Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
What I said then:
When I realised there was actually a book called the Necronomicon, I had to have it. Classic, bleak horror. Fun!
What I say now:
Actually, this wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd hoped. Lovecraft wrote a multitude of horror stories for American pulp magazines in the twenties and thirties, and Necronomicon is a chronologically arranged collection of some of his best, and most well known, tales. It's also eight hundred pages long.
There was my real error. If I'd picked up a book which contained a small handful of stories, and maybe one longer novella, I might have been able to appreciate the good things Lovecraft does. He's pretty good at establishing atmosphere; he sets most of his stories in a tainted, haunted version of rural New England, a setting which is pretty off-beat and unusual; and he definitely had a flair for inventing demons and ghouls and alien consciousnesses.
Unfortunately, under the weight of eight hundred god damn pages, all these positives came to seem repetitive and dreary. Honestly, the vast majority of the stories contained in this collection are incredibly similar: similar in setting, in tone, in language. Once I'd read five stories, I wasn't surprised (or even particularly interested) again.
Add to the repetitiveness his exorbitantly 'gothic' language, which sometimes was so overblown as to almost serve as its own parody. Check this sentence out (a character has just heard a horrifying sound): "To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones." Yikes.
That sentence gets at another of my issues with Lovecraft: he has an almost complete fear of actually describing anything. He won't tell you about the horrible monster or whatever, he'll relate how horrible his characters feel upon beholding it. Describing something's effects, rather than the thing itself, is always a good way to get on my nerves. (There is one way to make this work, which is to have me care so deeply about the characters, and know them so well, that hearing about the creature/alien/thing's effect on them is enough to sustain the drama. Unfortunately Lovecraft's characters are, without exception, two-dimensional nobodies, so this option wasn't available to him.)
There are more than a few stories where, having told us in exruciating detail about every step in an expedition into some haunted, blighted place, Lovecraft completely wimps out and says 'Oh, what they saw there was so horrifying that I can't even relate it to you, that's how scary it is! The end.' Seriously. That rivals 'and then they woke up and it was all a dream' as one of the worst ways you can end a story, and Lovecraft did it over and over again.
There were occasional stories that stepped out of his usual, frustrating patterns, and they were by far the highlights. The stories being arranged chronologically, it was also really interesting to follow his growth as a writer across the years: he definitely became a better writer with time and practice. Those occasional moments of interest were nowhere near enough to make up for wading through the rest of it though.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
books to go: 79
note: I've fallen way behind with my reviews (sorry 'bout that), which is why the numbers don't quite add up here. Not that anybody probably pays attention to this stuff, but I'm totally anal-retentive, so I feel compelled to explain.
Independence Day by Richard Ford
What I said then:
The continuing travails of a grumbling bastard, first met in The Sportswriter.
What I say now:
Richard Ford writes intricate, poetic novels that are critically acclaimed, and that are frequently prize-winners, and that I really just don't like very much.
It was years ago that I read The Sportswriter, the first in Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy, and I remember virtually nothing about it. The faint ghost of that book did, however, give me a peculiar sense of dread whenever I'd look at my list and see that Independence Day (Bascombe #2) was still on my shelves, waiting for me. It wasn't as horrible a reading experience as I was expecting, but I can now say with absolute certainty that Richard Ford's novels just aren't my cup of tea.
In Independence Day, Frank Bascombe, divorced former sports journalist, is now working as a real estate agent in small town New Jersey. Over the course of the 4th of July weekend, he nearly sells a house to a pair of schmucks, he falls out and then back in with a woman he's been seeing for a while, and he and his wayward teenage son take a roadtrip to visit the basketball and baseball hall of fames. And every step of that incredibly slight plot is described in minute (almost excruciatingly minute) detail.
The main issue I have with the way Ford writes is that he's too caught up in his quest to write lovely 'poetic' sentences ('poetic' in this context meaning 'meandering, slightly obtuse, and utilising unusual vocabulary choices). Character, plot, meaning --- Ford is willing to sacrifice all of those in search of pretty combinations of words. I just can't dig a writer like that. Maybe the most egregious example of what I'm talking about is that Independence Day is written in the first person, from the point of view of a fairly ordinary real estate agent. Yet Frank Bascombe, our main character, has an interior monologue that would put most published poets to shame for linguistic ingenuity. It's supposed to be a realist novel but nobody in the world thinks or talks the way Ford has Bascombe think and talk. And as such, I found it impossible to believe in the character. I never was able to imagine Bascombe as a real man; he was always too artificial a construct.
