marramgrass

Yesterday evening, we had dinner with a couple of friends. The guy, who we’ll call Bob to protect the guilty, cheerfully self-identifies as a geek. But during the evening it came out that he had never seen a whole slew of films which I contend are necessary to claim that title.

A sample: Highlander, The Princess Bride, Aliens, The Last Starfighter, Flight of the Navigator, The Big Lebowski, Tremors, many more.

Additionally, he maintains that Voyager is the best Star Trek (when all right-thinking people know that that title belongs to DS9, or at least to the original series), has never seen Thundercats and had never heard of Babylon 5.

There’s some edumacatin’ required.

UPDATE: ‘Bob’ informs me that he had in fact heard of B5. He’s just never seen it. As if that makes it better.

It’ll always be a complicated proposition for an Englishman to make a film about India, perhaps more so if the film spends much of its time in and around the slums of Mumbai, but Danny Boyle has rarely gone for an easy film.

Like most of his films, Slumdog Millionaire is disconcertingly wonderful to look at. While I’ve never been to India, my wife tells me that the high-contrast, saturated colours and constant movement, coupled with AR Rahman’s brilliant soundtrack, provide a right sense of the place. The intense imagery complements well the fairytale story.

It’s a strange mix. (Or not. Fairytales can be pretty gruesome.) Rags-to-riches and love-across-the-years, taking in an episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, humour, abuse, violence, torture, and a flash of full-on Bollywood dance. Everything about the movie is efficiently eloquent: visuals, dialogue and performance. I don’t expect to see a much better film in 2009.

The writer, Simon Beaufoy, set out to capture the resilience and joy he witnessed in the slums, and it’s all there. I’ll have to take his word for it as an accurate portrayal, but it seems honest. There’s no danger of romanticism; instead, he manages to make the characters and situation more than a two-dimensional backdrop. It’s good to be reminded that a full humanity exists on the other side of the screen, even in the slum. Those scenes could so easily have been patronising nonsense. (Of course, I’m a white man in Northern Ireland. They still may be.)

As my wife and I walked out of the cinema, the people around us were talking about some of the predictable resolution and the cheerfulness of parts of the film. We talked a little about how the tone of the film was, on balance, more upbeat that not. Often when a film deals with poverty and deprivation it becomes very worthy. Slumdog doesn’t, remembering instead that it is, after all, a fairytale for our entertainment. If the laughter, romance and joy are wrapped around a little bit of something to make us think — if they help us to entertain images of global need — then that sounds good to me.

During the week I grabbed the DVD of The Mist — Frank Darabont doing a different kind of Stephen King story. The film had a very quiet cinema release here, which is a shame. I enjoyed it.

In a nutshell: freakish all-enveloping mist contains nasty creatures and traps a mix of small-town folks in their local supermarket.

The creatures are cleverly designed, most of them more menacing for having almost human-like heads and faces, and the great design more than makes up for the slightly weak CGI. Most unnerving, though, is the conflict between different people trapped in the store. It starts out as random shouting, leaving me wanting a bit of backstory to explain the conflict, but the main tension is well set up and develops very nicely: the slightly mad pseudo-Christian fundamentalist Mrs Carmody proclaims the end of days, claiming that God has chosen her to lead the faithful in appeasing the creatures with blood sacrifice.

The development of Mrs Carmody’s unhinged interpretation of events, her growing confidence, her gradual winning of followers among the group and the eventual clash with the skeptical few are brilliantly drawn and very satisfying, even if I did spend half the film shouting at her to try reading that Bible she was waving around.

Most memorable, though, is the ending. I won’t spoil it in detail, but it is about as bleak — but excellent — a bit of cinema as I’ve seen.

Measuring personality is big business. You can spend a fortune in time and/or money filling in forms, answering puzzles and deciphering unwieldy four-letter acronyms all with the aim of categorizing yourself in an only semi-useful way.

Never having adequately got my head around Myers-Briggs, I hereby propose a new psychometric test:

Which Hitchhiker’s Guide is the best?

