"The Road"... and the cracks in it

Haha, Philip Challinor - the excellent author and sharp-edged political commentator - takes a chunk out of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". He is right. I find myself being in the camp of being a fan of "The Road", and remaining a fan, even though the perceptive and enlightening criticisms of it that I have read seem totally correct also. Naturally, part of the issue is that Cormac McCarthy is a huge literary name and that he receives the kind of praise and worthiness that surely needs to be taken down a peg or two. [1] I dig McCarthy. But Challinor is very right on the issue of the moral challenges of the novel: namely, that if you are looking for that, "The Road" cops out. What follows, then, is my acknowledgement of Challinors correct deconstruction of "The Road", or at least its lofty status, and also my defence, rationalisation and allowances of the novel as a fan. I am hoping not to lapse into excuses.

I like that Challinor puts "The Road" in its proper context - science-fiction, if not horror - and grades it accordingly. Challinor's opening is a fine slice of iconoclasm:

"If you'll pardon the blasphemy, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is not a very good book. It is not an uncompromising vision of the Apocalypse; it is not a brutally realistic vision of the end of civilisation; it is not more frightening than the most frightening horror story; it is not more convincing than the best science fiction; and it is not a brilliant allegory of parenthood in the dangerous twenty-first century."

And here we shall differ, because I think it is and remains a good book, despite the flaws. Challinor's key argument seems to me to be that it does not go far enough; or rather, does not go far enough to warrant it's reputation of incomparable bleakness. Whenever a true moral dilema comes up, McCarthy throws in something new to divert the true test of the father's "goodness" and paternal love. He never really has to decide should I kill and eat another human being to keep myself and my child alive?

To me, "The Road" is a little by-way off of the true uncomprosing, brutally realistic vision of the Apocolypse and one of the most chilling horror stories and allegories ever: Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead", which I consider to be one of the greatest slabs of horror and humanitarian writing in genre fiction. Yes, I am going to add ever to that too. I have a hard time imagining how McCarthy might have stumbled onto "The Road" without at least someone having mentioned "The Walking Dead" to him. But it is then not so much the plot and its convulutions that generate the truth of the grim reputation of the novel so much as the context, conceit and sparseness of prose that create the harshness. It is in the atmosphere and execution. The feel of the novel alludes to the worst happening to the father and son at any moment, even if the magic of storytelling intercepts at just the right moments to pull them back from the brink. This aftertaste of a crumbling natural world and civilisation holds up long after the convenience of discovering a bunker stuffed with food (which, of course, is a moment designed also to provide our protagonists with a moment of reprieve and civility: for the father, it is the memory of civility and for the son a fleeting introduction. It is meant as a contrast to the outside world, evidently, and the episode would perhaps be successful at this if the father was faced with scenes that truly test his humanity. Just how hungry are they? We don't see them at the stage of eating algae or dry leaves for sustenance, for example). The mood triumphs.

Challinor does not believe that the boy would be the herald of the virtue in a world overrun by cannibals. Challinor on the scene where the son chastises his father for the way he treats a thief that tries to steal from them: "A child in a highly dangerous post-apocalyptic landscape, with only its father to rely on, would join its father in humiliating and murdering the thief, and give the corpse a good kick in the face to show it just how good the good guys can be." But, indeed, not every scenario has to be that way, surely? Not every child needs to be barbarous to make a point, and surely the challenge McCarthy sets himself is not to have a barbaric child, and the quest his father undertakes to keeps him from that barbarism. But I would say that Challinor presents an unassailable argument as to why McCarthy fails this challenge: as he puts it, something always comes along to circumnatigate the father away from the truly messy choices.

Again, I see no need to turn every child into a stray from "Lord of the Flies" in such a scenario, and I can swing with the idea that, with only his father's evangelical stress on being "the good guys" and keeping him away from any other survivors, the son may well find himself the bearer of conscience and the desire for a better world that came before... especially when: something always comes along. I would also suggest that the paradox of children is that they are as innately sweet as they are barbaric, and that some fall more one way that the other due to character, environment, influences, etc. They are naturally as fascinated with being good as they are with bad behaviour.[2] Under the sole, stifling influence of the father, why should this not be so for the son?

My conclusion is doubtlessly not going to satisfy detractors, and probably not some fans either, but in light of Challinor's accurate squewering of its Achilles' Heel, I read "The Road" more as a fairy-tale. A fairy-tale in its rendering of the son as a "pure" character, as the father as a knight of sorts, both travelling in a world of monsters. A fairy-tale in that something always comes along, that convenience and coincidence always strike where most appropriate (like in those good old canonical classics!). Challinor feels it fails as an allegory, but I don't think it fails consistently or completely. For just a moment, I doubted someting would come along at the end. Of course it did and anything else would feel unbearable or take a longer novel to resolve. A more devastating ending would have the son falling into cannibalism - either as victim or feaster. As it is, he has to rely upon something always coming along which, for myself, I do not believe is such a cosy coda. But I believe it works as fairy tale, although detractors may see this as excuse-making and fans may see this as a challenge to its lauded verisimilitude.

As Challinor states, you have to go to, say, Harlan Ellison's seminal "A Boy and His Dog" to find the real moral dilemma of this scenario faced. This ground has been well covered before in science-fiction and horror, and by McCarthy himself. I propose that what was seemingly new and transcendant about "The Road" for many was that they had not read the key genre fiction that mattered, that had gone before... if they read genre fiction at all. "It's a horror novel!" I would tell people, because I read in "The Road" something that I have seen evident in mainstream cinema: the appropriation of horror motifs and excesses that had previously been found only in cult and b-rated cinema. I can see "The Road" as a crossover success, from the lowly sewers of the horror genre to the bookshelves of the literati. The literati, of course, ought to slum it a little if they liked this stuff. I recommend "The Walking Dead".

So Challinor is right, but I am a fan and, making allowances or not (as you must do with any work of fiction) I believe "The Road" still stands as an important work of post-Apocolyptic speculation, for its atmosphere, prose and crossover status if nothing else.

~~

I recommend Phillip Challinor's anthology "Radical Therapies". The first story, "The Little Doctor" in particular is a fine example of how he deals with ethical challenges.

~~

[1] I do not like Picador's new packaging of McCarthy's novels. The cover is a stack of words: the novel title stands out, surrounded by lines extolling the brilliance, importance, etc., of said novel. In the case of "The Road": "a work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away." I will? Really? Jesus, that's a tall order and deserving of a kicking. Challinor's review certainly cleans out the works to get some perspective back into viewing the book's weaknesses and strengths. Blurb has replaced art and design on the cover. It is as if you can simply congratulate yourself and take yourself out for a celebratory meal just for buying it.

[2] I recently watched "The Girl Next Door" and was struck how the film and Jack Ketchum's source novel credibly presents a throughly good character faced with the potential of his own ability and complicity in torture and inhumanity. His goodness is innate and wins through, but not in a way I consider to be trite: characters of Goodness can be wearisome, but they do not always have to be so, for they can represent natural moral awareness, empathy and rightness of action. I believe it is possible to see the son in "The Road" in this light also, and that such a character does not necessarily have to be the representation of natural childhood cruelty; one might also argue that that might have been the easy characterisation and certainly the novel would have fallen into into the exploitation/horror genres more visibly.