The other thing I found infuriating was Bascombe's wishy-washiness. In pretty much any given chapter, after an achingly detailed thought process, he'll come to some dramatic conclusion about life and living ... only to re-think one or two chapters later, and come to the opposite conclusion. I don't have any problem with that per se, it's kind of realistic and speaks to something fallible and uncertain about us puny humans. But Ford did it again and again, until Bascombe seemed like nothing so much as a weather-vane, swinging in the breeze. When, at the novel's close, he comes to a series of (what I'm sure I'm supposed to believe are) giant, life-shaking conclusions, it's impossible to give a damn, seeing as I've been conditioned by the novel to expect he'll just change his mind again in twenty minutes time. If none of his thoughts ever actually matter, they never actually matter, y'know? So ... why am I reading this book again?
As I said at the top, Richard Ford is one of the most respected, well-reviewed American novelists working today. Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize, for god's sake. I just think he kind of sucks, and I'm glad that I'll never read another of his books ever again.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
books to go: 82
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
What I said then:
Lots of people get killed, apparently. A friend said my book reminded him of it. I'm worried.
What I say now:
Holy shit, everybody! A blog post about a book, on John's book blog! It's a friggin' miracle!
In my defence, I've been trying to make a movie, which I reckon is pretty reasonable as far as 'reasons from being distracted from stupid self-imposed quests' go. During June/July I was pretty stressed about the whole Apartmentality thing, so any reading time I did have, I spent relaxing with old favourites. It's possible that I re-read the entire series of Hornblower novels, but I'm not gonna confirm or deny anything.
Anyway, when I did decide to pick up the challenge again, I decided that, given I loved Dead Europe with all its horror stylin', I'd have a crack at one of the other horror books on my list. There aren't too many to choose from (I'm more a fantasy or sci-fi guy when I want to get down and dirty with some pulpy fiction), but Exquisite Corpse, about two gay serial-killers who meet and fall in love, features more than enough eviscerated corpses to fit the bill.
In England, Andrew Compton languishes in jail for the murder and rape (yes, in that order) of twenty-three destitute youths. In New Orleans, Jay Byrne makes a hobby of killing any young drifters that cross his path, then eating their remains. Both seem to find the ultimate beauty in the stiffening bodies of their victims, and find murder an essential part of their sex drives. They're also both complete sociopaths: no reason is ever offered for why they are the way they are, or how their desires have come to take these sickening forms. After Compton escapes prison (by faking his own death), kills an American tourist and uses his passport to flee to the U.S., the meeting of these two deranged killers is inevitable. When their eyes eventually lock in a crowded French Quarter bar, sparks fly and they decide to team up.
Brite's novel is pretty full on in terms of its gore quotient, and I'd imagine it would be too much for some people. Every murder that gets committed is described in intense, loving detail. The inside of their victim's bodies are like the main character's playground, and Brite must have done a hell of a lot of research with a medical dictionary to know what Compton and Byrne were going to find in there. There's pretty much an exact parallel to how lovingly precise the many sex scenes are, and that makes perfect sense given that, for our main characters, sex and murder are two halves of the same coin.
Unfortunately, beyond the litany of mutilations and blow jobs, there's not much else to this book. Because the majority of the book is told from either Jay or Andrew's point of view, and because both of those characters believe themselves above any questions of morality, there's never really any urgency to anything. Whether they kill that guy or not, or whether they get caught or not, it doesn't ever really seem to matter. It's pretty impossible to empathise with a guy whose main concern is how pretty his next murder is going to be, but I never really empathised with any of the (underwritten) victims either. Given how much time is spent setting up that neither Andrew nor Jay has any feelings or emotions about anything at all, to have them suddenly fall in love (well, lust) just seems ... wrong, somehow. It just doesn't quite scan.
The one character who might have brought this whole thing to life is a guy named Luke, dying of AIDS and spouting anti-straights propaganda on a pirate radio station. He enters the story because his ex, Tran, gets chosen by Andrew and Jay to be their 'perfect' victim. Written in the mid-nineties and set (I think) a little earlier, AIDS panic is still a thing, and Luke's slow, messy decay has him feeling like a pariah (it also contrasts neatly with the quick, surgical beauty of the main couple's murders). Unfortunately Luke, who ought to be the heart and soul of the book, spends most of his time being a complete arsehole to everybody he meets, which makes it hard to go with his sudden, end-of-the-novel turn into good-guy-ness.
Also, and I'm kinda reluctant to say this given I'm pretty much the straightest, whitest, most privileged guy in the universe, and Brite most definitely is not, but the whole 'Homosexuals as Serial Killers' thing feels uncomfortably retro in its politics. Compton and Byrne's murderous impulses are so explicitly linked to their sexual desires that it's hard not to see their gayness as a contributing factor to their evilness. They're kind of like more salacious versions of Norman Bates, or Buffalo Bill, or the killer in Dressed to Kill that I can't remember the name of. Luke's radio rants touch on some really interesting issues to do with queer politics, but Brite never follows through, preferring to hack and slash his way to the end of the book, rather than try for something deeper. Oh well.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: Independence Day by Richard Ford
books to go: 83
Bleurghelblahrgelbleurgh. So ... tired. So ... many ... movies. After I finish writing this and post it up, I think I'm going to lie down for a while. But I made it through, God damn it. 28 movies in 17 days is the final reckoning (which honestly doesn't sound that impressive when you say it like that ... there's gotta be a way of making those numbers seem more epic).
