Ryan's Head

Stephen Malkmus/Jeff and Jack Lewis – 11/06/08 – Ancienne Belgique, Brussels

2008-08-24T01:27:00.000-07:00

I was a Pavement fan back in high school (quite a few years ago now), but I never really got into singer/guitarist Stephen Malkmus’ solo stuff once the members of Pavement went their separate ways. So hearing that he was coming to play a gig in Brussels – and that he was being supported by Jeffrey Lewis, whose stuff I’ve liked for a couple of years – was great news: exposure to Malkmus’ solo material and I get to see Lewis perform live.

Jeff Lewis, for those who don’t know, is a New York-based singer/song writer. His songs tend to fall into two categories: slice of life songs about his life, and lessons on musical history, with the two sometimes dovetailing together, as in the fantastic Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror. He was performing with his brother, Jack, who provided bass guitar and backing vocals. The interaction between the two brothers and Jeff’s interaction with the audience were excellent, even if some songs (particularly those on musical history) tended to leave the crowd somewhat dumbfounded on how to react. His more slice-of-life and comedy based songs, such as If You Shoot the Head You Kill the Ghoul and The East River, garnered a better reaction, though I had a feeling that the audience couldn’t fully appreciate his storytelling abilities because of the linguistic divide. This may explain Jeff’s choice to include a large amount of visual techniques into his set. Jeff, also a comic artist, used his own work to illustrate one of his songs (Gentle Jim) and satirise an old Nirvana song (Sifting). Both great stuff.

To be honest, this was perhaps not Jeff’s best gig in terms of audience reaction (most people were there to see Malkmus, after all), but in terms of showmanship it was solid, and I enjoyed finally having an opportunity to see him live. It more than lived up to my expectations. Something that Stephen Malkmus utterly failed to do.

I think that Malkmus’ set may have been one of the worst gigs I’ve ever attended. Malkmus came out on stage, and proceeded to slowly crawl up his own arse. Let me explain that: what he performed cannot really be called songs, and only from a very forgiving point of view could be considered music. It was a long, dull, formless jam session. Mindless self-indulgence with little consideration for the people who’d paid to see him perform his songs. And this poses a particular problem in writing a review, as the old formulas like “he followed this with a rousing rendition of _______” and “wowed the audience with crowd pleasers such as _____ and _____” fail to be of any use when a set has no identifiable songs. During the gig, I thought that maybe he’d gone through some experimental prog phase that I wasn’t aware of, but I’ve listened to all his solo albums since then, and can safely say that what he performed on stage bears absolutely no relation to what’s on his albums. I didn’t want Pavement covers. But I did want to hear something representative of his solo work to see if it was worth buying (I just ended up downloading it instead, because I don’t want to give him any more of my money).

And based on audience reaction to his set, I’m not the only one who had this point of view. Most people stood stock still and looked on bemused as Malkmus wallowed in the mud of his own ego and produced pointless, unengaging noise. This was made worse by his complete failure to build any sort of rapport with the audience – he stared at his shoes and said as little as possible. The set was mildly redeemed by an encore which featured actual proper songs. But by then the mystified crowd had thinned out, and gathered around Jeffrey Lewis’ merch stand. Good for them!

Fantastic Four 2

2007-12-09T05:37:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t really planning on writing a review on this film before I watched it, but it’s actually pretty good review fodder for a variety of reason. So...

I was pretty surprised when I heard that this sequel was in the works. The first film was competent but workmanlike, and primarily suffered from a misinterpretation of the basic premise of the Fantastic Four. Namely, it positions them as science fiction heroes rather than adventurers. It’s admittedly only a very vague distinction, but it nonetheless is a different subgenre. As the film stands, it belongs in the same group as Flash Gordon; the Fantastic Four should be more like Indiana Jones.

But the sequel is stuck with this interpretation, and tries to make the most of it. Unsurprisingly and logically given the above re-interpretation, the choice for our science heroes’ foe in this film is the Silver Surfer/Galactus combo. The image of the Silver Surfer lends itself to the screen, and the impressive CGI renders the character superbly. Galactus is only shown, however, as a swirling black cloud, which is probably for the best. His comic book design is preposterous and ugly. It was best avoided.

As for the plot, it varies widely. The basic idea of a galactic threat is handled well and Silver Surfer turning up as the herald, his subsequent bonding with Sue (who is still horribly miscast), and final sacrifice to save the planet is all fine. It’s in the peripherals that the film runs into problems. Principle amongst these is the return of Doom, the first film’s villain, without any explanation after his apparent death. The subplot with him stealing the Surfer’s board is embarrassing fanfic at best, though it does intersect with The Human Torch’s arc where he comes through for the team and stops going into business for himself, which at least ranks as character development. Of all the characters, The Thing is probably the one character who gets sidelined, but given that stories that focus on him tend toward the maudlin, perhaps that’s for the best.

The other aspect of the film that doesn’t sit well with me is the emphasis on the team as celebrities. This seems to me like an attempt the make it fit into the current reality TV and tabloid obsessed culture, and I feel making the film more timeless would have been a better strategy. Nonetheless, the film is superior to its predecessor. But still doesn’t come close to tapping the potential of the franchise.

Taichi Yamada: In Search of a Distant Voice

2007-08-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Taichi Yamada made his English language debut a few years ago with an excellent ghost story called Strangers, which dealt with a recent divorcee finding his dead parents alive and well. It was followed last year by this novel, which is actually taken from earlier in the writer’s career, having originally been published in Japanese in the mid-80s. It’s not even nearly as good as Strangers, but it does demonstrate a recent positive trend in Japanese literature in translation.

In Search of a Distant Voice is the story of Tsuneo, an immigration officer with a shady past who, as he begins preparations for an arranged marriage, starts to hear a woman’s voice. The voice becomes a haunting preoccupation for him to the point where it ruins his chances of marriage and he’s forced to take time off work. Once he confesses what happened when he was living in California, the mysterious woman agrees to meet with him.

Now, as an outline, that’s not a bad story – on paper it makes a decent supernatural thriller. Sadly, the execution is poor. The impetus of the story is governed by two major questions: ‘what happened in Tsuneo’s past?’ and ‘who is the woman?’, with an implicit link that there will be some sort of connection between the two that explains why Tsuneo can hear this voice, or why the woman is able to talk only to him. But ultimately, the revelation about Tsuneo’s past is anticlimactic. Now, this may be a cultural difference or just my broad pragmatic streak, but it’s nothing that shocking. To make matters worse, the mysterious woman’s identity is never revealed, and there no connection given between the two. It’s a potentially interesting plot chased down dead ends.

The other major interesting idea in the novel – the possibility that there is no voice and Tsuneo is just suffering from a mental illness - is dismissed, even though this would meld well with the revelation of his past, if it were revealed that he had post-traumatic stress syndrome. However, the novel goes out of its way to tell us that this voice does belong to another person, and then completely fails to provide a satisfactory denouement. One plus is that Tsuneo is a well-drawn character – an everyman at odds with his environment, as portrayed through the parallels between his current job and his situation while living in America. It’s a shame he finds himself stuck in such an ill-conceived plot.

But while the book isn’t wildly successful in its own right, it signifies a larger trend in Japanese literature in translation, and in literature in translation in general. Literature translated from other languages has long been regarded as intellectual. There are two major reasons for this. Firstly, many of the academics who work as literary translators on the side tend to turn there attention to more literary texts. Further, literary translation is a poorly paid enterprise and, particularly in Japanese literature, subsidies are awarded for translating more literary texts. These combined means that many of the works which are selected for translation into English are academic tomes with little interest for anyone outside of academia.

There are two results of this situation. Firstly, it’s very rare for a literary work in translation to be a commercial success, and as a result a publisher is hesitant when approached with any literature in translation. Secondly, it gives a skewed impression of foreign literatures: imagine if someone thought that English literature was just Austen, Dickens, Rushdie and other academic texts without King, Koontz, Asimov and all the other genre writers to set them off. The recent trend has seen more foreign genre literature being translated, making literature in translation, and the work of literary translators, more financially viable, and going a way to dispelling the myth that foreign literature is difficult, intellectual and impenetrable. So while In Search of a Distant Voice isn’t a particularly good story, I’m nevertheless glad it exists in English.

Tony Goldwyn: The Last Kiss

2007-03-11T13:34:00.001-07:00

The Last Kiss was last year’s summer romantic comedy, and its biggest selling point was probably Zach Braff, better known as JD from good-but-getting-crappier-by-the-episode Scrubs. This is nothing like his work there.

I can understand Braff wanting to do something different with the three months of the year that he isn’t filming Scrubs, but this is truly an extreme antithesis. Scrubs is a fast-paced show with weird characters and hilarious cut-aways. The Last Kiss is… well, imagine a Kevin Smith film stripped of all the jokes and snappy dialogue, reduced to half speed and given an indy soundtrack, and you pretty much have it. Now, perhaps it’s not far to compare the film to the lead actor’s TV series, but that’s what most viewers are coming into this with a knowledge of, and the shift in gears is incredibly jarring.

But let’s look at the film on its own terms. It doesn’t bear up much better, but at least it’s fairer.

The film is the story of five couples, all having problems of various kinds: impending parenthood, current parenthood, a messy break-up, affairs, and a regular shag wanting a serious relationship. We stagger through scenes where not a lot happens and the characters are flat and not at all likable.

Admittedly, the film does have a point to make (basically, that relationships are hard), but it takes forever to make it, plodding through mundane moments in the lives of the stock characters, and smugly thinking it's cleverer than it really is. It has brief moments of genuine charm, but it could have really done with a bit more plot or more developed characters, or with losing about 30 minutes. As it stands, it’s a protracted a slightly pretentious film, likely to bore.

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

2007-03-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

I apologise for the extended dead air on the blog. I became quite apathetic to my job, and that apathy spread into my private life. I also dedicated a lot of time to watching stuff that really wasn’t interesting enough to review. I have a new job now, which isn’t nearly as boring as the last one, and so hopefully, this will be the first of a series of regular posts, as I have a pile of CDs and films to watch/write about, a few books that I’d like to get into, and I still haven’t done that analysis of The Dreamers which I was talking about ages ago.

But for now, let’s have a look at last year’s hit comedy Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I hated it.

For those of you who don’t know, Borat is a creation of Sacha Baron Cohen (better known to most Brits as Ali G). He’s supposed to be from Kazakhstan and is in America to gather information on the country for the Kazakhstani government. Cue cultural misunderstandings as Cohen annoys people across an entire continent, and points out America’s faults in hilariously politically incorrect fashion.

I’m not a fan of political correctness by any means, but I think there are only special occasions when certain jokes should be made in a public forum, particularly jokes about Muslims and Jews. If these form part of some coherent critique or the expressing of a valid political point-of-view, I can understand it. But Borat isn’t a film with a political stance – it simply pokes fun at these targets for a cheap laugh, and I think that that’s a dangerous mentality and attitude when it comes to anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment: it renders the two acceptable by laughing off a very serious problem. Quite apart from that, the jokes aren’t even original. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Jews are greedy and want your money. Er, yeah...