THX 1138

George Lucas, 1971, US

It does feel as if two quite different directors helmed “THX 1138” and “Star Wars”. Not so much that you can’t see where the Stormtroopers, comedy robots, gadgets, slightly detached and simplistic characterisations and the limited colour and hardware palette came from; but it is different enough that “THX 1138” feels like the work of a low-budget, b-movie arthouse auteur rather than inventor of the modern blockbuster franchise cinema. “THX 1138” looks made by a cult director who would go the other way and create further formally experimental genre pieces, rather than the great sweeps and crowd-pleasing pulp sentiment and action of Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vadar. There's even the hint of chill that defines David Cronenberg's earliest works. “THX 1138” also bears the kind of clinical, slightly visionary Dystopian qualities that can then be found in seminal science-fiction literature such as “We” and “Brave New World”, and films such as “The Andromeda Strain” and “The Forbin Project” through to “Code46” and “Eden Log”. With its eerie and disturbing future conceit, with brilliant design and a slightly abstract presentation, "THX 1138" has the appearance of mature, ‘hard’ sci-fi rather than pulp, although it is ultimately as much pulp as, say, “Logan’s Run” and “Planet of the Apes” and the like. Indeed, Lucas opens with a homage to early “Buck Rogers” films before introducing us to his Dystopia, as if to directly say: ‘we started with the passionate adventures of pulp, and we ended up with this.'

It takes a moment for us to even identify whom we shall be following. We are thrown into this world instantaneously by the means of distorted, overlapping dialogue tracks, mostly jargon relating to work; by surveillance and observation camera shots, as well as a gallery of shaven-headed monitors, workers and random civilians whom we can’t particularly distinguish. Walter Murch’s fantastic sound-design demands to be taken seriously as both a character in its own right and as the film’s true triumph: it is omnipresent, simultaneously disorientating and informative, verging on white noise. Lucas is bold in using an almost Brechtian use of disorientating sound track, clone-like appearance of actors, filtering events through other cameras. He is not an artful director - it's like plane prose telling a dense story - but he knows how to frame a shot and not get in the way.

One of the best early shots is that of the surveillance camera view of an accident at a plant in which explosions wipe out several running staff… the figures are distant, unclear, a little pixellated and distorted on screen, and this makes it all the more chilling and real somehow. Watch for the worker who shoves his colleague back into the danger area, shutting the door on him, only to be blown away himself: it is an action shot that achieves verisimilitude and extra horror, rather than thrills, by being viewed one step removed by the audience, via a screen within the screen they are watching.

Best of all, rather than a lot of exposition, or myth-making, Lucas conveys the details of this world through visuals and audio. It is a familiar Dystopian narrative - hapless THX 1138 is the rebel against an oppressed, desensitised society when his house mate LUH messes with his compulsory drug intake and they have forbidden sex - but it is made more abstract and fascinating by being interrupted by tiny interludes and to the incidental workings of the society around our bewildered protagonists. People watch a sports match. A police robot amuses a bunch of kids. People work, walk, step into booths where they make confessions to a Jesus-like picture… which are recorded and monitored, or simply stored away with millions of other confessions (a neat conflation of Catholicism and Big Brother). Even towards the end, Lucas pauses to introduce more details that flesh out the society: Donald Pleasance - as SEN - reminisces with some kids about how when he was a kid, education came in huge bottles rather than the mini-intravenous bottles the children have taped to their arms as they play. This is one of the film’s most successful visual achievements: we see the children as the appear at the top of an escalator, the “lessons” intravenously fed into their arms, conjuring up the image of hospital patients on a conveyer belt, churned out into society. The culmative effect of this visual and aural collage, as Chris Basanti says, is of 'a fractured tone poem".

Finally, we settle upon THX himself, and it is Robert Duvall. The film benefits immensely from a wise cast: Duvall and Pleasance especially know how to work this material. Duvall does much with a limited role, conveying a slow awakening of awareness and character. Pleasance does a neat line in borderline creepiness and befuddlement. Maggie OcOmie manages to squeeze in the film's real source of humanity in the brief time she is on screen as LUH. But performances are not the key to the film's success.

Elsewhere, Lucas creates a whole web of criticism: blundering bureaucracy, stolid police brutality (which has its own plot-free hologram-show for violence entertainment!); faux-passionate law and trial gibberish; the intelligentsia… it’s all here. As ever, police states and conformism are the umbrella targets. Although much of it feels timeless (in the era of the police taser, the police brutality sequences ring especially prescient), Dragan Antulov at Draxblog places “THX 1138” firmly as a result of the 1969s:

“The futuristic underground world is natural progression of everything which was wrong with Western civilisation in 1960s – faceless and bureaucratic state is as oppressive as those behind 1960s Iron Curtain, while the consumerist culture is as tasteless and worthless as in 1960s West.”

Perhaps the best gag is the subversion of the drug culture scare: in this world, it is illegal not to take drugs. Government prescribed and prone to make you a virtual working zombie, of course. All this is a fine elaboration on Lucas' original student short film, "Electronic Labyrinth THX 4EB": this earlier THX has some slightly psychedelic allusions: a slightly hippyish theme song, some flashing lights. 4EB runs through a world of white, concrete and steel, and the powers that be struggle to contain him from afar electronically. The key ingredients, including the ultimately startling and ambiguous final shot, are all present and correct, but the full drollness of this Dystopia is not quite in full view.

"THX 1138" is a very white film: the walls, the uniforms, the shaven heads. When THX 1138 goes across the cell with Donald Pleasance in tow, they are very shocked to encounter a black person. The only black people they know of are the masturbatory holograms of people of colour dancing naked to jungle rhythms and cracking wise on holo-TV. For the moment, let’s sidestep the Lucas' future problematic use of racial stereotypes for alien characteristics (looking at you, Jar-Jar Binks, Yoda, et al). The black man THX meets is a hologram, who has just wandered out of the virtual world to see what the real one is like. It’s a nice enough gag, but what it says about the technology of the world is hard to pin down: that technology has achieved sentience of its own? That the film has suddenly forsaken the realism of its hardware and technology and stepped into fantasy, perhaps? But it also hints at a world where, say, white privilege and prejudice has successfully eradicated people of colour and minorities, reduced them to ghosts. Indeed, the casting seems to bear this out, for it is seemingly populated solely by a pale and bald population. People of colour are relegated to holograms, personifying the baser needs of white people (e.g, sex and humour). But the hologram is not exactly the black comedy relief, thankfully, and in fact brings a warmth to the last act absent from the sterile world. Some end result of white man’s Puritanism and perhaps Conservatism is, then, the Dystopia that THX 1138 lives in.