Answer the question by selecting a form or an individual book, and find your personality-type below.

The radio show, but only the Primary and Secondary phases.

You’re a traditionalist. You know that there are many new and supposedly wonderful things in the world, but it’s better to stick with what you know well. You may be of a certain age, and you sometimes miss the carefree days of your youth.

The radio show, the whole thing.

You wouldn’t describe yourself as a risk-taker, but your friends will say you’ve been known to take a chance or two. Of those friends, some will enjoy your sense of humour, while others aren’t so sure. You like to see things through to completion, and prefer to make a good go and get it done rather than be paralyzed by a futile search for perfection.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the novel.

You like to know where everything is, and you value simplicity. The people around you have learned that you don’t handle surprises very well, but they’re perfectly happy to treat you kindly and look out for you.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the novel.

Quality matters to you, but sometimes you’ll let it slip in the name of excitement. Similarly, although you tend towards an analytical approach to life, you have been known to jump to some very unusual conclusions. It seems to have worked okay for you so far.

Life, the Universe and Everything, the novel.

You’re a little bit surreal in your approach to life, perhaps as a result of an experience with hallucinogens. Nonetheless, you know exactly where you’re going in life, even if no-one else does. This knowledge makes you a little bit smug, but in an endearing way.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the novel.

You’re a bit of a hippy, and a romantic at heart. You wish for everyone to have a happy ending, but you know deep down that that’s terribly unlikely. Still, you hope.

Mostly Harmless, the novel.

The diametric opposite of Type SLATFATF, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all, life is suffering, isn’t it? You remember a time when you were less negative about everything, but you’re a little bit ashamed of that past self.

The text-based adventure game.

Given to extraordinary bursts of imagination, you still like to suffer. With a tendency to make life difficult for yourself, pain is a strange pleasure to you.

The BBC TV series.

You grew up on Doctor Who and like your entertainment made up in dreary cardboard. Slightly morose, you tend to just get on with things without getting terribly worked up about them. You are very probably English.

The 2005 film.

It’s nice to see some young ‘uns packing towels. Welcome to the family — just be sure to mind your manners, and don’t assume that you know what you’re talking about quite yet.

(A note on method: this is based on the forms of Guide that I’m familiar with. Given the uniquely multi-media nature of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed some. You now where the comment form is if you want to expand the test.)

There are a few kinds of fiction that I’m a total sucker for: SF and some gentler fantasy, things with zombies. And vampires — ever since I read Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire at an impressionable age. I’ve had the occasional awkward conversation (“Do you really think a good, Christian lad should be (reading|watching) that kind of thing?”), but my response is generally along the lines of, “It’s fiction. Fick-shun.” I don’t think it’s done me any harm. Actually, I think I’m well past due a re-read of Jim Butcher’s excellent Dresden Files. (I keep meaning to post about Dresden — there are some interesting things to talk about from those books.)

That’s the background. Here’s the fun.

A series of books I haven’t read, by Stephenie Meyer, is starting to make it’s way to film; the first, Twilight, has hit cinemas in the States and will do so here around the middle of next month. It’s about a girl who falls in love with a vampire, and it all sounds very teenager-y angst-y: just the kind of thing that gives YA fiction a bad name.

Cue tension.

In the red corner we have the concerned Christians, represented by Jonathan McKee. (I used to follow quite closely what he wrote, but got a bit turned off when he relaunched his site and resources as The Source for Youth Ministry. The teeth were also a problem, although that shot shows them as a bit less extremely white than I recall.) Actually, I don’t want to slabber too much as what he’s been saying is generally of the “take care and make your own decisions” variety. I’ll never pretend that the media we expose ourselves to can’t influence us to a frightening degree (although I have a suspicion we get distracted by the bits that don’t pretend to be anything more than a good story and let a great volume of much more insidious material go past unchallenged), and that’s always good advice.

What I find amusing is the contrast between the counsel on McKee’s site and this outraged piece on io9.