Now, there’s some potential interest in the film as far as it being a snapshot of America, but even these insights lack depth, and don’t tell us anything we don’t already know: yes, the South is xenophobic and bigotted, frat boys are idiot man-sluts with all the rafinement of a boar, and Texas sucks. There’s a very cool scene with Borat and a group of black teenagers, who turn out to be the friedliest people in the film, totally toppling the stereotype. But Cohen’s aim isn’t to explore the culture, it’s simply to get a cheap laugh and run, and many potentially interesting scenerios and interviews are cut short because they’ve served that purpose.

If you want a politically incorrect comedy which actually makes an intelligent political point (and not one I necessarily agree with, but a thought-out political position nonetheless) try Team America: World Police. But avoid this crap.

The Tick TV Series

2006-10-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Tick is a strange beast. It originally saw the light of day as a comic, which, as a medium, fitted perfectly with the premise. It is, after all, a superhero parody and as superhero stories are the dominant genre in American comics, it was a perfectly sensible melding of subject and media. When it was turned into a cartoon, the amalgam worked equally well, seeing as many comic superheroes had been adapted to Saturday morning TV, and the general reaction was a nod of agreement. (The cartoon being incredibly funny also helped greatly.) But when a live action version was announced, I couldn’t help but struggle with how it could possibly work.

This was because television has never leant itself to live action superhero programs, whether parodic or not. Let’s take a look at just a few of the low-budget entries – Batman, Wonder Woman, The Million Dollar Man. Arguments could be made that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was basically a superhero series, but while its popularity cannot be denied (and as much as I love Buffy), the series was very much a sanitised, mainstream-friendly version of the superhero genre, removing many of the more absurd genre trappings, possibly for the better. The Tick, as a spoof of superheroes, couldn’t take similar liberties when moving over to its new medium: in order to fully satirise the superhero genre, all the genre conventions, in all their ridiculous glory, had to be present. The notion of the resulting program raised suspicion and cynicism in my mind.

Sadly, the series didn’t last very long: only 9 episodes were made and 8 shown before Fox cancelled it, though frankly it's a surprise that they commissioned it at all. It’s been out on DVD for a while, and while the results are mixed, it’s certainly worth checking out simply as a curio.

The series opens with the Tick thwarting the evil schemes of a coffee machine at a bus station before he’s tricked into taking a bus to The City, where he meets Arthur, former accountant turned superhero sidekick, and they team up to battle a communist robot let loose by disgruntled postal workers and save Jimmy Carter. It’s brilliantly oddball stuff, with the Tick’s dialogue stealing the show, as shown with his confrontation with a coffee vending machine: "Empty your bladder of that bitter urine men call coffee… Java devil, you are now my bitch." Patrick Warburton’s deadpan performances here are to be applauded as he plays the character with just the right mix of stupidity and innocence.

One major problem, though, is the supporting cast. Not so much with the performances, which are solid given the material, but with the characters themselves. Arthur remains relatively true to the comic, but the comic’s Die Fledermaus and American Maid are reinvented as Batmanuel and Captain Liberty respectively, and neither character is very interesting. Both are turned into sitcom stereotypes, Batmanuel as an oversexed, Joey Tribiani-type character and Captain Liberty as an unlucky-in-love career woman. The only interesting thing about them is that they are rarely seen out of uniform, and neither are the Tick or Arthur. It's jarring at first, but them sitting around a table drinking coffee while wearing spandex makes for an interesting visual.

And I think that embodies what people didn’t like about the series. It blurs the line between two genres, the sitcom and the superhero action series, and the viewing public couldn't grasp the blend. This isn't helped by some of the plots of episodes which cover some very strange ground indeed for either of those genres.

Firstly, the aforementioned episode which never aired, somewhat unsurprisingly given Fox’s conservatism, deals with the Tick and Arthur’s relationship with obvious homosexual undertones. This is never any direct implication of the two being in a sexual relationship, but the allegory is pretty clear: Arthur’s mother and sister are worried about his choice to be a “sidekick” and have him institutionalised for his own good. The same hero/sidekick dynamic is used in another episode as an allegory for abusive relationships. But perhaps the strangest episode given the program's primetime timeslot is an examination of the difference between justice and law (in brief, they're not the same thing – the law is only an approximation of justice, and often acts as a hindrance to it), and the Tick’s trouble in accepting that the system isn't as perfect as his rose-tinted optimism thinks it is.

While I applaud the writers for these attempts to address some relevant and interesting social problems, I’m not sure that a primetime superhero sitcom is the place to do it, especially one which already has some huge hurdles to jump. I find the show absolutely hilarious, but I can also see exactly why it’s very much a failed experiment.

Kevin Smith: Clerks II

2006-08-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve made my thoughts on Kevin Smith clear in a previous post. In a nutshell, I used to be keen on him, not so much now. And when I heard that he was making a sequel to what I consider his only good film, I was concerned that he’d somehow manage to ruin my happy memories of the original. So it was with a certain amount of dread, scepticism and schadenfreude that I downloaded and watched the film.

The film starts out by setting up a new status quo: after 10 years at the Quick Stop, Randall and Dante find themselves out of work when the place burns down. They end up working at Mooby’s, a fast food restaurant in the style of McDonald’s. Jay and Silent Bob are out of rehab and have found God, but are still dealing. Dante is engaged to some hot blonde and about to move down to Florida to start a new job and get married.

All this is established early on, and leaves Smith enough time and space to turn everything on its head. He introduces a complication with Dante’s one-night stand with his boss, and the whole film hinges on the question of what Dante will do. The answer is never really in doubt, but the twist ending is something completely unrelated and out of left field. As a piece of plotting, it’s very tight, but Smith has never been a filmmaker overly concerned with plot. People come to his films for the dialogue, and this film has some great moments.

Most of these are, of course, delivered by the awesome Randall Graves, played by the equally awesome Jeff Anderson. His various diatribes are fantastic, and his constant teasing of religious colleague Elias is often laugh-out-loud funny stuff. His reaction to Elias’ description of Pillow Pants and his recreation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as his attempt to take back the expression ‘porch monkey’ despite it being a racial slur are hilarious. Unfortunately, there are many less funny moments. As Mallrats proved, Smith doesn’t really have much of a sense for visual or slapstick comedy.

The great thing about the original Clerks film was that a lot of action had to take place of camera, principally due to budget restraints. In particular, I’m thinking of the necrophilic denouement. There is a similar scene here involving bestiality, but instead of taking place off camera, we get to see a lot more than I would have liked. Add to this that the joke wears thin very quickly once Randal realises there’s no woman involved, and I can only conclude that Smith find this far more amusing than I do. It simply goes on far too long to be funny.

In all, Smith manages to make a decent film. There are some genuinely funny moments, basically whenever Randal opens his mouth, and the plot and more especially the ending actually give a nice close to the franchise. So while certainly not on par with the original, at least Smith manages not to piss on his legacy.

Paul W S Anderson: Alien vs. Predator

2006-06-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Now, the blog until this point may have given the impression that I like nothing more than wanky films. This is true to a certain extent, but I like to think that I haven’t lost my common touch, and I enjoy a nice, brainless summer cinematic crapfest as much as the next guy. And Alien vs Predator promised to be great on that account: a big, stupid summer action movie with lots of thoughtless violence, people (or aliens) hitting each other and stuff blowing up. And it certainly delivers on some of those counts. But it still manages to leave a bad taste.

The plot is simple enough. Eccentric billionaire tycoon has found a subterranean pyramid under the North Pole and puts together a team to go exploring. Unknown to him, it’s not only swarming with the xenomorphs from the Alien series, it’s also the location of an initiation ground for the Predator aliens, where they fight the xenomorphs to prove they are manly. And anyone who's seen an Alien or a Predator film can probably piece the rest together from there.

The predictability of the plot, though, isn’t something to sneer at in this case. This is an action film after all, and no one comes to this type of film looking for cinematic experimentation or complex storytelling. Neither do they come for characterisation, and I was glad to see that most of the characters are stereotypes (at a push, I suppose you could say archetypes) – the weedy guy who talks about his kids all the time, the hunky scientist, the authority-loathing, gun-toting idiot. And they all meet an equally predictable end, of course.

The main problem with the film is that the writers seem to have completely ignored the title. This is Aliens vs. Predator, and a large part of the film’s appeal was surely seeing the two alien beasties in a one-on-one fight. What we actually get is the Aliens picking off the archaeological team, the Predator wandering around with a nebulously defined task, mostly getting killed but occasionally holding their own. The time spent on actual fights between the eponymous extraterrestrials is probably less than three minutes. If you’re generous, you can count the final battle with the queen, where the Predator forms an intergalactic tag team with the female lead, Lex. But the main conflicts (conflicts rather than out-and-out massacres) are between the aliens and Lex, our politically correct heroine.

Obviously, they wanted a human in the film to have someone for the audience to get behind, but I don’t think it was necessary – as I’ve already said, people’s expectations of the film were most likely limited to having the two alien species fight. Humans need not have applied. The result is quite disappointing, and at the very least, they should have changed the title to Alien vs. Plucky Ethnic Heroine, which would have been a fairer description of the film’s content.

The other major problem is that there’s too much time given to explanations of the pyramid's history. If people wanted archaeology, they’d watch Time Team (well, repeats of Time Team). Clearly, there certainly needs to be a plot reason for the Aliens and Predators to come together, but it needn't be credible. Frankly, it could be as wafer-thin as the plot and the characters. It's really just a matter of paying it lip service and letting the violence ensue. Garbled anthropology does not make an interesting popcorn flick. And all the time spent translating hieroglyphics for the audience could be spent on bloody carnage and explosions.

So, all in all, not a bad film. The history lessons are mostly unnecessary, but it follows the genre fairly soundly, and only fails in not realising its audience’s expectations, handily contained in the film’s title.

Larry Clark: Ken Park

2006-06-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

Larry Clark has cut out quite a nice little niche for himself since his debut feature, 1995’s Kids, succeeded because of (and not in spite of, as many claim) a large amount of controversy over what the film portrayed: kids having underage sex, smoking and drinking. Obviously, the main reason the film was so controversial was its stark realism; Clark does not make fantasy films. But, contrary not what that film's more puritanical critics may have claimed, there is certainly a moral core to Clark’s debut, although his unblinking glance sometimes distracts from it. Clark continued to court controversy with Another Day in Paradise and Bully, dealing with similar themes. He has, then, despite his growing years, become the quintessential bad boy of independent American cinema, an image which was very firmly establish when Ken Park was released in 2002.

Ken Park, though, is important for many reasons. Principally because, as a result of Clark refusing to make a single cut to what he considered a perfect film, it did not gain wide distribution in the USA and was never released in the UK. Fortunately, I was living in over-liberal France at the time, where they just stuck a 16 certificate on it and released it in cinemas all over. It’s also significant because, despite Clark’s claims, it is far from being perfect, and is significantly poorer in quality than the other three films mentioned above.