It is also quite pithy about heroism. THX 1138 isn’t particularly a hero, or a rebel. He comes to his rebellion by accident, but once LUH messes with his meds and he ends up in the shared cell-space, it is pure frustration that initially drives him on. Lucas subverts the idea of the prison by making it ostensibly wall-less and endless white, simultaneously claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Pleasance’s SEN also has designs on THX 1138 and subverts the system to get them to share living space; THX turns him in and this is how they end up in the cell together. SEN talks of revolution and argues with other dissidents and criminals about rebellion, society and what they will do and what it all means. They philosophise and debate and yet do not do the simplest thing, which is what THX ultimately does by getting up and walking out on them. This leads to escape. Thereafter, he seems to run and carry on simply to see what happens. Meanwhile, lagging behind, SEN simply gets a taste of the world beyond and retreats back into what he knows, paralysed by the thought of real adventure and escape.

It is here that the most evident touching-up effect in Lucas’ 2004 Director’s Cut restoration of “THX 1138” appears: Pleasance stumbles upon a CGI bug - which chatters in one of those comedy-like alien noises that Lucas so loves. The CGI seems out of place, a rude anomaly in a retro-classic - but it is not gratuitous, for the bug does at least have purpose: encountering the bug makes SEN back away from the possibility of braving the unknown. Elsewhere, the updated special-effects fall mostly seamlessly into the film, fleshing it out, showing that when a director goes back to tinker and insert the next generation of special effects technology into an old work, it doesn’t necessary need to look like a jarring graft job. 

When I watched “THX 1138” the first few times as a teenager, much of the dark humour was lost on me; at first, for me it was all about a scary prospect of a future society. Now, it is the satire that truly satisfies, and it is this that makes this a film that rewards watching numerous times. ‘THX 1138’ is full of haunting stark visuals and clinically chilling demonstrations of a technologically fixated authority, one that is bureaucratically flawed, as befitting of the best Dystopian science-fiction. The design, aesthetic and agenda are consistent and compelling. For all its starkness, it is loaded with fascinating details and deadpan humour. Unintelligible trials, impenetrable technical jargon, creepy and blundering police robots, workers casually making errors and not taking responsibility for them... In the end, THX1138 escapes simply due to police force budgetary limitations. It is a wonder how the genuinely satirical eye that conceived “THX 1138” disappeared by the time the inane philosophies of “Star Wars” came around. 'It is also interesting that Lucas cannot maintain the grim "1984" tone throughout the movie," John Brosnan writes [1]. Indeed, it is as if Lucas wanted to get this serious stuff off his chest before returning to “Buck Rogers” and getting on with space opera. And, of course, we now know which led to the money.

[1] John Brosnan, "The Primal Screen: a history of science fiction film", (Orbit, Lonodn, 1991), pg. 156

Drag Me To Hell - rerun

Watching "Drag Me To Hell" again I am struck at how thoroughly it works as a portrait of a woman - Christine (Alison Lohman) - apparently traumatised by an eating disorder and self-esteem issues (first review here), . This, of course, is manifest in her delusion that she is being gypsy-cursed and hounded down by a Lamia demon; a delusion compounded by her unfortunate trust in a bunch of con-men mediums and experts in the occult. She wants to be free from mouth-fixated demons and they want her cash.

With a second viewing, it becomes apparent that the Raimi's know exactly what they are doing, because all the clues and cues are there - how the demon appears at stressful moments when reflecting on how she used to be overweight or confronting food; the many down-the-throat violations also tell us a story. Indeed, the banquet of continuity and logic issues make total sense, and only sense, when in the context of Christine's delusions.

And, which I missed the first time, the subtle clues that her boyfriend especially knows that she has mental health issues. "She needs help," he says when her mother says that Christine is sick. Upon a first watch, I thought the fact that boyfriend's mum comments that Christine is sick was just an indication of her bitchiness, but second viewing seems to hint that, well, she knows something, and so does her son and that's why she doesn't approve of their relationship and it's not all about class.

That the film situates the manifestations in Christine's latent and not-so-latent prejudices and class anxieties is also thorough and pretty bold. She's not exactly likeable, but she's in trouble; she is not particulary deep, but she feels real enough. Particular note has to be made of Lohman's performance too and, as ever, the effects work is exemplary.

My initial review shows how I started off a little lukewarm, but coming back to "Drag Me To Hell" reveals that this may be the cleverest Raimi film so far. It is like a Jacques Tournier/Val Lewton film made by Looney Tunes. I can take or leave the slapstick violence, as incidentally enjoyable as it may be, but as a comedy-horror about failing mental health, this has the weight of subtext that truly elevates horror, and shows what horror can do like no other genre. Here's the cliche: demons of the mind. It also means that "Drag Me To Hell" is bona fide tragedy, and for that I like it more than ever.

People call it a classic, but I am no longer about to quibble that so easily, although my reasons may differ.

A Swedish Love Story

A SWEDISH LOVE STORY / EN KARLEKSHISTORIA
Roy Andersson, 1970, Sweden

What is distinguished about Roy Andersson’s portrayal of adolescent love is the respect, the unwavering reverence with which he treats the romance of his young protagonists. We may be amused at their affectation of supposed adult ‘cool’, with their leather jackets and mopeds and miniskirts and attention to make-up and posing, but these are also the core of their evolving characters. There is no denying the confidence with which they carry themselves. It is impossible not to recognise ourselves in them: furtive looks, raw feelings, tenderness. When Par (Rolf Sohlman) receives Annika (Anne-Sofie Kylin) at his family’s country home, he can barely stop smiling to be around her. These are agreeable protagonists, not immediately approachable or conventionally affable, for we will never be allowed access to their full inner-workings; but they are fully rounded characters.

Andersson’s debut wears very little friction between the loose influence of Czech New Wave naturalism and the clearer, infamous stylistic formalism of his later films (""Something Happened", "Songs From The Second Floor", "You, The Living"), although the opening does inform us that this is theatre with the rise of a curtain. Andersson’s obsession with detail serves his young couple well, not only in their dress sense and mannerisms, but also their less guarded mannerisms and casual body-language (e.g., the random way Par clucks his tongue nonchalantly after having been caught romancing in Annika‘s bedroom). It also generates a wholly convincing milieu for them to live in and explore: from nursing homes, clubs and the streets, to Annika’s bedroom and the country retreat. Rarely do films feel so of a time and place without feeling dated.

Andersson’s respect for his protagonists is served further by technique: after a split between the couple due to Par’s humiliation and near unbearable shame at being beaten by another boy, the break-up is resolved in a glorious scene where Par mopeds across the yard back into Annika’s arms. The scene uses a melancholic swell of music, strings that manage not to turn the evident melodrama of the moment trite, but rather serious, heroic and moving. The moment creates a dry humour in evoking those big scenes of reconciliation that resolve so many romantic narratives: he is James Dean, Elvis, whoever, awkwardly jumping off of the moped to rush back to her. But more than this, when they are reconciling, the music swells to drown out their spoken intimacies and the camera steps back from close-up to wide-shot to allow them their privacy. It is a moment of sublime cinematic generosity and regard for the characters.