Short version: in the blue corner we have a SF/fantasy blog up in arms over the books’ expression of the author’s Mormon morality:

The more you examine author Stephenie Meyer’s themes, the more obvious it becomes that her books are a thinly-veiled religious screed against teen sex.

…

Of course Meyer should be allowed to write her own values into Twilight and its sequels, but we are doing young readers a disservice by rubber-stamping these books without a forewarning of what lies within.

And it goes on.

Poor Stephenie Meyer. She seems a little bit out on her own.

I usually make it a practice not to post about movies within too few hours of seeing them, but it’s November :-) I’m just through the door from Quantum of Solace, the new Bond flick.

After the pure brilliance of Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s second turn as 007 is rather a let-down. I’ve heard comment that the plot is hard to follow; not really — just that there isn’t much there to follow. Instead, it’s a poor excuse to squander some beautiful locations on some alright action (cheesy intercuts with background action twice: Palio di Siena and Tosca).

The film does have its moments, and the filmmakers actually manage to make Quantum a reasonably sinister evil organisation, but I hope they bring it out into the light a bit more in the next film. Craig is a bit less three-dimensional than in Casino Royale, but I’d still rate him as Bond; unfortunately Olga Kurylenko didn’t really live up to her billing, but that’s more down to the character she was given to work with, and it would have been nice to see a little more of Miss Strawberry Fields (a name that provides one of the many nods to the Bond films of old). Judi Dench has, by now, made M her own, but she didn’t seem altogether involved in this one.

Unusually for Bond, Quantum of Solace follows directly on from Casino Royale, and sets up the next film as well. That, plus the grittier feel and more bluntly applied violence, shows that someone has been watching Jason Bourne at work, and that’s no bad thing. Fortunately it hasn’t gone too far: Bond is still distinctly Bond.

Not all bad, not all good. Here’s hoping this is the weak second film of a storming trilogy.

Yesterday evening was Get Smart, the Hollywood update of a TV show I loved when I was younger. If you’re not familiar with it (turns out not everyone is!) Get Smart is to The Man From UNCLE and Mission: Impossible what Police Squad and Naked Gun are to the likes of Dragnet. Any wiser? Good.

I hoped this would be a cracker, and it was. Plenty of proper laugh-inducing humour and all the riffs on the series necessary to keep someone like me happy. Steve Carrell does a great job updating Maxwell Smart, and Anne Hathaway makes for a supremely confident Agent 99.

The comedy ticks all the boxes: bad visual puns, some in-jokes and catchphrases, a little bit of politics, slapstick… Not what you’d call particularly intellectual, but fun.

If you remember the series you’ll enjoy the film; if you don’t, you probably still will.

After months of waiting, and of hype that seemed to get whipped up even further after the death of Heath Ledger in January, I toddled along on Thursday night to catch The Dark Knight. Along with, seemingly, half of Belfast. It was hoachin’.

Did I enjoy it? Oh yes. Was it “the best movie, like, ever“? No, not really, but a pretty fine show all the same.

The obvious question: Heath Ledger as the Joker? He was great. Folks have asked me how he compared to Jack Nicholson in the Burton version — actually, I think the whole internet was asking that before the film opened. I felt that Ledger’s unhinged nihilist (ooh, look at me) was much more menacing — and Joker-like — than Nicholson’s self-assured… Jack Nicholson standard character.

I know others will disagree, but I was also completely onboard with the handling of Harvey Dent/Two-Face.

The film belonged to Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart and Gary Oldman (an actor who we’ve never really seen enough of). It almost seemed to me like Batman was the white space around these three that let them do their thing, and do it in spades.

Criticisms? The Bat-voice, so comical as to be distracting, is one of the beats where the Nolans lost some of their intended realism. That, and some of the daft Bat-gadgetry, just didn’t seem to fit. Casting wise, I wish Maggie Gyllenhaal had had something to do other than [SPOILER]. She was wasted. If only Ms Gyllenhaal had been there last time round, then Katie Holmes could’ve handled the character’s three or four lines for this one.