The film contains four separate narratives: one with a guy sleeping with his girlfriend’s mom, one with a father and his repressed homoerotic feelings for his son, one with a guy who murders his grandparents, and one with a girl whose father is religiously crazed. The narratives are linked by the characters’ friendship with Ken Park, a skater kid who shoots himself in the head at the end of the film (though before the events of the film itself).

As you can likely tell from the descriptions above, Clark’s film continues its depiction of teen life and sexuality as in his previous films, and three of the four contain some very sexually explicit scenes, including a teenager performing oral sex on a mature women, a father trying to fellate his son, and a two teenagers indulging in some light bondage. The fourth contains no sex whatsoever (though the character does masturbate while asphyxiating himself...) but it does contain a gory murder scene.

This is probably the closest Clark will come to writing a comedy. The kid who murders his grandparents in particular is very much played as dark comedy and the affair between an older woman and a teenage boy is often played for laughs. But while superficially the film provokes laughter, it never enlightens the viewer what message Clark is trying to send. Laughter can be a powerful weapon to force the audience to question their reactions and judgements when used by a deft hand, but here it never penetrates deep into the film, remaining nothing more than a superficial reaction.

Indeed, while the comedy makes the film feel superficial, so too does the plot and narrative strucutre. It simply comes across as a selection of controversial scenes rather than a cohesive whole. This is, notably for an art house stalwart, the first time Clark has abandoned a linear narrative structure and he doesn’t seem particularly adept at handling this sort of storytelling technique. As a result, it’s just a rather scattershot collection of stuff, nebulously floating around with nothing, whether a moral core or a directorial message to unite it. There are many lacunae in the film and while some can be filled in with a decent amount of thought and imagination, many just seem lazy and leave the plot and Clark’s message a murky mess and without a message at the core and behind the sex and gore, Clark’s usual shtick is reduced to nothing more than pornographic showboating.

Simply, then, the film is reduced to an exercise in critic-baiting, something I agree with in theory with a mischievous grin on my face, but in reality it doesn’t make for particularly entertaining viewing.

Lost (again)

2006-06-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

A while back I wrote a review of the most recent season of Lost and came to the basic conclusion that, at that point, it had been a huge disappointment. But the producers still had 5 hours of TV to try to redeem themselves, so now that the season has ended I thought I’d update my thoughts. Unfortunately, the show never turned around from its general lethargy and dullness that had encompassed the entire season.

(As before, spoilers from here on in.)

As I stated in the last review, the main problem with this season is the pacing. It’s just become incredibly slow and while it’s clear that the producers are trying to draw out the explanations of what’s really happening on the island, they haven’t managed to find an interesting or entertaining way of doing it. They have “Point A: People crash on weird island” and “Point B: Explanation of crazy stuff” but they seem to have few ideas on how to fill the gap inbetween.

In the last review, I talked about how the castration of John Locke deliberately impeded the show’s forward momentum, as he was one of the first season’s most pro-active characters. But there are plenty of other examples that clearly show a lack of original ideas: the tail end survivors had several episodes dedicated to their introduction, but Ana-Lucia and Libby were killed off, Bernard is completely inconsequential, and Eko may or may not have survived the finale. Similarly with relationships: Ana-Lucia muddied the waters between Kate and Jack before permanently being taken out of the equation, Hurley gets with Libby who then gets shot dead, Claire and Charlie have a spat mid-season but kiss and make up in the finale. Likewise, the hatch is introduced properly at the start of the season and seemingly destroyed at the end. Everything just seems to be going around in circles.

Now, anywhere else, this would be a perfectly sensible storytelling technique: establish status quo, disrupt status quo, re-establish status quo or establish new status quo. But where the producers have opted to re-establish the status quo, they really needed a new status quo. Re-establishing a status quo is equivalent of revealing nothing and the main drawing power of the series, after all, is the mystery of what is going on with all the general weirdness and for that they need to move forward and have people making discoveries and a concerted effort to find out exactly what’s happening. If people are completely passive, not striving for revelations and the new status quo that they will put in place, the series is nothing more than a cat chasing its own tail. What the latest season has become is nothing more than a sometimes excruciatingly dull exercise in killing time.

Even when the many questions that were left over from the first season were resolved, they lacked sparkle. Kate’s original crime was revealed, Claire’s flashbacks to what happened when she was kidnapped, and Jack’s marriage break-up were shown but all somehow lacked any real drama, feeling rather workmanlike in execution, as though they were something the writers felt they had to address rather than something they truly wanted to. But perhaps the most frustrating aspect is the constant deluge of unanswered questions, many of which may prove to be inconsequential red herrings: Rose’s cancer, Sin and Jun’s baby, the foot statue, even more questions about Dharma and the ‘Others’, and the Walt storyline which was supposed to be resolved in the finale but wasn’t in a satisfactory way.

Another problem which plagued the last few episodes of the season was the fact that the writers began pointing out the blindingly obvious. Despite what American TV producers seem to think, sometimes mysteries don't need to be explained in agonising detail. One of the reasons I watch (and therefore review) so much Japanese stuff is simply for the reason that Japanese films and TV don’t patronise the viewer; they show the viewer what they need to know and let them work out the rest for themselves, thereby assuming that the viewer is smart enough to come to some reasonable conclusions based on that information. This is certainly the tactic that this program takes with character development, and I could talk at length about characters' actions and how that gives an impression of their personalities, an aspect of the show that seems lost on many judging by what I’ve read on various forums. Perhaps they should just have the characters wear badges describing their character traits (Sawyer – bastard with a heart of gold, Jack – he just wants to help people, Hurley – overweight everyman), as this is certainly the tactic they took at the end of the season with the plot.

At the end of episode 20, Michael shoots Ann-Lucia and Libby dead, an action which is very much out of character for Michael, unless, thinks the reasonably intelligent viewer, ‘the Others’ have got hold of him and coerced him into doing something in order to see Walt again. Everyone assumed that he was being blackmailed in some way, and yet we get an entire episode explaining exactly that. Similarly, at the start of the season when Jack and Sayid were exploring the hatch, the find the big magnet, leading many to speculate that it caused the plane to crash, and 20 very slow episodes later, it’s revealed that – shock horror! – it caused the plane to crash. The tendency has even invaded the dialogue, as after seeing the impressive visual of a statue of a huge, four-toed foot, Sayid kindly explains: “I’m not sure what’s more disturbing, that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes.” As if it needed explaining...

The series has jumped the shark as far as I’m concerned. The writers are clearly a lot of hacks who don’t know how to write an interesting, properly paced television series. There are still some interesting ideas lurking behind the poor execution, but I doubt I’ll invest any more of my time in the tedious wait for them to reveal what will no doubt by that point be blindingly obvious.

Brett Ratner: X-Men 3: The Final Confrontation

2006-06-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

X-Men has developed a decent audience for itself as a sci-fi/action film franchise, unshackling itself from its comic roots and finding moviegoers who want intelligent action-based films with a moral message. The first two films were directed and creatively spearheaded by Brian Singer, who disappeared after the last film to make a Superman film for Time-Warner. Brett Ratner stepped in to fill his shoes and has actually done a decent job of continuing the franchise.

This film picks up not long after the last one left off. As a result of events portrayed in it, mutants are now politically represented by a Secretary of Mutant Affairs, Hank McCoy (played by Kelsey Grammar), and relations between mutants and the government are taking a step in the right direction. The school is trundling along nicely, except for Cyclops, who’s being broody and despondent because of Jean’s death. Then it’s announced on the news that a scientist has created a cure for mutants. Magneto sees this as a weapon that the military could use against mutants and begins recruiting an army for a final strike, even enlisting the help of a back-from-the-dead and mentally-unhinged Jean Grey. This all leads to a big showdown between the outnumbered X-Men and Magneto's army at the lab where the cure was created.

The problem with the first sequel was that it was overpopulated: too many characters struggling for screen time and an insistence on cramming in as many cameos as possible for the hardcore fans. Watching it, there was always the feeling that they were trying to fit a pint into a litre bottle. The result was an often unfocussed and meandering plot. This film tackles the problem quite efficiently by killing off two major characters, depowering another, having another run away, and not mentioning Nightcrawler whatsoever. Cameos are kept to a minimum and mostly serve the plot. The result is certainly a much more focussed film, in contrast to the more labyrinthine and sometimes tedious plot of X2.

It also benefits from simplifying the rivalries. In the second film, there was simply too much happening between characters: the Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine love triangle, Wolverine’s search for his past and connections to Stryker and Lady Deathstrike, Nightcrawler’s introduction and flirting with Storm, and Pyro’s introduction and eventual desertion. All that on top of moving on a conspiracy plot that contained three factions vying for the upper hand. It was a very dense film, and not always particularly well paced. Here the plot is much simpler: Magneto is convinced (and correct) that the cure will be used as a weapon and is prepared to lead a militaristic first strike. The X-Men, on the other hand, while opposed to the cure, are not prepared to go to the same lengths as Magneto. Cue big fight. As far as personal relationships go, we have Iceman and Rogue growing apart because of her inability to touch people and Iceman meeting someone new, Wolverine and Jean’s romance rekindled leading to the poignant ending, and Iceman’s rivalry with Pyro. All much easier to follow, and it allows for a thankfully quicker pace.

The other major change, presumably due to a budget increase, is that the film goes in for large scale battle sequences, rather than the previous films’ one-on-one fights. This serves to convey that the X-Men are a team, and is also a more intense and enjoyable cinematic experience.

As for the acting, it’s easily up to the quality of the previous films. Except for Halle Berry, who gets her much-whinged-for screen time and the results may explain why Singer kept her role small in the previous films. Her delivery of important lines is stilted and forced and she lacks chemistry with any of the rest of the cast. The scene where The Beast and her discuss the cure is particularly painful to watch, as you can see Grammar doing his best to play off Berry's lines, and finding nothing. Grammar fairs far better elsewhere and brings just the right amount of quiet eloquence and dry wit to the character, and particularly excels in scenes where he banters with Jackman's Wolverine. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are the consummate professionals we know them to be, and Hugh Jackman has Wolverine down to a tee.

The biggest problem the film faces is the fact it's trying to meld two unrelated stories here. The cure story is fine in its own right, but Jean Grey's ressurection as the Phoenix is added and the two plots do not complement each other at all. Further, neither story really has enough time to develop in its own right, a criticism particularly true of the Phoenix story which is one of the best-loved stories in the comics and could have been a film in its own right. Admittedly, some fat would have to be trimmed from the original comic which involves intergalactic space travel and a whole new set of villains, but it deserves more than being a distraction to the primary plot. Jean's return from the dead was a given after the events of X2, and they had to follow through on it, but it's just a shame they decided not to give it the full spotlight.