But once they are at the country home, Andersson retreats from the couple completely and we are left with the adults. Throughout, we have been shown the adults as a counterpoint to the young romantics, apparently to reveal what a loveless adulthood becomes, to show what the teenagers are not, or even what they might become. No, we don’t really believe they will become their parents, but the possibility remains. The adults are tediously angst-ridden and distraught, melodramatic and childish in a way Par and Annika are not. Annika’s parents are trapped in an apparently loveless marriage where the mother sobs and the father is given to pompous declarations of bitterness. With Par’s parents being more settled (regardless of their concerns about ill grandparents and business in a time of economic strife), the dramatic focus falls on Annika’s parents, in particular her father’s self-loathing and boorishness. He is driven to distraction by a sense of failure, his temper and a desire to see his indifferent daughter deliver vengeance on the world on his behalf. This focus seeks to trump the Swedish love story who are conspicuous in their absence - Par and Annika have snuck away to be intimate - and the adult histrionics are crass and far less involving than the delicacies of the teenagers. Earlier, a scene involving installing a pair of swing doors in the house is almost farcical in the way the family turn it into a confrontation of the value of the action and the meaning of life. But later, there is little of the satirical, mocking qualities to the last act, as typical of Andersson’s subsequent films; yet the party hats and bibs provide some welcome surrealism, although this too is slightly at odds with the preceding naturalism. Ultimately, there is the feeling that a wrong-turn has been taken, as if the narrative has wandered into another Bergman-influenced film of broken angst-ridden families, leaving the love story somewhat stranded and an aftertaste of dissatisfaction. Like Par and Annika, we really had little to learn from the adults.

Nevertheless, this remains a towering, beautifully made tribute to first love, to the main protagonists and the range of feeling and intelligence held by youth. A rare film that sees its main characters not so much as puppets and ciphers ruled by narrative, but as the personification of the raw, rare and vital intimacies of adolescent discovery and character; and in that way, and more than that, as people in their own right.

Kick Ass

Matthew Vaughn, 2010, USA

When "Kick Ass" first came out, Mark Millar And John Romita Jnr’s comic was an instant phenomenon. The film came out seemingly when the comic had barely finished. That is, barely finished volume one. It’s concept is simple: what if a comic book nerd took it upon himself to dress up and fight crime in the real world? He tries it out, gets hospitalised a couple of times, has some success when his fighting a bunch of thugs gets filmed and uploaded to Youtube. In fact, he becomes an internet and cultural phenomenon. At this point, there is much blood and guts, some lowkey adolescent humour and wish-fulfilment fantasy and not just a dash of self-loathing. "Kick Ass" looked like it may have something to say. And then the story introduces Big Daddy and Hit Girl and Red Mist and organised crime. The comic moved into "Batman" and "Daredevil" territory. Big Daddy was a "Punisher" like vigilante figure with a pre-adolescent ninja daughter. The defining image of "Kick Ass" became not so much "Kick Ass" in his ski suit, but Hit Girl covered in gore from head to toe.

Which you are not going to see in the film adaptation. Announcements of the film adaptation came early in the comic’s first run (reprints with variant covers were catnip for collectors and fooled others into buying editions they already owned) and my first thought was, How the hell are they going to do that? The fact that Matthew Vaughn’s film - writing with Jane Goldman - is not the total compromise that might have been expected is remarkable. Even the fact that a mainstream film going by a mildly swearing title seems remarkable (that, along with "Inglourious Basterds", has Hollywood ever offered such a mild-sweary-title season?). It surely indicates how the ultra-violence and taboo-breaking of the alternative art scene has gone mainstream. So maybe Dave Lizewski - a.k.a. Kick Ass - is older than I imagined from the comic, and as played by Aaron Johnson he is surely more American every-nerd, and far less ugly and manipulative than his comic book counterpart. But Hit Girl is still an eleven-year-old super-psycho. So: sure, we get a hoodlum being microwaved, but the film simply leaves out much of the hand-on super-gore, and it inevitably has to. Hit Girl barely gets a bloody splatter upon her. We don’t get the nasty "Kick Ass" torture session, complete with his testicles being frazzled. And also, rather than the bloodbath finale of the comic, we get a thrilling and funny and totally comic-book showdown, complete with bazookas and jetpacks. It goes for broke and quietly detaches itself from the potential realistic ties the initial concept promises. So, yes, the film is toned down, but the fact that it is a huge mainstream success is - to repeat myself - remarkable.

The truth is that it was obvious halfway through the first volume that "Kick Ass" really had nothing profound to say about the little guys dressing up and playing at being crime fighters. You shook it and it was hollow, so that it’s phenomenon was based upon the shock-value of under-age killers and buckets of gore and bad taste. It is more "Sin City" crossed with indie coming-of-age tale rather than for fans that really, really want "The Dark Knight" to come true. Rather than engaging with the problematic murderous consequences of vigilantism, with all the grey areas and troubled morality, "Kick Ass" fuelled itself on Dave Lizewski’s good intentions and how cool the unstoppable slaughter-machine Hit Girl was. Recent Batman is frequently more focused on the difficult ethical shadows that he moves in than the ostensibly more realist "Kick Ass". In actuality, Romita and Millar conceived the Big Daddy and Hit Girl storyline first, and then stepped back for the Kick Ass story, which does create some critical distance, but serves mostly to accentuate Lizewski’s loser qualities and envy of real hero-murderers. It left me queasy in never once noticing or questioning any humanity of the bad guys. They were comic book bad guys, useful for humour and body count.

The film adaptation bears all the good and bad points of the comic and holds with the trajectory of becoming increasingly fun but less poignant. What we are in fact left with is good old guilty pleasure exploitation entertainment. Not as clever as it thinks it is, the comic "Kick Ass" remained compelling, mostly for the WTF factor. But not only that, because it also had a couple of neat twists that you may not have been expecting. These twists are lost in the film because the adaptation has so much more bad guy back story: so we know that Red Mist is a villain from the start (and he doesn’t get turned on by torture either, making him a genuine sadist), because we know the bad guy plot to nab the good guys (as dubious as that ‘good guy’ status may actually be); we see Big Daddy and Hit Girl overcome early so that the comic’s surprise that they have actually been caught is also gone. The narrative surprises, therefore, are lost in adaptation.

The film makes up for this with lashing of bonus humour and a comic book aesthetic that stays on the right side of drowning out story. Thankfully it also eschews much of the tedious angst that hobbles Peter Parker and the characters of "Heroes" (the kind that is meant to make them more human, but actually makes them repetitive and wearisome). The first fights Kick Ass engages in both have their moments: in the thrill of the moment, Kick Ass gets knifed and we feel very much thrown back in the real world for a moment; in the second, he shames the thugs into giving up, which is the last time the film will recognise the complexity of confrontations. The fight scenes are thrilling, kinetic and visceral, shocking and fun. Considering how Manga Hit Girl is, Vaughn films and edits in a way that manages to keep her killing sprees all looking within the edges of plausibility, using her size and light weight for her advantage in running up bookcases and slipping under the range of adults. We go with it.