I approached this one as energetic popcorn entertainment and left most of my analytical brain at home, but Glenn offers a some deeper thoughts. Batman has always been the hero who will never get an easy ride. His lack of any ’superpower’, his difficult past and his blunter-than-normal vigilante status see to that.

It’s a characterization that lends itself to the darker, grittier kind of movie that Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have been. Batman works because he’s just that little bit closer to what might be possible, but he makes us uncomfortable because he shows us the consequences that neither Superman, Spider-Man nor the X-Men ever did. We can read life onto him much more easily. He’s a bit of white space that allows us to fantasize and moralize and perhaps question what justice might be, here in the real world.

Unfortunately, in this one, Bruce Wayne and Batman were almost (Rachel Dawes) the thinnest characters there, and it was left to Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent to hold the line.

It’s still the best movie I’ve seen this year, I think, and probably due a second viewing sometime soon.

There’ve been a couple of films and a book lately that I intended to comment on. Here goes.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is what happens when a Respected Literary Author™ tries a little genre fiction. A fairly standard post-apocalyptic yarn, it’s been around for a couple of years and is currently being made into a film starring Aragorn. In a nutshell, America (the world?) is enduring the aftermath of an undetailed (nuclear?) disaster. Society has collapsed, survivors are eating each other, and a man and his young son are trekking across the country in an attempt to find a little safety and security.

The Road gathered very positive reviews, singing the praises of McCarthy’s handling of his fairly sci-fi premise and how he uses it to great effect to explore themes of civilization and fear of death, along with some deftly handled father-son relationship issues.

I wasn’t quite so impressed.

Yes, the book does all those things, but I suspect it gained from the reviewers not being too familiar with the genres in which McCarthy was squatting. Disaster-destroys-civilization has been a popular device over recent years, and lends itself well to this kind of philosophising — so it’s been done a lot, lately.

If you want a study of the end of civilization in all its fascinating horror, check out Max Brooks’ World War Z. I’d love to say that Brooks hasn’t got McCarthy’s touch with language, but actually I found his prose much more interesting and affecting. Sometimes The Road is too clever for its own good: yes, screwing around with punctuation may reflect the chaos and disorder of post-apocalyptic America, but it makes it damned hard to read. (Of course, ‘genre’ authors can be guilty of this, too. The phonetically written portions of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn are as tiring to read as they must have been to write.)

Maybe I’ve got a chip on my shoulder that’s tempting me into a rant. Maybe not. I read a lot of SF and fantasy, but I read a lot of literary fiction, too. I have the fervour of an evangelist trying to convince the world of all the quality writing that exists in the ‘genres’. I just find it sad and a little elitist that when a well-known literary author tackles themes and ideas that have been done very well by genre authors, he gains far greater recognition than those genre folks.

Enough of that. On to a few films:

Iron Man has, I think, claimed the position of my favourite comic book adaptation. Robert Downey, Jr made a most excellent Tony Stark, and the whole thing was great fun.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall wasn’t so hot. It had one or two good laughs, but on the whole it’s best forgotten.

We watched Knocked Up a few weeks back. This was why I went to see Sarah Marshall, because this one was good. It’s the next stage of coming-of-age film after American Pie et al — what happens when the drunken sex leads to pregnancy? The humour may be low-brow, but the characters are surprisingly subtle and the whole thing is sweet and sensitive.

The Heartbreak Kid joins the list of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Looking at that short list, it seems that I’ve mainly been consuming cinematic fluff recently. Ah. So be it; does you good, sometimes.

While I’m still slowly reading through NT Wright, in between I’m having great fun with a series of cheesy fantasy novels.

I think that’s me up to date with the reading and the watching I wanted to mention. Was it good for you?

The trailer for this year’s bizarrely-titled fourth Indiana Jones movie is out: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’m curious to see how they play Indy being almost twenty years older than last time.

Am I looking forward to it?

Oh yes.