Another story which doesn't get enough time is Rogue giving up her powers. For a franchise that is supposed to advocate individuality, having a character 'cure' herself seems contrary to the film's overall message. It perhaps would have made more sense if Rogue's struggle with life not being able to touch others (and particularly her boyfriend) was portrayed in more detail, and it would have also given the film a good deal of emotional intensity, but as it stands, her actions are those of a petulent, insecure child who thinks her boyfriend is going to go get some elsewhere. They should have excised the Phoenix material and saved it for the next film, and expanded Rogue's dilemma, acting as a nice counterpoint to the Angel's mini-story cameo. As it stands, neither plot is particularly fulfilling, even if the film's pace manages to plough on nonetheless.

All in all, a very entertaining film that continues the franchise nicely. Fixing the errors of the previous two films, such as poor pacing, various budget restrictions, and an overloaded roster, and introducing some all of its own, principally two unconnected plots. It certainly benefits from better action scenes, and the film will likely be well received by the general public and comic nerds alike simply because it manages to ignore its weakness and charge toward an action-packed finale.

Chahdortt Djavann: Je viens d’ailleurs

2006-05-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

And the blog takes a decided step toward ponciness, as I review a book that’s only available in French that half the visitors (maybe more) can’t actually read. But if you like the sound of it, write to your MPs and publishing houses, and maybe I can get my recently-finished translation of it published.

Chahdortt Djavann is an Iranian-born writer now residing in France, and writing in French. She’s lived there since 1993, when she fled Iran's Islamist regime and claimed refugee status. Je viens d’ailleurs (roughly translated by yours truly as I’m not from Around Here) is, as she herself admits, her attempt to confront and lay to rest the trauma of living through the 1979 revolution which disposed of the shah and saw Khomeini return to claim power and implement a fascistic Islamic regime, and the following years of repression. The book is roughly separated into 3 parts: Djavann’s early adolescence, which coincides with the revolution and her communist, anti-Islamic revolt; her time as a medical student in Bandar Abbas; and her first return to Iran in 1998.

The first part shows an idealistic young girl and her equally idealistic friends caught up in the early stages of the revolution. As portrayed in the book, its early phase is led by Marxist ideology, but it is ultimately hijacked by Khomeini who establishes a totalitarian Islamic republic soon after returning from exile. In short, he forces everyone into a type of Islamic servitude, and anyone seen disobeying or protesting is liquidised by the pasdaran, Khomeini’s military enforcers.

The tale of the abuse of power is set against the steady breaking apart of Djavann’s friendships with Sara and Mahsa, and the young girl’s loss of innocence and idealism as her friends disappear and she is forced to conform or share their fate. This part also talks about Iran’s economic crisis in the 1980s, as children were forced down mines while their older brothers and fathers fought in a war with Iraq. And the pasdaran show their faces at a graveyard to attack a group of mourners who aren’t following proper Islamic burial practices.

The second part continues the idea of a loss of idealism, as a disillusioned Djavann is studying medicine and being forced to obey the country’s Islamic laws. She talks at length about the strict rules on relations between men and women, and their efforts to overcome them. But perhaps the most shocking segment of this part of the book is the description of a 13-year-old girl who miscarries her uncle’s child. Despite the efforts of the midwife, the pasdaran wait outside the building and demand the girl be handed over to them. Her fate is left to our, and Djavann’s, imagination.

Finally, the third part of the book which is perhaps the most interesting. On her return, Djavann tries to show us as many sides of Iranian culture as possible: friends who have tried to flee the country and failed; friends who are happy to stay as they're wealthy enough to live outside the law; an old revolutionary acquaintance who is now prepared to accept marriage to a devout Muslim. But while these three sections give the impression that things have changed and are less totalitarian than in her youth (at least for some people), the final chapter reintroduces the pasdaran and shows them killing a young girl, firmly cementing the Marxist idea that even if the rich can get away with anything, the young and the poor will always be the victims.

The book is very well structured and told in a hauntingly zeitgeisty present tense despite being made up mainly of flashbacks. But I do remain a little sceptical of many of Djavann’s opinions. Obviously much of what she lived through and witnessed was truly horrifying, as this book accounts for. But she is particularly insulting of Islam. Obviously this religion is a large part of the atrocities committed in her home country and the hardships she had to endure, but it is simply another example of someone taking an ideology and adapting it for their own bloody means. As a communist she should know that Lenin did exactly the same thing with Marxist ideology, and killed many times more people than Khomeini did. She mentions totalitarian communism several times, but never ties a direct link. The result is that the book oscillates between being politically confused and overly simplistic, often seemingly saying ‘Islam = bad’, which is a dangerous sweeping blanket statement, rather than ‘totalitarianism (in its myriad forms) = bad’, which is more apt generally and specifically in the case in Iran.

All in all, a fascinating book, but certainly not one to go into with the same wide-eyed naïveté shown by the young Djavann, or the sometimes simplistic thinking she leans toward throughout the book.

Belle and Sebastian: Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, 9th May 2006

2006-05-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

Belle and Sebastian arrived in town to promote their new album (The Life Pursuit – well worth picking up, much better than Dear Catastrophe Waitress), and to honour the great unwashed masses of Brussels with their cultish divine presence.

This would be my second time seeing them live, the last time being in Clermont-Ferrand two years ago, in a highlight of what was a very shitty year living in France. And for those who’ve already had the pleasure of seeing them live, you know what to expect: tight, well-performed music from the septet (with special mention to Mr Stevie Jackson on guitar), as they all instrument swap several times and do a superb job with whatever they happen to be playing at the time, and witty audience participation from Stuart Murdoch (which, much to my delight, included insulting Americans a lot this time round). Old songs are freshened up with some new arrangements, and new songs are played to urge those who haven't bought the new album to venture to FNAC and purchase it. This time they were even good enough to include some older b-side material which was recently re-released on Push Barman to Open Old wounds (another worthwhile purchase), such as Belle and Sebastian, a song which predates the band and where they ultimately took their name.

One thing that was disappointing, though, is the band’s continued reliance on tracks from If You’re Feeling Sinister... When I saw them in France, the entire encore was made up of tracks from that album, complete with the stage being bathed in red light. Obviously it is not only their best, but also their most well-known album, and these are songs that the less die-hard fans will be familiar with, but I can’t help but feel that they’re using it as crutch. After all, they have a very large back catalogue, and yet I'm reasonably sure that they didn't play anything from Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant or The Boy with the Arab Strap (nothing from Storytelling, either, but I’m not going to complain about that), and only one track from Dear Catastrophe Waitress, I’m a Cuckoo (again, the best known track and the band’s 2nd highest charting single ever). I’d like to see them do a gig without playing a single track from that album. It would certainly be refreshing.

I was paranoid about going to the gig alone and more than a little self-conscious about looking like a loner, which was really only a problem before the band came on. I adopted a ‘waiting for friends, where the fuck are they’ pose, and once the band comes on, everyone ignores each other anyway. And occasionally I lost interest as songs with extended solos got to the point of being overindulgent. But Belle and Sebastian are an overindulgent band, and that’s one of the reasons we devoted fans love them so much. All in all, an enjoyable night.

Lost

2006-04-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

I don’t really have time to watch anything new, or rather, I do have time but can’t be bothered. So I thought I’d check in with my thoughts on the biggest TV program of the moment. Most people in the UK won’t be getting the new season till June, so if you want things to be a surprise, I suggest you not read this. Those people lucky enough to live in Belgium are about 5 or 6 episodes in, and those smart enough to get Bit Torrent and download new episodes as they’re broadcast in the USA, like me, are right up to date with the 19th episode of season 2.

Just to make it clear here that I’m not going to get into speculation on the nature of the island and all the other quandaries and enigmas that have been set out. I’m looking at what we have so far in the way of television and how entertaining it is.

I missed the first season when it was first shown in the UK because I was working early shifts and had to be in bed. I picked up the season 1 DVD box set back in November, though, and got through all 26 episodes in just a few days. It was a genuinely very tense thriller, interspersed with excellent character material. The mysteries were compelling and the slow build worked very well, hitting a crescendo midway through the season with the discovery of the hatch and running with it till the season finale.

(Again, spoilers from here on in.)

The second season continues directly from where the first left off, with Locke and Kate deciding to go down the hatch, going missing and Jack going after them. What they find down there is a guy who has to press a button every 108 minutes. He does a runner and Locke takes over as button presser. In the first season, Locke was, without a doubt, one of the best developed and most interesting characters of the bunch. He was more ‘at one’ with the island than anyone else and the one most engaged in discovering the island’s mysteries. This is, of course, what led him to the hatch, but he’s spent most of the latest season stuck in there. Hunter-gatherer, shamanistic Locke is no more, dedicating his faith in fate and the events on the island to the pressing of a button. Simply, the character has been castrated. The most recent episode starts toward rectify this, but it may well be too late.

And I think this shows perfectly well the problem with the series. From the very beginning, the creators have insisted, in retaliation to claims that they’re making it up as they go along, that they know exactly what is going on, that they know what the big reveal will eventually be. It’s just a matter of getting there. But as the show is renewed each year, the ‘getting there’ part takes much longer, and so they have to find diversions for the characters. Locke, as one of the most proactive characters, was castrated for a good reason: by sticking him in the hatch, they cripple the plot, stop it from progressing. Now, the hatch may be part of the wider mystery and Locke's obsession with it is mostly in character (he's blindly faithful, he's looking to justify Boone's death in some way, his confidence has been shaken), but this does all whiff a bit of killing time. And really, that’s what they’re doing.

(There’s also the problem that, no matter how long the series runs for, the pay-off will always be the same, and people who don't realise that risk ultimately being disappointed for the amount of time they’ve invested. Let’s hope the producers know when to end it.)

That’s not to say the new season hasn’t had its highlights: the introduction of the tail section survivors, including the awesome Mr Eko, darker character turns for Charlie and Sayid, Claire remembering what happened to her when she went missing in season 1, and the continued excellent character material provided in the flashbacks. But while the first season did an excellent job and building real suspense, the latest season seems much more scattershot. It is much less structured and too involved in taking the scenic route to the eventual explanations, and as a result the questions surrounding what's really going on which drove the series through its first season are losing interest. The new season is in its run-up to the finale now, and is picking up the pace, but they really need to either provide more explanations or find a more interesting way of delaying them. I'm sure I'm not the only one getting bored, and unless the series gathers some momentum, I'll probably not bother with the third season.

Isao Takahata: Grave of the Fireflies

2006-04-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

“September 21, 1945... that was the night I died.”

Isao Takahata again. For those not keeping up, he’s a director who works for Studio Ghibli, Japan's foremost animation studio. It's often compared to Disney (mainly by Disney, who bought Western distribution rights to their films a few years ago), but the comparison doesn't really hold water outside of them both making animated features. Grave of Fireflies, a film portraying how normal people try to continue to live during the Second World War, shows these stark differences.