As everybody now know, this is Hit Girl’s film. Everyone else is good - I am fond of Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s geek style (and vengeful geek style hopefully helps nudge him out of the typecasting he has to struggle against since McLovin') and Nicolas Cage puts in another bizarre performance - I always imagined Big Daddy as more Henry Rollins, but Cage turns him into a vengeful comic book artist gone psychotic. But it is Chloe Mortez that makes Hit Girl her own, exceeding what is on the page. She invests Hit Girl with a sweetness and humanity that the comic doesn’t touch. And so we go on to forget how troubling the character concept is and celebrate its outrageousness and Mortez’s dazzling performance. Why shouldn’t girls have some fun and trump the guys for once?

As a piece of superhero geek-and-gore vigilante excess, "Kick Ass" is an instant hit. It is a sunnier version of the comic book source, and a damned site nicer to its put-upon would-be hero. these are not necessarily bad changes. It manages to have it's cake and gorge itself too. When Hit Girl uses night-vision, one can also feel themselves playing the tie-in game. When our heroes are tortured and are about to be executed on television, the audience are glued, and when the TV pulls the plug, everyone just moves over to the internet stream. No one seems bothered by watching, and in fact they seem incapable of not watching, apparently only able to process horror as taboo-breaking entertainment, and apparently never able to pull themselves away from entertainment. It is surely too much to read this as a criticism of the very audience watching. Shock IS entertainment, "Kick Ass" persists, but it doesn't go too deep. And that is exploitation cinema and so somehow it pulls it off. Unencumbered by moral reflection and letting go of the reality shackles early on, it’s a funny, thrilling and totally winning guilty pleasure.

Schock

SHOCK / SCHOCK
Mario Bava, Italy, 1977
a.k.a.: "Beyond the Door II"

It is surely one of the great unsolved mysteries of cinema why Italian shockers feel that free-form funk-rock is the sound of horror. Take the rather good opening tracking shock through a currently deserted house in Mario Bava’s "Shock": we know this is a horror film, so we naturally expect that this will be a place of fear and frights… but the decidedly jamming music accompanying this shot means we should perhaps play air-bass and shake our stuff. Maybe there will be wine and some little cheesy treats to signify European decadence. The impression is often that the score of another film has accidentally walked onto the set of what we’re watching. When this achieves a wonderfully bonkers effect, this is usually Ennio Morricone; when it is contradictory, it is usually some members of Goblin that are responsible. The soundtrack here is by Libra and is, perhaps aside from the theme, for the most part good, atmospheric and experimental in the best way.
Which goes for "Shock" in general. The funky theme song and some slightly stilted dialogue promise the kind of anything-goes, random plotting and narrative that characterise many Italian giallo and horror films, but "Shock" soon tightens up to something more straightforward and haunting. This time, the mishmash of cash-in features actually increases its range and curiosity value: the post-"Omen" creepy/psychic/possessed kid; an apparently haunted house; a woman with amnesia, recovering from a breakdown and increasingly on the verge of another; some psychic supernatural action; a mild giallo murder mystery. Sometimes a film can shake together a pastiche of regular genre motifs and reach for something more, transcending its obvious derivations and generating some originality and fascination. The best b-movies do this. Bava was influenced by Stephen King, but come the end it is equally "The Shining" and Roman Polanski’s "Repulsion". The story also goes that "Shock" was directed by both Mario and his son, Lamberto - but Lamberto never managed anything so otherworldly and surreal on his own.


Although there is probably not enough sustained ambiguity as to whether there really is haunting-possession going on or if it is all in Dora’s mind (Dora being played by Dario Argento’s wife, Daria Nicolodi), "Shock" manages to have its cake and eat it too. It cannibalises all of its influences and builds up a quite a disturbance with a little hysteria and strong nightmare sequences which have the flavour not only of "Repulsion", but also of Ingmar Bergman. Moments such as the plane crash induced by the haunting has more in common with the Seventies psychic phenomenon horrors (e.g., "Patrick", "The Medusa Touch"). There is some surprising subtlety: left unpunctuated by overdone melodrama, a moment such as the child simply telling his mother he has to kill her is left unnervingly un-confronted. Occasionally, Bava truly transcends, as when a love-making scene seems under the touch of a ceramic hand (a masterful shot); or when Dora seems to be caressed by otherworldly ecstasy and forces, her hair flowing as if underwater (apparently filmed using a revolving bed, a simple but mesmerising trick). It is these touches that make "Shock" memorable and distinctive, taking a handful of genre tropes and bringing them altogether with . Throw in some oedipal disturbance on this tale of domestic breakdown, psychics and ghosts and it is quite a full package.

It should be a mess, but the different strands keep pulling at mystery and the unpredictable so that the genre tropes are kept mostly in the air and pulled together with offbeat atmosphere, hanging upon the finely realised, memorable set-pieces. There’s no gibbering finale, just an over-long breakdown, some revelations and the inevitable deaths and a creepy open end.

Fearnet's 10 Greatest Horror Movie Music Themes

Fearnet has a great, note-perfect choice of "10 Greatest Horror Movie Music Themes".

Myself, I am crazy about John Harrison's score for "Creepshow". Also: "Phantasm", "The Amityville Horror" (instant shudders from that music!)... and continuing that choir-like trend, "Children of the Corn".

I don't enjoy the "Friday the 13th" films, but Jason's musical cue is definitely a winner ("Kill!" "Ma!")

I also have a huge crush on Fantomas' "The Director's Cut", in which Mike Patton and esteemed friends re-interpret a bunch of film themes to crazed and wonderful effect. A number of choices are horror-related, not least "Ave Satani".

The Open Up And Bleeds

THE OPEN UP AND BLEEDS

www.myspace.com/openupandbleeds

The first thing that you have to do in listening to The Open Up and Bleeds is turn up the volume. This Swedish, Stockholm based band demands you turn it up, possessing a big sound which helps break out of the punkish core that fuels it - a punk rock centre which they happily namecheck: Iggy Pop (obviously), The Stooges, Stiv Bators, Klaus Kinski, etc. Their first album is a fine expansion of what they have been developing for a while: the early recordings on their first EP was rougher with a decidedly storming-it-in-a-bar, almost rockabilly feel. Even then the band’s ease with pop-punk, rousing melodies and songs was obvious, never quite knowing whether to dance or start a fight. Singer/guitarist Joel Segerstedt alternated with a fuck-off and fuck-me attitude, one moment confrontational and the next introverted. One of my favourites from this first release is "Lonely City", about the ironic uniformity of the punk movement: "My little brother is a punk rocker," Joel declares, but the tone is dark, doomed and seemingly grieving. Get it at suicide records.

The next three-track EP revealed that The Open Ups had developed so that now they had less swagger and more epic venturing that included new wave synths and swirls and 10 minute odes to decay of the urban, suburban and personal kinds.

All this remains on their first album. They are quite the formidable unit. It is not that there is anything groundbreaking here, but that the songs are so complete and enjoyable. The Open Up and Bleeds run on words of discontent. Andreas Thunmarker’s drums alternate between patient pounding (e.g. on "OK is not OK) and thunderous explosions. The guitars by Joel and Markus Johansson roll, soar and spike. Thomas Meyer’s basslines sometimes slur, but often are the kind to run through the streets at night to.

