. Jason is the hero who acts as their pawn, but at the same time he finds a measure of defiance, daring to dream of a time when things will be different. Nonetheless, you cannot help feeling that his determination to steal the Golden Fleece from the King of Colchis makes him little better than the indifferent Olympians, placing his own desires above any higher moral law and the rights of others. All of which is by the by, as the appeal of this film is in Harryhausen’s creations, the giant Talos, the harpies, the skeleton’s sown from the dragon’s teeth. It is dazzling stuff, as breathtaking now as it was all those many years ago when I first saw it, the appeal not dimmed by the greater potential of CGI. We’re off the map. Here be dragons. Here be the magic of stop-motion. Hail Harryhausen.

Solomon Kane (2009)

A character created by Robert E. Howard, Kane is a ruthless mercenary, the leader of a band of killers for hire, who abandons his violent ways when he learns from a demon that his soul is forfeit to hell (you’d think it would have occurred to him before, given all that murder and mayhem). But then he is forced to abandon his newfound pacifism when a young girl he has vowed to protect is stolen by the servants of an evil necromancer, and the quest to save her leads Kane back to his ancestral home and a fight with the older brother he left for dead many years ago. This didn’t do too well at the box office as I recall, but I rather enjoyed it. James Purefoy in the title role is suitably dour and laconic for the Puritan Kane, but this isn’t really Howard’s character and so his interpretation seems slightly off kilter in a story driven by CGI, and with a necessity for each action scene to top what has gone before. While the CGI pales compared to Harryhausen’s work, seeming quite soulless, I can’t deny that it is visually impressive, and the film is at its strongest when depicting scenes of a ravaged England, bleak and arid landscapes, people living in squalor and fearful for their lives. I can’t help wondering what they might have achieved if they’d stayed faithful to the source material, worked with shadows instead of filling the screen with monsters. This was worth the pound I paid for it, and I may watch it again at some point, but it will never have the hold on my affections that Jason does.

Dark Crystal (1982)

Strange thing – when I first attempted to watch this, I had to give up as it all seemed a bit Clangerish; second time around I stayed the course and loved it. The film is animated, courtesy of Jim Henson and Frank Oz (the Muppet men) and with creatures designed by the artist Brian Froud. It’s set on a world dominated by two dying races, the benign Mystics and the evil Skeksis, who rule with the aid of their Garthim servants. Only the Gelfling Jen can heal the world and cause it to regenerate through repairing the dark crystal. There’s an almost childlike feel to this film, something akin to the reputed sensawunda beloved of science fiction aficionados. You revel in the evil of the reptilian Skeksis and the atrocities of which they seem capable, enacted by the crablike Garthim, and opposed to them is the power of the gentle, placid Mystics, who seem distinctly ordinary in comparison, the lavish lifestyle of the former versus the bucolic contentment of the latter. The film’s makers seem to realise that both are one-dimensional, absolute good as tedious and lacking in potential as absolute evil, and there are various clues in the narrative that prime us for the final revelation, both races are parts of an incomplete whole. Their ‘healing’ is achieved through the intervention of Jen and Kira, the last of the Gelflings, and it is with their race that the future lies, they are the inheritors, the ones who may still aspire. It’s a slow film, frustrating at times, but ultimately rewarding.

I also watched a video compilation DVD Britney Spears Greatest Hits: My Prerogative, but enjoyable as they undoubtedly are, those type of fantasies lie outside the scope of this blog post.

So what fantasy film favourites do the rest of you have?