The quotation above is taken from the opening of the film, which shows main character Seita dying of starvation in a public place and his ghost appearing nearby, reunited with the ghost of his little sister, Setsuko. They then accompany the viewer through the events that led them to that point. Their father is a high-ranking military official, their mother is killed in an air raid and so they’re shipped off to live at their aunt's house, who treats them like shit, so they leave and set up home an in abandoned house by the river. Not living within a community, they do not receive rations and it isn’t long before they’re driven to stealing in order to eat. Soon after, Setsuko falls victim to her hunger, and Seita, realising that he has lost his entire family, gives up hope.

I can’t think of too many Disney films which open with the main character’s death, but here it works incredibly well, setting the tone for the entire film. Rather than give the impression that the brother and sister duo are a pair of plucky underdogs who overcome seemingly insurmountable adversity, it tells us immediately that the story does not have an Americanised, rags-to-riches happy ending. This is not a film about the wonderful stoicism of the human spirit; it is a film about the hard and tragic realities of war.

Another very non-Disney image is the mother after the bombing and the removal of her body once she passes away. Primarily, it is burnt and bloody with limbs missing, and riddled with maggots when it is taken away, presumably to be thrown in a mass grave. The extremely graphic representation of her injuries is decidedly not PG-13 material, but again this is and unblinking look at the repercussions of war which does not patronise the viewer. The lack of a proper funeral for the mother is paralleled strongly with Setsuko’s cremation later in the film, demonstrating that while they starve because they live outside of a community, the freedom it allows them gives them back the right to bury and mourn their dead.

Finally, there is no good guy/bad guy dynamic in the film. While Disney would no doubt portray the sides as black and white (complete with camp, fetishist Nazis in leather gloves, probably anthropomorphised foxes or snakes), here there are only people and consequences. The Allies are never given a human face, certainly, only ever appearing in the form of the planes that drop the bombs, but neither are they vilified through dialogue or any other means. They, and the consequences of their presence, are simply presented as facts in these peoples’ lives. Similarly, Seita is not portrayed as good and honourable, scavenging from houses during air raids and stealing from farmers’ fields as a way to survive. The result is a character who is more a person than a caricature or stereotype, and the film, despite being animated, is much more realistic for it.

While the film is certainly not cheerful viewing, it is not all sullen. The scenes which develop Seita and Setsuko’s relationship are very touching and their early life living down by the river has an idyllic and innocent air to it, as the frolic and play in the countryside. The deeper emotional subtext of the film, with an overwhelmed Seita unable to mourn his mother properly and Setsuko being able to in a more naïve, innocent manner also provides an emotional core to the film. It is, though, an unflinching and an emotionally draining portrayal of what the war did to our apparent 'enemies'. And for that reason alone, it is more than worthy of your time.

The Atomium

2006-04-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Atomium, for the uninitiated, is Brussels’ answer to the Eiffel tower. It’s a large steel structure made to mimic the structure of an atom, with the metal balls representing the nucleus, electrons, protons and neutrons. It was originally constructed back in the 50s, which is pretty impressive considering the engineering and construction work involved. It's located in a large, picaresque park in the north of Brussels, near Brupark and Mini-Europe, two other big tourist attractions.

I first went to the Atomium back in January, but it was closed during the off-peak winter period for some much needed restoration. This principally involved polishing the balls and making them gleam, which is no mean feat for a 103-metre tall structure. It reopened back in February, and I made the trek again when a friend was visiting a few weeks ago.

The initial reaction to the structure is one of awe. It is incredibly large, with few pictures doing justice to its scale. After queuing for quite some time on a busy Sunday, we finally got inside and were ushered straight to the lift, which climbs, at a speed quick enough to make your ears pop, the 100-odd feet to the highest sphere. The views from the top are amazing, both of the immediate area and further away in Brussels centre.

You then head back down the lift and are left to your own devices to explore the other balls. This is where the centre falls on its face. Each sphere is supposed to house separate exhibitions of some kind. Some are very informative (the history of the structure, details of the recent renovations), some are simply services (a cafe, a dormitory for visiting schoolchildren), others, however, are simply baffling: a whole room given over to one rather small abstract piece of art and a room with a big telly are just two of the things on offer here. Think of the Louvre in Paris. It serves two functions: firstly, it’s an art gallery which houses some of the most famous pieces of art in the world; secondly, it’s an important historical monument in its own right. I have the feeling that the Atomium could be used in a similar way, and feel that there is a lot of wasted space and wasted potential.

Still, focussing on what it is rather than what it could be, it’s certainly a fun day out, even if I wanted to actually climb the thing and they’d so kindly provided a lift and escalators.

Kevin Smith

2006-04-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

I’ve wanted to write something about Kevin Smith for a while. He used to be my favourite filmmaker back in Sixth Form (a dizzying 7 years ago!), but he’s fallen from grace to the point where I find the site of him, and the thought of most of his films, quite sickening.

It was quite a gradual process which started with indifference – I just stopped watching them – and then when I switched completely from VHS to DVD, I never bothered to replace his films with DVD versions. When Clerks X (a 10th anniversary edition of Smith’s debut film) was released, I went back and watched the film, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Having not seen any of his films for a good three years, I also had a look at Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma… And that’s when it dawned on me: not only is this collection of work of quite poor quality, it is also remarkably strange oeuvre.

Clerks is undoubtedly the film that cut out a niche for Smith. It tells the story of two friends who work low-paid retail jobs in their hometown in small-town New Jersey. Filmed on a very small budget in the convenience store where Smith was working at the time, it’s a portrait of two young high school graduates who should have gone to university, but instead are happy loafing about, playing hockey, dealing with their love lives and harassing customers.

The film shows Smith’s lack of directorial style, though somewhat disguised beneath the restrictions of a low budget. But Smith has always been a writer more than a director and what stands out is the dialogue. Private contractors working on the Deathstar, Dante’s summing up of a woman’s role in sex, and, of course, the 36 dicks are all laugh-out-loud moments. The film seemed to be made to the gen-x, grunge generation of the early 90s: slackers, dick jokes, and general bad taste (including knocking over a coffin at a funeral and necrophilia), but even today there’s a lot to recommend the film. It has something of a naive charm and is genuinely very funny, something that later films would seem to forget.

Smith has claimed that Mallrats suffered from meddling producers and so he’s made himself bullet-proof to any criticism of that film. Chasing Amy, however, was much beloved and was a film that Smith very much wanted to make. Hailed on its release as Smith’s return to his indy roots after pissing about with $5,000,000 of studio money with his second film, it tells the story of a guy who falls in love with a lesbian and manages to convert her, only to find out that he wasn’t the first guy she was with and screw everything up. The most notable thing about the film is that Smith finally deals directly with the repressed, adolescent homoeroticism of the lead male characters which was clear in his two previous films. However, it reads as something of a meta-Kevin Smith film, and while Smith’s dialogue shines through on many occasions (“Hey, I always notice the far-away look in her eyes”), the plot is contrived, and the film just seems too self-conscious and too wrapped up in Smith’s real-life preoccupations to be good in its own right.

By the time Dogma came out, though, Kevin Smith had apparently forgotten how to be funny and decided to be morose (though morose with lots of swearing). Dogma, like Chasing Amy, was a deeply personal film for Smith, but for a filmmaker whose fan base was fuelled by the wide-eyed nihilism of gen-x slackers, the film was ill-advised. Sure, a new generation of 15-year-olds will love the swearing, dick jokes and shit demon, and the quasi-religious and spiritually confused will love the pious message, but Smith’s early fans, if they were still hanging around by this point – after distracting forays into studio production and self-referential homoeroticism – would certainly be turned off by a film that not only has a message, but one strongly anchored in Smith’s always-present Christian beliefs, very much in strong contrast to the ideas and lifestyles of the characters in his debut.

In this respect, Smith’s films can been seen as an odyssey from the nothingness of nihilism to the somethingness of faith; unfortunately, both the laughs and the fans deserted him along the way.

Isao Takahata: Pom Poko

2006-02-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

Pom Poko is produced by Studio Ghibli, probably best known for being the home of Hayao Miyazaki, who everyone is correct in loving from Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s also the home of a few other directors who’ve made their own films, which is the group that Pom Poko falls into. It’s recently been released in the UK, and through some weird coincidence, I happened to watch it at about the same time, but as part of the Studio Ghibli boxset I bought a while ago on eBay.

The story is simple enough. Two groups of raccoons are fighting at the start of the film, but soon band together to fight the threat of the humans that are stealing their land for redevelopment. These are not normal raccoons, though. According to the film’s interior mythology, which is set-up by the narrator at the beginning of the film, raccoons are able to change shape, to the point that they are even able to take on human form. Early in the film, new trainees are taught this skill by the elders, so it can be used against the invading humans.

These same elders, though, cannot agree on how to deal with the humans. Many want to take the Gandhi approach, while one elder in particular is insistent that the only way to get results is to take aggressive action. He is, in due course, injured, and his point of view is sidelined for a short while. This allows three gurus from a nearby village to arrive and amplify the shape-shifting powers to try to scare off the humans. It fails. Then a fox, the only other creature able to shapeshift, turns up and offers them another alternative: take on human form and live in their cities. That idea is also rejected. Meanwhile, the humans are beginning to suspect that the urban legends about raccoons may not be completely fictitious...

There’s a lot going on in the film, and the potentially heavy environmental message could overwhelm the viewer, but the tone is lightened with plenty of comedy, a little romance and some nice character moments. It also benefits from not droning on endlessly from one point of view, but instead offers various viewpoints from all sides of the debate, and even shows some ways in which the humans’ arrival has a positive impact. Some sources have claimed that the raccoons win in the end. This is far from the truth, and though the ending tries to be upbeat, but fails in the grim reality of the situation.

As for the animation, the raccoons’ constant shape-shifting gives the animators plenty of opportunity to mess with different animation styles, as they change from realistic quadrupeds right the way through to being fully anthropomorphised. This may sound jarring, but the animators handle it incredibly well. The scenes where the raccoons create a ghostly parade to scare off the humans are amazing, and the body language on the anthropomorphised fox sits perfectly on the line between refined and smarmy. There’s obviously a lot of work gone into it, and it shows throughout the film.

A truly excellent film which doesn’t take itself too seriously, is brilliantly animated and tries to take a level-headed view at a complex subject. Definitely one to see.

Michel Houellebecq: Whatever

2006-02-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

Michel Houellebecq is something of a phenomenon in his native France. He’s been described as the man responsible for influencing and mentoring a new generation of French writers. This is the English translation of his novella L’extension du domaine de la lutte, a novella that I briefly considered translating before I found out that: a) it had already been translated, and b) it’s not really very good.

The story centres on the narrator, a computer programmer, who deals with the little conundrums and foibles of working life in an overly exasperated way. Working life goes from bad to worse, though, when he’s told that his next job will involve working with the ministry of agriculture to train its staff on a new piece of software. Cue lots of travelling around rural France (well, that just means France, really) and poking fun at farmers, as the narrator struggles to find any sort of point in what he’s doing. The blurb compares it to Camus’ L’Etranger, and there are certain similarities between the narrator and Mersault. L’Etranger, however, is an incredibly good book. Whatever, to reiterate, falls short on that account.