The dissatisfaction is easy to feel… it’s in the slightly strangled but compelling vocals of Joel and the restlessness of the guitars. . The titles are a giveaway too: "OK is not OK", "I Don’t Want to Die", "In Darkest Hours". These are mid-tempo, brooding tracks depicting characters struggling with pessimism and disgruntlement, broken up by bursts of rocking out such as "This Noise". "I’m waking up in such a mess," Joel sings, and it’s thrilling and cathartic.

But it is not all bleak, because beneath this veneer of unhappiness, there are also semi-nostalgic tales of being in bands, as well as much evidence of affection in the numerous named people and small tales Joel tells. The title "Everyone I Know" comes with the suffix "is from bands I’ve been in" and leaves the fourteen year-old protagonist "stuck there" on a stage for the first time; whereupon the song also leaves him stranded adrift an instrumental passage that captures a frozen moment of nerves and self-doubt before giving relief with a final chorus burst. All this to a synthetic pulse that comes dangerously close to disco. Well, perhaps not quite disco, but it does work and is decidedly new wave. It is the inclusion of these pulses and sweeping synths and effects that help to boost the Open Ups’ sound, to help give each song a distinctive feel. With songs like "Stiv Bators in All of Us" and "Let’s Go Back to Modernism", it is hard to think of many songs that sound so tunefully desperate for a smack around.

And then there is "Cut Me A Live One", which finds the Open Ups at their most evocative: "crosses on your eyeballs/and scars upon your chest"; "body bags and stretchers/blocking every the door" (these lyrics are written by Markus; all other by Joel)).The music channels that other Swedish band of disillusionment Broder Daniel, a big and yearning sound whose haunting effects is helped immensely by the subtle, singalong layers of vocal. For me, this track is the true revelation of the album, near impossible to shake.

Rounding up with "The End", the album finishes on a 10 minute epic that feels like a gritty neo-realist European film about the disaffected and alienated. The rush of the whole album thins out into a cacophony of synths, designed to leave you hanging and lost.

And then you are done. It needs to be noted that there is grand, clear production by Henrik Svensson that is notable often in the inspired thunderous drum treatment and vocal layers. The Open Up and Bleeds will not be cast as pioneers, but the music is sweet, the energy infectious, the edginess and anxious essence casting ambiguity over the simplest of statements. It is an album for when you want to rock out; to run away to, to sing along to.

An evident act of love and hate, The Open Up and Bleeds album is a winner; one eye on the darkness and one on the dance floor. It’s a charged, thrilling time feeling bad. I won’t argue with that.

Lost in Space: on the Robinson homestead

LOST IN SPACE:

series 1, episodes 4-8

4: There Were Giants in the Earth

5: The Hungry Sea

6: Welcome Stranger

7: My Friend, Mr. Nobody

8: Invaders from the Fifth Dimension

"nefarious plot... dupliciuous plan..."

*

4: "There Were Giants In The Earth" - Things have settled now. We know that each episode, Maureen Robinson (space-eyed June Lockhart) will be concerned and anxious; Dr. Smith will be duplicitous and scheming; Will Robinson will disobey his father’s orders and get a talking to later on after calamity has been diverted; Judy and Penny won’t do much and Don West will be stolid. To be fair, Penny almost endangers herself by, apparently, wandering off with her monkey alien just as the family are trying to relocate; ordinarily, endangering oneself is Will’s job, but Penny’s dilemma is short lived and this incident seems to serve only to kill time and to show off John Robinson in a jet-pack (jet-pack!). Early on, John makes a voice-over report and states that they know "nothing" about the animal life on the planet… except, of course, for the bizarrely trouble-free and domesticated monkey-alien and the turtle things briefly glimpsed when Penny rides one.

Giantism is the theme for this episode, as the somewhat odd title implies: giants in the earth?? We get giant vegetables this time to liven up a period of quiet given to seeing how the Robinsons try to set up their own little farmstead. But this proves only to be an indication of things to come as we next get full-on giant fanged cyclops alien action. Again, "Lost in Space" is like a whole sequence of Golden Age science-fiction magazine covers come to life, and the giant alien is a prize moment, simultaneously hilarious and gripping. The special effects are ambitious, fun and despite the low budget, engaging and credible enough; and you can’t go far wrong with a man in a furry suit and absurd headpiece.

But an even greater threat appears to be the impending freezing weather, and so the family sets out South to avoid being turned into Popsicles. The early stages of the journey includes a camp-side moment with Will Robinson playing "Greensleeves" on guitar! (For a moment, I wondered why Will was playing Leonard Cohen before I realised I was recalling Cohen’s cover version initially rather than the traditional original. But for a moment, Will Robinson playing Cohen was a surreal possibility. Bill Mumy will go on to have a long musical career, of course.) This is all without Dr. Smith, who has decided to stay back in the space-saucer to mince around and take his chances, not wanting to give up home comforts and test the nastiness of the outside world and, well, he is just damned contrary because he is the villain.

As the journey progresses, there is trouble in camp as Don West begins to show defiant strains of dissent against the imperious goodness of John Robinson. Don’s distrust of Dr. Smith makes him trigger-happy when Smith becomes less nefarious, has some kind of change-of-heart and tries to warn the Robinsons of the crazy orbit and weather changes of the planet which are likely to spell their doom. This all ends up with the Robinsons not having to go South after all and returning back to the Jupiter 2. But not before they run from electrical storms and take refuge in a cave of tombs - which ends up being a disappointingly brief exploration and peril. Sheesh, aren’t these guys curious about ancient alien civilisations at all? And -

5: "The Hungry Sea": - on the way home there is a fun battle with whirlpools as the frozen landscape they initially crossed has now melted into a violent sea. There is definitely delight in seeing the fragile-looking but apparently super-durable "chariot" making its way across frozen seas and rocky terrain, and then swimming to land - again, the miniatures work is pretty impressive and engaging. Much of the imagery of these early episodes is highly memorable and the sea storm is another that seems to exceed expectations. This particular odyssey ends with everyone back at Jupiter 2 and - evidently not wanting to be outdone by Will’s performance the previous episode - the Robot takes up the guitar and strums "There’s No Place Like Home". Will seems jealous of this, decrying the Robot’s choice as a din, apparently forgetting that his own earlier choice of "Greensleeves" was not exactly rock’n’roll. And then comes the sensation that a shark is being jumped.

The long-term storyline of the early episodes, outlining the Robinson’s take-off into space and their eventual shipwreck on an unnamed planet starts to break up now. The overarching continuity will fall into more independent instalments which resets the storyline every credit sequence. There has been evidence of this already, what with the giant (what, just one giant?), gigantic vegetables of episode four being totally forgotten subsequently, along with the potentially creepy and fascinating implications of a tombs they stumbled into. This pilgrimage into the cosmos is likely to offer up a lot of come-and-go perils to keep things going over the seasons. The next episode seems to hint at instant desperation after the Robinson’s brief excursion South to avoid the crazed weather patterns, and also to the way "Lost in Space" will progress.

"Yessirree, ain' we just jumping the shark early?"

*

6: "Howdy Stranger" immediately resorts to the guest star mode of keeping things going. And it’s a galaxy-travelin’ lone cowboy called James Hapgood that drops by the Robinson homestead (he‘s good and haphazard, I guess!), the kind that likes to spin yarns, whoop and fight and not stay any place long. We’ve already determined that the Robinsons are derived equally from pulp sci-fi and western pilgrimage adventures equally: the wholesomeness of the family, the campfire acoustic sessions, battles with the elements, the old-fashioned gender roles, the way they stop at the "roadside" to "give thanks" that they have survived perilous moments… it is all there. What we now have, which was not so obvious before, is a galaxy potentially full of solo-adventurers too, which makes the Robinsons far more straight-up pilgrims than pioneers and also means that a guest star might drop by at any moment. There is some slight endangerment from a weed-like contamination on the cowboy’s spaceship, but the real conflict here is the Robinson parents tension around the opportunity to send the children back to Earth, and then with Hapgood to convince him to take them. This does seem a little late in coming since the programme to send a family into space was at least a decade in the making (according to episode one); you would think the Robinsons were pretty certain of what exactly they were letting themselves in for, even if they concluded that it was the unknown. For a moment, Will has another alternative father figure (he doesn’t seem interested in looking up to Don West much and he tolerates Dr Smith like a difficult grandpa) and COWBOY as Hapgood puts in a good enough performance, not too broad. But, again, the haste with which the show had a guest astronaut stop by for a moment already nods to a show quickly run out of steam and unable to perpetuate an ongoing rather than episodic venture.

Evidently it is time for each Robinson to get their moment, and episode 7, which has the crummy title of "My Friend, Mr. Nobody", is all Penny Robinson’s. Feeling a little ignored and not taken seriously by the rest of the family, Penny wanders off alone in the alien landscape and hears voices and promptly gets herself an ’imaginary’ friend of sorts. It is, of course, an alien force, a disembodied voice in a cave mimicking and learning from her words. There is some initial creepiness, but this falls away to Penny’s sentimental and borderline hysterical attachment to this disembodied voice (girls, huh?). Finally, Penny’s loneliness takes flight into the stars. I’m sure she’ll be fine from now on. More curious, although in no way self-aware, is the subplot of the Robinsons blowing up the scenery looking for natural resources to use and exploit. The Robinsons just need to wipe out an indigenous tribe now to fit right in. Anyhow, this leads to Dr Smith conniving to have Don West exploding Mr Nobody’s cave in order to get at the diamonds there. That Mr Nobody turns out to be a brand new galaxy is kinda neat. That this galaxy calls back to say goodbye to "Pen-nnee" is daft.

The daftness of 8: "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension" is more pleasing. Somewhat inevitably, since most of the titles suffer from delusions of grandeur, it’s also more of an intrusion than an invasion. The invaders are apparently, and eerily enough, disembodied skullish and mouthless white heads that spout exactly the kind of preposterous platitudinous threats you would expect. They disdain the puny human mind and the primitive human sensation of "love" (which of course, will turn out to be the exact quality that defeats the interlopers). They want part of Dr. Smith’s brain and he, naturally, offers up one of the Robinson kids’ brains instead. Dr. Smith nefariously convincing Will Robinson to do something dangerous or counter-productive is one of the "Lost in Space" key highlights and special effects, as it were. Smith plays on Will’s good nature and fools him before the kid’s natural and equal intelligence, honesty and feistiness gets him out of trouble. This means he’s always a match for the Doc, even if unconsciously and even if constantly duped, and all without forfeiting that good faith he always has. It’s a stalemate of sorts, leaving their relationship always open for another round of manipulation and rebuff. And I’m not exactly looking for character development at this point.

Anyway, once the aliens are gone and Will is okay, everyone treats it like a bit of a romp and a joke. Nope, a little "invasion" ain’t going to phase the Robinsons.

Looks like "Lost in Space" will use visitors of one type or another to keep the storylines coming, rather than focusing on what it takes for the Robinsons and pals to survive. It’s easy and enjoyable, but the best has already been and gone, it’d predict. They aren’t doing much exploring now, really, but it looks like it’s going to get pretty busy whilst they’re stranded anyhow. Hey, and what about those giant Cyclops??

Same Time. Same channel.

You can't go wrong with spooky mouthless disembodied heads.

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle

Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967

A film that is more essay than cinema? A film that could be referred to by any outsider to confirm the stereotype of Continental cinema as a litany of smoking, pontificating, posing, and smoking; of studied indifference and existential angst. (Yes, I put smoking twice).

An essay: everyone speaks with the same voice. This is the voice of Jean Luc-Godard himself, whispering a worried narration (perhaps annoying, this whispering, like a politicised fly buzzing and fretting in your ear as the film plays); the "I" of the title. Every character speaks in this voice, with these very same concerns and contributing to a homogenous viewpoint; they stop in their everyday routines to tell us, the audience, a thought or biographical sentence about themselves, without emotion, perhaps wanly; but mostly they are lost in introversion and existential reflection. Existence, objects, consumerism, detachment, female faces, globalisation, war, famine, fashion, and naturally: sex. People talk to one another as if in mid-seminar, relating to one another and the world around them only as concepts, themes, objects. Others sit in cafes reading random quote from a mountain of novels as if in mid-performance art.

Paris: the "her" of the title, the city being built up even as Godard narrates his concerns and characters reflect his insights. Buildings. Constructions. Erections. Civilisation. Prostitution. Parisian.

"An article which appeared in the Le Nouvel Observateur relates to a deep-rooted idea of mine. The idea that in order to live in Parisian society today, one is forced, on whatever level, on whatever scale, to commit an act of prostitution in one way or another, or to live according to the laws that govern prostitution." (dvd booklet, pg. 46)

Non. We do not truly learn anything of Paris. We do not learn from this essay what it truly means to "prostitute" oneself. We do not learn what it is to be a wage slave, trapped in one or two jobs just to feed the children. We do not feel the humiliation of a secretary having to literally "give" herself to her boss in order to keep her job. We do not see a scenario in which a man is so consumed by work that he loses all connection to his family. That kind of thing. The kind of "prostitution" on display here is closer to a dalliance, a detached flirtation with the idea of the apparent oldest profession in the world defining everyday bourgeois existance.

Pose: gorgeous French female portraits and profiles glamorise the screen. Women light up a cigarette, because they want to, and they air their existential ruminations to camera. Dour, smoking, very ’60s, disaffected, continentally bored. Marina Vlady is Juliette Jeanson, a housewife who defines herself in one word: indifference. A housewife that turns to prostitution. A housewife who, when putting her kids to bed, suddenly stops for the audience - as her son bounces on the bed full of life, to reflect - "What does it mean to know something?" Which brings us to:

Humour: unintentional? Formal? Deliberate and satirical? The young son (young enough that you think he might only have just managed to get beyond "Le Petit Prince") tells his mother of a dream he has had about twins that merge into one person, which has a preposterous punch line: "And then I realised that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united." His later recital of his homework about friendship and whether it is or is not possible between boys and girls is equally deadpan and hilarious.