The problem isn’t that this is a self-referential, stodgy, wading-through-treacle type wankfest in the Salmon Rushdie vein as you might expect from a French post-modern work. It’s much more approachable than that. Houellebecq’s PR machine paints him as a chronicler of modern life and society, as an ironic truth-sayer who dares to point out the faults in our post-modern society. He writes about dysfunctional types with low-paid jobs and no joie de vivre. And that’s an apt description of what this novella does. The PR machine, though, fails to point out that, frankly, there’s nothing new here. I've already pointed out a comparison to Camus, but this book, and Houellebecq's work as a whole, is more in line with gen-x literature, so let's add a few more recent names: Douglas Coupland was doing the same thing years ago; Haruki Murakami built his career on it; Will Self does it, and with a great deal more wit. Perhaps it’s just the French catching on to a fashion 15 years too late. It wouldn’t be that surprising. But more likely, it’s a case of the truth being a novelty in France, whereas for most of the rest of the world, it’s old hat. (But I’m going to talk about modern French society when I review The Dreamers – yes, I’m really trying to build up some hype for that post.)

But that’s only half the problem here. The second is a truly amateurish translation. Without droning on endlessly about translation techniques and methods and the theories surrounding literary translation, Paul Hammond seems to be ignorant of the key linguistics differences between French and English. He sticks too tightly to French diction and syntax, through either unawareness of said differences or some misguided notion of fidelity. The result would have been fine 150 years ago, when English was more hung-up on being like Latin, but for a translation of a modern work the language is clunky, and sounds unnatural. A little research shows that Hammond is actually principally a translator of Spanish and lives in Madrid. So, obviously, he’s eminently qualified to translate a French novella, then…

But as for Houellebecq, I really don’t see what the fuss is about. Whatever indeed.

Alain Resnais: Nuit et Brouillard

2006-01-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

Now, this isn’t really the type of thing I set this blog up for. It was supposed to be a place for light, fluffy commentary and review rather than intense cinematic analysis. But in a few weeks, I’m planning on writing a socio-historical analysis of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers which is likely to be quite dense. So in order to prime you for that, this is half of an essay I wrote in my final semester of university on the cinematic representations of the Holocaust, dealing with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. It deals with some similar themes that I’ll be discussing when I get around to The Dreamers. I’ve ‘carefully’ integrated footnotes into the text rather than leave them out. I know I can’t be thrown out of the blog for plagiarism, but just put it down to habit.

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Over the years, many people have attempted to rationalise – to find some distancing logic in – the events of the Holocaust and the result is that they have come to view the atrocities as ‘crimes against humanity’ rather than culturally significant acts of violence (Samuel Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1182-1186 (p. 1182)): the Holocaust has become a frightening concept rather than a terrifying period of history. Cinematic narrative has played its part in this, as the tricks of creating meaning and continuity in a film, of creating a logical cohesion, can also serve to rationalise the events and to place them into a framework where they are rendered easily digestible and understandable by the audience. In brief, narrative cinema, through its very technique, tries to rationalise the trauma of the Holocaust.

Rather than recreate history for the cinema, with Night and Fog, Alain Resnais made a film of disjointed narratives, which succeeds due to this very nature. The narrative can be divided into four separate parts: Resnais’ colour footage of a contemporary Auschwitz, the archive footage and photographs, the narrator’s text, and the musical score. Despite claims that the film acts as a totality, (André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film, p. 122) I believe the opposite is true: the film’s narrative is splintered and imperfect and this is where it finds its power. The four parts do not work in unison in a traditional narrative sense, but rather work against each other, eliciting a tension which brings pertinent issues to the fore.

Firstly, the visual parts of the film: Resnais filmed colour footage of a contemporary Auschwitz and then juxtaposed it with black and white archive footage. This visual opposition raises an important question about the audience’s relationship with the memory of the Holocaust. As William Earle wrote, “Alain Resnais’ films… proceed to dissolve any assurance in a public reality by demonstrating the ambiguity of meaning in the present through its dependence on the past.”( William Earle, ‘Revolt against Realism in Films’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 1968), pp. 145-151 (p. 151)). This statement is certainly true of Night and Fog. Today, Auschwitz has ceased to be a place and become a concept – a metonym for the Holocaust itself which exists in a perpetual 1943 (or thereabouts). In the viewer’s mind, Jews are still tattooed and killed en masse in gas chambers there: indeed, the camp was never liberated. It is for this reason that Resnais’ footage of a derelict and abandoned Auschwitz at the start of the film is so jarring, because this is how Auschwitz is today, and not how the viewer imagines it. When this is brought into contrast with the archive footage, the resulting tension between the two visual narratives brings into question Auschwitz’s signification, which is dependent on events which had taken place over ten years before the film was made. Therefore, it forces the viewer to reassess how he conceives of this particular place and the associations that go with it: to liberate Auschwitz in his mind.

Some have claimed that the archive footage of Night and Fog would have had an effect in 1955 which is now lost because it has since been overused and made familiar (Margaret Olin, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film’ in Represenations, No. 7 (Winter 1997), pp. 1-23 (p. 17)). While it is true that the previously unforeseen footage certainly would have been far more shocking in 1955, and that it has become familiar to today’s audience, the film unquestionably challenges our perception of it, although it may not tell an audience anything it does not already know about the genocide. Furthermore, it is the archive footage that provides the most obviously shocking material in the film. Resnais uses photos and footage from the camps: human skeletons, the gas chambers, mass graves, transports arriving. The main question this footage demands is who was filming this, and why? While Resnais is responsible for the colour section, the author of the secondary footage remains unknown, and this absence haunts the film as yet another phantom, the unknown spectator. More frightening, though, is the thought that this footage, unlike its subjects, survived. Likewise, the buildings themselves outlasted the short-term residents, and shows that the Nazis respected these material objects more than they did human life, another result of the tension between the empty contemporary Auschwitz and the archive footage littered with people.

Moreover, Resnais’ own footage, filmed in colour to contrast strongly with the dull, scratchy archive film is aware of its limitations in representation. Resnais’ visual style expresses his presence as investigator rather than witness: his camera is slow, hesitant, that of a respectful tourist, rather than someone familiar with the camp. In addition, the camera will often pan aimlessly, looking for something which it cannot locate. This is the case when it studies the sleeping quarters, which gives the impression that camera has never been there before, or that it does not know where to look because the space is unfamiliar. The camera will often stop and cut to footage, acknowledging that it cannot recreate what happened, such as at the hospital where his camera stops with a shot of the door and then Resnais chooses to cut to archive footage of the interior, and often the camera will retreat, simply unable to acknowledge the atrocities that were perpetrated there. Resnais camera only ever looks and presents images; it never analyses as it is impossible for Resnais, as a stranger to the camp, to give anything more than this superficial experience of it.

The analysis is provided in the text written by camp survivor Jean Cayrol which accompanies the two visual narratives. In fact, Resnais refused to make the film unless Cayrol, as a survivor, was involved. His text, spoken by a disembodied voice, paralleling the voiceless bodies the viewer sees in the film, is concerned to testify not against a nation but against a system which did not “respect the elementary rights of everyone to his own originality and particularity.”( Cayrol, quoted in Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, p. 49). Indeed, it is a work of great restraint by the poet, who provides a script which is sad rather than angry,( John Ward, Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time, p. 143) and which asks questions rather then points the finger. It is interesting to note the way in which the text interacts with the visual narrative: at times it will be inverted, the text explaining or complimenting what we see – like the description of the hierarchy of the camps – or completely broken, the text not being able to find words to describe what is shown (André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film, p. 125), and leaving the film to simply show what cannot be put into words. This is the case when the text says, “When the Allies arrived…”, then cuts off, unable to put into words what the archive footage shows: piles of emaciated corpses being tossed or bulldozed into mass graves. Cayrol even admits on one occasion that words fail him. The third use of the tension between visual and audible narratives is when the camera shows the contemporary Auschwitz and the text talks of the past, which has an effect identical to the one detailed above by the tension between the colour and archive footage. The text also has dark humour running through it, like when Cayrol points out the different kinds of architectural aesthetic for the camps (Alpine, garage, or Japanese style, or no style at all), or when he ironically observes the prison within the camp. This, along with the text’s unnerving lyricism, show that even Cayrol cannot represent his experience in any one medium, so he uses an assortment of poetry, humour, documented facts, and silence. His final statement, though, is untouched by such turmoil, as he delivers a stern warning to those who have forgotten:

“From this strange observatory, who watches to warn of new executioners? Do they really look so different to us? Somewhere among us remain undetected kapos, officers, informers. There are all those who didn’t believe, or only sometimes. And those of us who see the monster as being buried under these ruins, finding hope in being finally rid of this totalitarian disease, pretending to believe it happened once, in one country, not seeing what goes on around us, not heeding the unending cry.”

This is spoken over a visual of the remains of the camp, the text inverted and the narratives unified to reinforce the message, and cuts to black at the end to put a definitive ending to the film’s central message. It is also important to discuss the score. Resnais often claimed that he had “a certain taste for mixing sugar and salt”, (Quoted in Ibid., p. 127) and this is certainly true of the gentle music used throughout the film. While it perfectly compliments Resnais’ slow panoramas of a Polish landscape, it is much more unwelcome as an accompaniment to the archive footage, where the serene strings stand out in stark contrast to the scenes of misery, starvation and abuse presented on screen, making them appear more ghastly in contrast.

The film has many fragments brought together to form a montage of viewpoints. As Annette Insdorf points out, the film can be divided in such a way: Resnais/visitor/image vs. Cayrol/witness/voice (Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, p. 212). But she fails to point out two significant facts: Resnais only provides half the images, and Cayrol only provides the words and not the voice, which is supplied by actor Michel Bouquet. A more apt definition would be: Resnais/visitor/colour images, Cayrol/victim/text, ????/perpetrator or liberator/archive footage, and Bouquet/????/ narration. The result is that there is a multitude of narratives, some half-told and unclear. This montage of narratives, both visual and audible, demonstrates the embodiment of the need for multiple perspectives in dealing with the Holocaust, as Insdorf suggests (Ibid.). As François Truffaut wrote: “It is almost impossible to speak about this film in the vocabulary of cinematic criticism. It is not a documentary, or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century… The power of this film… is rooted in its tone, the terrible gentleness… When we have looked at these strange, seventy-pound slave labourers, we understand that we’re not going to ‘feel better’ after seeing Night and Fog; quite the opposite.” (Quoted in Ibid., p. 39). In short, it is through the film’s fractured narrative, through its failure to represent any one clearly defined history, that it succeeds, not in recreating the concentration camp experience, but in presenting it to an audience in the most challenging way possible, even if this means doing so through unconventional means.

However, while Resnais’ film can be seen as hugely successful in several ways, some critics have identified many lacunae. Firstly, many complain that it did not confront Jewish victimhood at all. (Samuel Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1182-1186 (p. 1184)). This is true in that the documentary footage used does not indicate the prisoners’ creed, but this is not Resnais’ fault, confined as he is with the choice of raw material in which any religious artefacts would have been confiscated by the Nazi guards. Cayrol’s text could have easily compensated but he chose not to. The reason for this may simply be that the concentration camps were not solely, but only principally, used for the extermination of Jews. Indeed, as many non-Jews were victimised under the Nazi regime, including homosexuals, the disabled, the elderly, and the mentally ill, this could be Resnais and Cayrol’s way of including everybody that was murdered in the camps and not just the majority. More importantly, the film is a meditation on the acts of dehumanising violence perpetrated by the Nazis and a warning against a similar regime rising to power, and works amiably within these parameters. It makes no claims to being a documentary of the continued victimisation of the Jew in western civilisations, and it is unfair to judge it one that criterion.

One criticism which cannot be so easily negated is the film’s failure to address France’s involvement in transporting prisoners to the camps: while the Germans responsible are shown in outtakes of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and Himmler’s tour of inspection is shown in a photo montage, neither Maréchal Pétain nor any of the members of his puppet Vichy government are shown. Certainly, there are several sources which indicate that the French authorities, who provided the majority of the money for the film’s production, demanded cuts of shots of the transit camps to Auschwitz, Drancy and Pithiviers where the French police force is caught at work (R M Friedman, ‘Exorcising the Past: Jewish Figures in Contemporary Films’ in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 3 (July 1984), pp. 511-527 (p.514)) and another scene which included a concentration camp guard in French uniform. (Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, pp. 229-330, referenced in Olin, pp. 1-23 (p. 6)) These scenes have since been restored, but at that time the authorities obviously did not want proof of their collaboration to be shown because, while the 1950s were certainly a prosperous decade, much of this was dependant on Charles de Gaulle’s creation of the resistance myth, a revisionist history of what happened in France during the war. The duly elected collaborative government, French participation in transportation, and the ceasefire with Germany was rewritten as a France occupied by a neighbouring tyrant, victims of the Reich, a France which struggled alongside de Gaulle, the leader of the resistance during the war, to free itself. Nevertheless, the cuts to the film, which never contained abundant footage of the French involvement in the full version, were by no means drastic. Guy Austin writes that in the forward-looking ‘50s, Resnais’ film was a warning not to forget (Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, p. 21), and it is indeed a powerful piece of film-making which successfully portrays Nazi atrocities, but as a cultural artefact of propaganda-ridden post-war France, through its silence it unfortunately perpetuates the same myth that it attempts to debunk.

The Paris Hilton Sex Tape

2006-01-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

I had a break from the blog for Christmas, and judging by the amount of e-mail I got bemoaning my absence (i.e zero), I’ll assume that no one really cares. I should do something to publicise the blog, but then again, I’ll probably never get around to it.

This was originally going to be a review of Nine Songs, but then I realised that I’d actually have to buy a copy of the DVD if I wanted to review it. So I looked for something similar and what did I find? Yes, the Paris Hilton sex tape (which is unsurprisingly easy to download.) The tapes been circulating in various forms for years, but I’ve never seen anyone try to write a review of it. That’s probably for obvious reasons, but I’m happy to shun convention once in a while. After all, it might actually be quite good…

The story behind the tape is quite simple. When Hilton was 19 she had a fling with 30-year-old Rick Salomon (who was once married to Shannen Doherty). They filmed their night-time trysts, and three years later they somehow found their way onto the internet. Hilton’s family immediately set their lawyers into action for besmirching their young daughter's name and Salomon, in retaliation, did the same. The resulting furore led to a ridiculous amount of publicity, mainly for Hilton.

The contents of the tape itself is a surprisingly dull affair. Hilton’s getting ready in the bathroom wearing nothing but black bra and panties. Salomon tries to convince her to have sex while she acts disgusted. That goes on for a while. Hilton finally relents and takes her little black panties off, revealing a question I think we’ve all asked… (the answer: she’s shaved). Lots more teasing and finally they get in bed, change position once or twice, then Hilton tosses him off and he comes in her mouth. All this lasts about 15 minutes. Hardly thrilling or all that much different from all the other porn you can download on the internet. The only thing that really sets it apart is no female orgasm (faked or not) and no money shot. But then, this wasn’t made for public consumption, so they aren’t exactly following industry standards here.

However, I don’t think anyone is really going to watch this to be aroused (which is lucky because there’s nothing here that’s particularly arousing) but rather out of some sort of bizarre celebrity schadenfreude. And as far as that goes it pays off very well. Judging by this tape, both parties are horribly sexually inept. Hilton just lays motionless like a rabbit caught in headlights and emits the occasional groan, while Salomon pokes at her from behind like he’s stirring broth. If you thought the sex lives of the rich and famous were supposed to be exciting, this puts an end to that theory in hilarious fashion.

The most interesting aspect of the tape, though, is what it did for Hilton. Whereas Salomon quietly fell back into celebrity obscurity, Hilton used it as a building block to become the new ‘it’ girl and everybody’s favourite celebrity slut. So while you watch and snigger at her sexual inadequacy, you might want to stifle the laughter when you bear in mind what it spawned.

Thieffry Metro Station

2005-12-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

And so the blog takes its first steps into the unconventional, though this is nothing compared to what I have planned further down the line.

Most people who are reading this will know that I moved to Brussels two months ago, but I haven’t written much about the city, either on here, or in e-mails to people. There are plenty of gigs to go to and museums for me to visit, so if I actually get off my arse and do some other stuff, this should mark the first of many reviews based around the city.

Thieffry metro station is in the Etterbeek area of Brussels and serves one of the schools that I work in. The Brussels metro system isn’t great, but it sits somewhere between London’s (at the crappy end of the scale) and Paris’s (at the better end) in terms of the effort made in turning the stations into nice places to be. Most London tube stations haven’t seen a lick of paint in years (since privatisation, I suspect) and most of the food outlets are fast-food franchises, whereas in Paris stations are well-kept and up-to-date and most of the cafés are privately owned. But what really sets Parisian metro stations apart from their London counterparts is that some surely slightly quirky Frenchman came up with the idea that they could be used to display art. Somehow the idea caught on, and now there are pieces of art in metro stations throughout Paris. This is something that appeals to my left-wing, liberal sensibilities, and putting art in public for everyone to enjoy rather than in stuffy museums where it’s only seen by a handful of tourists is a great idea.

Brussels’ metro stations share one thing in common with London and two with Paris. They are all in serious need of a lick of paint, and they have privately owned cafés and are used to display art. Thieffry station is no exception, offering one of the most peculiar pieces of public art I’ve seen. As you walk up the stairs from the platform, in the main entrance way, there are large black cables coming out of the floor. The floor is blistered and it seems as though the cables have burst through. The first time I saw it I was a little shocked… This is, after all, an image of Something Gone Wrong, and it’s not really this that commuters want to think about, especially after 7/7. But to be honest, my initial reaction soon wore off and I started to view it as just another piece of public art, walking past it several times per week on my way to work, mostly ignoring it, sometimes admiring it, and always with that initial reaction nagging at the back of my mind.

One day, I wasn’t in my usual hurry, and I stopped at the vending machine to get a drink. As I walked past the broken cables again, taking a swig of my drink, something caught my eye. I’d never looked at the statue closely, but when I approached it I noticed something quite unsettling. Set in the end of each of the broken cables was a part of the human body. As I walked around, I saw hands, feet, an arse, and arms all disembodied and seemingly fossilised. It’s a frightening piece of art and one which seems horribly out of place, which is possibly the reason why it’s my favourite piece of public art in Brussels so far. Art should be a kick in the bollocks, and this certainly managed to lay the boot into me a couple of times.

Kid Chameleon

2005-11-26T13:29:00.000-08:00

Surprising as it may be, in all my years as an amateur journo, I’ve never reviewed a computer game. I lost interest in them when I was about 18 which roughly coincided with the last time I actually had a computer good enough to play recent releases. Ironic then, that despite the fact that I finally received my new, high-spec computer this week (and yes, it’s great, thank you for asking), I’ve chosen to review an old game.

Kid Chameleon was released on the Sega Mega Drive at some point back in the early 90s (probably about 1992, if memory serves), and I had the cartridge back in the day when such things weren’t charmingly retro. I’ve always had fond memories of the game, but nostalgia can do funny things to the brain and I was curious to see if it had held up after all these years. It also provided a decent challenge in that I never completed it when I was younger. I remedied that this afternoon, and this is clearly the first thing to recommend the game. I sat down for about two hours and played the game right through, with only short breaks for food and the toilet.

The basic concept of the game is simple enough. You’re a gamer playing a ‘total immersion’ video game, not dissimilar to Star Trek’s holodeck, but the game’s been hijacked by a bad, bad man and the safety protocols have been removed. It’s up to you to get through the game and free the other players. To help you along the way, there are various masks which change Kid into characters with different skills that will help you through the 100+ levels.

The game is admittedly huge. There are over 100 levels, and while it’s not necessary to go through all of them, as there are plenty of short cuts along the way, a completist-type player could certainly spend happy hours getting through the entire game. The cartridge version of the game didn’t have a save function (something of a rarity back in those days, let’s face it), which made the game a test of concentration span more than skill, but most people today would probably play this on an emulator, complete with snazzy save function, and so this criticism of the game is negated.

I find it baffling that Sega decided to push the horribly overrated and tedious Sonic the Hedgehog as their signature game/character back in the 90s when this game would have made a far better counterpart to Nintendo’s Mario series. Not that Kid Chameleon is on the same level as the superlative Super Mario World, but it’s certainly a lot closer than Sonic ever came (despite his apparent super speed), and Kid’s many personae would have definitely made for some interesting marketing ideas. But seeing where Sega are in the games market today, is anyone surprised that they made some crappy business decisions?

Anyway, Kid Chameleon has certainly held up over the years, and provided me not only with some erstwhile and dizzying nostalgia, but a great deal of gaming fun, too.

AJ Schnack: Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns

2005-11-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

No, not gay porn, despite what the title may suggest, but we’ll get to that sooner or later. Gigantic is a documentary about They Might Be Giants, the ultimate indy group. For the uninitiated in the great unwashed masses, TMBG (as they’re known to their nerdy fans) are an American band based in Brooklyn, New York who have been writing music together for over 20 years. Outside of the phenomenal Birdhouse in Your Soul charting in the early 90s, and Boss of Me, the grating theme to the awesome Malcolm in the Middle, charting ten years after, they haven’t had a great deal of success in the UK, and this film, following suit, was never released in cinemas in Great Britain, though is now available on DVD.

Quite simply, it tells the story of the two Johns (Linnell and Flansburgh), from their early years in Brooklyn, through the huge success of anti-love song Ana Ng, the MTV-supported sensation that was their third album Flood, and their drop from the spotlight, as MTV’s support ceased and the band had problems with their record label who were clueless as to how to promote them. In the absence of footage from the band’s career, moments are recalled by fans, friends, and peers who share their experiences of the band. In the present, the camera follows the Johns as they promote the 2001 album Mink Car. The most interesting part of the film, however, is when the two Johns talk about each other and it’s a defining moment of a film which, while entertaining, is certainly lightweight, with the focus assuredly on light-heartedness rather than any sort of perspicacious insight into the bands relationship or creative process.