And then there is the gratuitous moment of a woman having her bath interrupted by a gas meter reader who just wanders in. Pure farce. Or the apparent "crèche" run by an old man who keeps reminding the amorous couples in the adjacent rooms that they have only a few minutes left.

Or the visit to the hotel by Juliette and her friend for a bit of naughtiness with a journalist running from the experience of Vietnam, a scene that offers two choice moments: first: Juliette - in a moment of disconnected reflection as the girls undress and get to work for the journalist - sits by a lamp, says to herself and the audience, "Paris is a mysterious city," and poignantly turns the lamp on "…asphyxiating…" and off "… natural…" and on and off; and the man says, "Why doesn’t she come over?" as if oblivious to her moment of artiness, to the fact that she is breaking through the wall between actress, character and audience. And Second: the journalist - wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on it (!!) - has the women walking back and forth undressed with Pan-Am and T.W.A. flight bags over their heads. Absurdism to puncture the veneer of suffocating consumersim and circumstantial and literal prostitution, non? C’est comedie!!

Despite the loose-limbed New Wave feel, there is no accommodation of the trivial, of the simply pleasurable, of the inconsequential to mitigate this dissertation on Paris and prostitution 1967, and therefore unintentional humour may seep in. The 10 year-old says "Mummy, what is language?", to which she answers, "Language is the house that man lives in." Yes. Yes that is how such inter-generational conversations between such characters go. The austerity and the very un-likeliness combined is amusing.

Essay and pose: There is no story, no emotional core, no real bracing neo-realism, just nice clean imagery, sharp alluring colours, and a wonderful, bright ‘60s feel. This is not Bergman, whose metaphysical and existential concerns are merged near-seamlessly within story and characters. This is not even Goddard’s "Le Petit Soldat" (1963), a polemic married to a fragmented but recognisable story. Here, there is only Godard, rejecting narrative, spoken from whispers on the one hand and attractive women on the other. Aside from the compelling portraits of pretty faces, there are wonderful moments where the size and unknowability of the cosmos and, indeed, of the unknowable itself, are captured in close-ups of a swirling coffee, or a burning cigarette. Then there is the bustle of urban life distilled in the busy editing of the garage sequence. A sketchpad of contemporary angst in a nice, bold modern binding, complete with funny doodles. Composition and colours are often resonant of comic book panels (see Drew Morton).

Let me end with a confession. Let me ask what is the truth of my opinion about "Two or Three Things I know About Her…", how has it imprinted itself upon my privileged, lofty, detached judgment? Let me say that I am amused. I don’t necessarily find it profound, but it is entertaining as a cinematic dissertation. But I am more a Francois Truffaut kind of man.

My "favourite" horror films of the last 5 years... (2005-2010)

Having been given this challenge by a friend of mine, I was surprised to find I got my list up pretty quickly. The list soon overran, but let's go with the primary ten first:

"Let The Right One In" (2009)
"Martyrs" (2009)
"[.Rec]" (2007)
"The Descent" (2005)
"The Orphanage" (2007)
"Ils/Them" (2007)

"The Mist" (2008)
"The Road" (2009)
"Hansel & Gretel" (2007)
"Halloween" (2007)

And then/Honorary mention:
"Wolf Creek" ("2005")
"Vinyan" ("2008")
"The Hills Have Eyes" (2006)
"Dek Hor"
"28 Weeks Later" (2007)

What do I divine from this list? That 2007 was a bumper horror year. That I really dig the grimy neo-realism of the Twenty-First century extreme horror wave. That a lot of "video nasty" era trimmings are now mainstream. That I really like the fairytale horror aesthetic too. I'm not big on happy endings either. ...Also: I think I missed some good Asian horror and probably a bunch of under-the-radar b-horrors I missed also, the kind you would stumble upon in the golden era of the highstreet video store.

I believe that "Wolf Creek" was also better than its detractors say. Half the films in the list above have key problems, but few films don't. I have seen "Hansel and Gretel" accused of a thin story (not really), and "28 Weeks Later" has calamities triggered by dumb character behaviour, but... well... sometimes a film is good enough for allowances and forgiveness to be given. For example, "28 Weeks Laters" injects a welcome seriousness and attention to mounting fear that push it beyond its formula; plus an opening that may well bustle for "fantastic opening sequence" position with "Dawn of the Dead" (2004).

"28 Weeks Later" comes from my 'fun horror' pile, and I note that there is not enough from this pile that made the list; modest films that I felt transcended its format through execution and gusto (No, I wouldn't count "Zombieland" and "Shaun of the Dead" appears to be 2004; "30 Days of Night" (2007) is enjoyable enough but ultimately evaporates upon reflecction). This "fun pile" has little to do with humour and more to do with the enjoyment of genre tropes well presented. "The Mist" starts and runs as fun and - though there are plenty who did not like it - that ending shoves it off the deeper end into something far more troubling and vital. More fun: The "Orphanage" scores for having a couple of scenes that genuinely gave me the scares and having a genuinely heartbreaking explanation at the end... like "Hansel and Gretel", it overcomes weaknesses through beautiful execution and simple allegiance to the ghost story, moving into pure storytelling. "Hansel & Gretel" could very well be in a tie with "Dek hor", an equally creepy/sweet and beautifully executed ghost story.

Not since "The Blair Witch Project" has hand-held camera felt so vindicated and brilliantly utilised as in "[.Rec]", a point-of-view stance that dragged the viewer deeper and deeper until backing itself into a corner of the genuinely nightmarish. It also allowed for wonderful long takes. An excellent formal approach at the service of the genuinely scary unfolding zombie tale (and you can keep your "Cloverfield"). "The Descent" had a similar shrinking into a nightmare-space trajectory, and ended up a bizarrely emotional experience, seeming from out of nothing more than the standard monster movie dilemmas - something so few manage.

Blahblahblah "torture porn", etc. "Martyrs" and "Ils" took few prisoners. Both felt infused with genuine social awareness, commentary and outrage - especially "Martyrs", whereas contenders such as "Frontiers" felt forced and probably hollow and "Shaitan" felt ultimately undernourished. Both "Martyrs" and "ils" were scary for different reasons.

"Haut Tension" felt like a good con trick, but a con trick nontheless, but director Alexandre Aja scored better with me with "The Hills Have Eyes"; perhaps not as 'clever', but a more straightforward, gruelling, silly and grimy remake of the Craven original that holds up well as a nasty piece of gore-and-scares.

My feelings towards "Halloween" remain: it will stand future scrutiny.

Yes, I am calling "The Road" a horror film.

I suspect "Vinyan" could well find weakenesses in one of the top ten and take it's place; upon reflection the film reveals strength and strength and odd places for the ghost story (yes?) that feels pretty damned original and authentic.

As a mixture of post-modern horror and pure story, "Let The Right One In" is sublime. The horror genre at the height of its abilities. I need say no more.