A key problem is that AJ Schnack’s occasional attempts to play up the wackier side of TMBG (celebrities reading their lyrics as poems, the selection of facts about James K Polk, school children discussing the true meaning of Particle Man) do feel like filler. If the documentary was more in-depth, these vignettes would certainly make good breather material to give the audience a break, but as it stands, it’s lightweight on top of lightweight, and results in an aroma of trying-too-hard.

But while the film has some definite weaknesses, it does one thing very well: it dispels the myth that TMBG, and the two Johns by extension, are some kind of lofty, impenetrable ‘in’-joke-laden wankfest. On the contrary, it shows them both as very normal guys, and what’s more modest, self-effacing and earnest, too. While, from their often perplexing lyrics, you would be forgiven for thinking they were beard-stroking intellectual types, this shows them as two hard-working, down-to-earth guys whose integrity, vision, and musical originality gave birth to the little band that could, did, and has been doing for over 20 years.

The film isn’t a penetrating portrayal of the personal lives and creative processes that I, as a long-time fan of the band, would’ve liked to see, but it goes a long way to make the group approachable, and with such an affectionate tone, the film makes very entertaining viewing.

Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist and The Valkyries

2005-11-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

Paulo Coelho is something of a strange entity. He is without a doubt a publishing phenomenon: a multimillion-selling writer whose books have been translated for consumption the world over. However, the first thing that strikes me as strange is that he, as a Brazilian who writes in Portuguese, is arguably the most read writer in translation. Yet it’s unclear how many people reading his books realise this. The other odd thing about Coelho, and the one I want to focus on, is his personal philosophy, a philosophy which permeates his works. He makes no secret of the fact that he believes in magic, though he doesn’t seem to practice any of the trendy neo-pagan religions which have cropped up over recent years. Coelho is certainly a Christian and yet perhaps not a monotheist; it remains unclear how he marries these two seemingly incompatible belief systems. As a staunch atheist, this is all a little far-fetched for me. Even as someone with an interest in religion and belief systems, I find it a baffling combination. Coelho has seemingly chosen the best bits of various religions and put them together in some sort of middle-aged Me-ism (http://www.scn.org/~jonny/genx.html). This is not, however, just indiscriminate musings. All this does have quite a profound effect on his writing.

Let’s begin with The Alchemist, undoubtedly his best-known novel. I’m going to leave aside the notions that this is a fictionalised self-help book because while those elements are certainly present and many readers probably view it as such, I’m not so insecure that I need to take life advice from some book. When I read the book, it wasn’t as some life-changing text, but rather as an adventure story. In fact, it would have made an excellent installment of one of the various Indiana Jones incarnations.

The book is about Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who has a dream about some buried treasure near the Pyramids and after a meeting with a mysterious old man decides to go look for it. This takes him to the north of Africa, where he heads east toward Egypt as part of a caravan, but gets held up at an oasis while there’s a war between local barbarians. At the oasis he meets an alchemist who trains him as his apprentice and, despite the war, they head out to the Pyramids. They runs into some barbarians who say they will let them go free if both men can turn themselves into the wind. Santiago has his doubts but he manages it. He gets to the Pyramids, and gets beaten up by a thief who inadvertently tells him that the treasure is actually back in Spain. He goes back home and claims his reward.

Now, all this is notably far-fetched. But within the confines of an adventure story, it works. After all, there’s nothing here that’s any more out of place than some of the weirder moments of Indy films (the obstacle course to get to the Holy Grail, the guy who tries to pull out his heart). Within the confines of a genre whose very conventions already ask you to suspend your disbelief to an often ridiculous degree, the mystical elements that Coelho readily and clearly believes in as real-life forces are simply another element in a ludicrous-yet-entertaining yarn. In brief, his beliefs become fictionalised and we the readers therefore don’t have to except them as anything other than plot devices or general background clutter to the exotic setting of the book.

The Valkyries, though, is another kettle of fish. This is Coelho’s second attempt at autobiographical writing (his first being The Pilgrimage). It’s the story of him realising his marriage is doomed unless he does something soon and heading off to the Mojave dessert on a 40-day (yes, I know…) quest to sort it all out. He’s told by some other magus that he needs to listen to his guardian angel and becomes obsessed with not only listening to it, but seeing it. So this leads to him meeting up with a group of evangelist biker women (the Valkyries of the title) and he follows them around as they go from town to town performing bizarre rituals to a baffled crowd of onlookers who clearly regard them as ranting derelicts. Coelho, it turns out, is cursed owing to some devil worship back in the 60s, and he needs to forgive himself. Cue another bizarre ritual to cure him. And Coelho also falls in love with their leader, and her with him, which means Chris, his wife, and the leader have to take part in yet another ritual. Paulo and Chris go home. The end.

Where to start… Firstly, remember that this is apparently the story of how Coelho saves his marriage, though it’s never clear how his poncing around in the dessert achieves this. There is no resolution to the story, just another ritual and a return home. He never sees his angel either. It’s never sufficiently clear what’s been achieved in the book’s 240 pages. There’s little to no plot here, and the characters – despite what Coelho seems to think – aren’t strong enough to distract from it.

But aside from structural problems, there’s a more fundamental difficulty here: we have to buy into Coelho’s pick-and-mix faith. While in The Alchemist, it was subsumed by the genre, here it stands in stark contrast to the real-world setting, and within that setting I find it incredibly difficult to suspend my disbelief and go with the flow of the book. This is, for a major part, because I’m an atheist, but also because I don’t understand Coelho’s belief system. Perhaps if I had some sort of framework to put his faith into, the story would resonate with me more – I’d understand what was at stake and perhaps even what was achieved. But instead the characters just come across as deluded fools who spend time in the dessert as part of some nebulously defined faith.

Moreover, the rituals which crop up several times over the course of the novel wouldn’t seem like the actions of a band of converted acid victims, but some kind of meaningful (to the characters in the book, at least) ceremony. Instead, I have no idea what the ceremonies symbolise, nor what its affects on the participants will be. Coelho has a wonderful talent for nonsensical philosophising – writing whole paragraphs about how ‘the gates of heaven are open’ which, rather than clearing up gaps in the narrative, just leave more questions to be answered. Ultimately, writing 400 words and saying absolutely nothing. The key problem seems to be that Coelho isn’t allowed to talk about his life as a magus, which is perfectly honourable, but sadly doesn’t make for interesting reading.

Simply, this is the writing equivalent of a damn good wank – I’m sure Coelho enjoyed the hell out of it, but I don’t want to see him pleasuring himself, and I certainly don’t want to pay for the privilege. The book is often turgid and meandering. As he has shown in The Alchemist, Coelho is a good adventure writer, but he is undoubtedly a dull, perplexing, rambling and self-absorbed autobiographer.

Banana Yoshimoto: Night and Night’s Travellers

2005-11-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

Banana Yoshimoto is one of the better-known Japanese writers in the west. She’s often been described as the female counterpart of Haruki Murakami, though the comparison doesn’t quite ring true – primarily because Murkami is far more successful, but also because their works differ significantly in style and content. I’ll probably get to Murakami at some point on the blog, as he is one of my favourite writers, but for now let’s look at this Yoshimoto short story.

This is the first story in a collection called Asleep, published in 2000 and translated by Michael Emmerich. It’s about the death of Yoshihiro, a vibrant young man whose life is sadly cut short by a car accident, and his family’s reaction to his death. The story is narrated by his sister, Shibami, but it is really the story of Mari, their cousin and Yoshihiro’s lover, and the depression that she suffers after his death. It’s a Yoshimoto trademark to have the story narrated by someone other than what would conventionally be considered the main character, and it’s for this reason that her stories are often difficult to pin down: people are looking centre stage, when they should be looking at the wings. The story also includes Yoshihiro’s earlier affair with an American student, a part of the story which gives it a marvellous, poignant pay-off and validates Yoshimoto’s choice of Shibami as the narrator.

Death is evidently the main theme here, but more specifically, those who have to go on living after someone has died. It’s by no means an original subject, but Yoshimoto has a knack for mingling these potentially life-changing traumas with dull, day-to-day activities, basing them in a very real, often mundane world and making the events more touching as a result. While her prose style has often been described as ephemeral because her stories often take the form of vaguely recalled memories, its beauty is in its simplicity, which reflects a much more grounded aspect of the stories; while these are certainly cloudy memories, they nonetheless took place as real-life events and are presented as such. It’s an interesting dichotomy which works incredibly well for her here and elsewhere.

Yoshimoto’s a good writer, and those dubious of Japanese literature because you fear it’ll be indecipherable don’t need to worry. While Yoshimoto’s novels are set in Japan, her themes of love, death, memory and longing are universal, and even the most sceptical reader should find something to enjoy in her work. Night and Night’s Travellers is a strong example of exactly what she does well, and an excellent introduction to it if you haven’t been inducted yet.

The inaugural post...

2005-11-04T02:00:00.000-08:00

Ah good, you found it. Well done.

Welcome to Ryan’s Head. It’s a blog which exclusively posts reviews and essays. Clever, eh? And it means that you don’t actually have to read about my life in excruciatingly dull detail. It just keeps getting better…

Now, the craze of using blogs for reviews and stuff is by no means a new trick. Many people have been doing it for quite some time, and doing it damn well, too, I should add. Just check out some of the links on this blog if you don’t believe me. So rather than being a huge innovator, I’m really just jumping on the bandwagon, and why not? After all, it’s been a few years since I’ve actually had a regular stomping ground to put out my various ramblings. The Event once served that purpose quite well, but most of the people reading this will know what happened there. Backlash (see the links over there again) occasionally does the same, but my one-time lover and current pimp Mischa, in all his sexy lankiness, hasn’t managed to get it on a regular schedule, for perfectly understandable reasons. So this is my way of getting back into the whole reviewing lark, something I’ve actually missed more than I thought I would when I stormed out of the newspaper office a little over a year ago. And more importantly I’m doing it on my own terms: no editors, contributors, no deadlines, and no spending entire weekends pissing about with Quark Express. It feels quite liberating.

So I suppose I should give some kind of mission statement, some hint of what to expect. Well, a mixture of opinion pieces and reviews covering anything I fancy, init. And I mean anything. Books, comics, DVDs, CDs, gigs, museums, towns, every bite of a goats cheese and tomato sandwich. And very occasionally I might put some creative stuff on here, too. I’m going to aim to get at least one new article on here per week, on Sunday night, and perhaps some more before that if you’re lucky. So add me to your favourites and check back in a few days.

Finally, I’d like to dedicate this first post to Constantine for being a truly awful film and making me want to write a review more than anything I’d seen/heard/read in a long time. I think that’s where Ryan’s Head truly started (and not, as biologists continue to insist, in my mother’s womb).