My only animated film of the festival, Metropia is (I think) Swedish in origin, but it was kind of an international stew: it had cast members from all over the Northern Hemisphere (including Stellan and Alexander Skarsgaard, giving their performances in different accents!). In a dystopian future, every underground rail system in Europe has been joined together, and super-fast trains make continent-wide travel a possibility. There's also a conspiracy involving mind-control dandruff shampoo. And ... and ... yeah, okay, I've been trying for twenty minutes to write a plot summary, but I don't think I can, because it made no God-damn sense. It was super stylish, and great to look at if you can handle a movie that's 95% different shades of dank grey. I don't even really know how to describe the animation style: it was kind of flat, like South Park or something, but photo-real at the same time. Unfortunately it was pretty much incomprehensible, and thus pretty boring.
From Senegal, The Pirogue tells the story of a fisherman coerced into captaining a frail vessel filled with immigrants up the coast of Africa and across the mouth of the Mediterranean to Spain. The voyage doesn't go well: inclement weather, in-fighting amongst the various factions of passengers, and the crappiness of the boat itself, all combine to cast them adrift in the Atlantic. It's obviously a really dramatic subject, and certain scenes in the movie were jaw-dropping in their horribleness. Unfortunately it was too episodic and too simplistic to have the emotional punch it should have. And while some of the actors were great, others were pitching their performances well over the top. Interesting moments, but not a good film.
Okay, I made the point in one of my other MIFF round-up posts that FILM-MAKERS NEED TO KNOW HOW LONG THEIR MOVIE OUGHT TO BE. The guy that made In The Fog, a WWII drama from Belarus, had no friggin' idea. In Nazi-held territory, two partisans sneak up to a house in the forest, determined to mete out justice to the suspected collaborator who lives there. When the execution doesn't go according to plan, the three men have to journey through the forest together, and at the same time we get a series of extended flashbacks, explaining how each of them has arrived at this moment in time. There's plenty of meaty drama there (and the flashback explaining why the guy is suspected of being a collaborator is gut-wrenching) but it's kinda ruined by the glacial pace, the insistence on lengthy 'walking through forest' shots that add nothing to the story, and the way the two other flashbacks don't illuminate anything about the main thread of the story. Like The Pirogue, there were moments that suggested a much better movie lurking beneath the surface, but it was buried in pretentious twaddle.
And then here it was, two days from the end, that the best film of the festival showed up. From Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg's searing, horrifying, The Hunt is about a kindergarten teacher who is falsely accused of paedophilia. As an entire town gets caught up in the hysteria that the accusations cause, lifelong relationships are destroyed and previously unbreakable trusts are shattered. There is nothing about this film that wasn't brilliant: every single actor is remarkable, giving everybody in the enormous ensemble the depth of a fully fleshed out interior life; the direction is clear and graceful, telling the story with perfect elegance but without ever intruding on the audience's notice; the cinematography is equally good, dancing on the line between being beautiful and being unstudied; and the script is almost miraculous in the way that it combines air-tight cause and effect storytelling, a rigorous dedication to 'realness', and an ability to find symbolic meaning in everyday life. This film was basically perfect, and I'm sure I'll be talking about it again when the time comes to write about the best movies of 2012. The Hunt is a bonafide masterpiece, and I urge everyone to see it if you can.
Last year I saw and very much enjoyed a Korean gangster movie called The Yellow Sea (though to be fair, it ran off the rails a bit towards the end), so I thought I'd give Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time a crack this year, in the hope it might be just as entertaining. Unfortunately, this one felt really tonally scattered, never quite sure if it ought to be a broad farce, or high melodrama, or something in between. After getting fired, an inept loudmouth of a customs officer decides to try and use some of his family connections to become a gangster. As crap as he is at basically everything, he still manages to worm his way into a position of power in the gang of his great nephew, from which point he starts fucking everything up. The film was at its best when it was a comedy: the protagonist's wimpiness offered plenty of laughs as he tried and failed to adapt to the gangster lifestyle. When it reached for drama, though, it was hard to give a damn. Having treated the whole story as mere comedy, it suddenly seemed a bit unfair when bombastic music came on and I was expected to care deeply about this bumbling prat's fate. Also hampering the film was the fact that the crime story, with double and triple and quadruple crosses aplenty, just didn't make a lick of damn sense!
The writer and actor Brit Marling was one of the people behind Another Earth, one of my favourite films at MIFF 2011. She was back again this year, co-writing and starring in Sound of my Voice, about two dating quasi-journalists infiltrating a cult that is led by a young woman who claims to have time-travelled from the future. Like Another Earth, Voice is a low-budget indie drama with a bit of a sic-fi bent, and it's just as good (if not better) than the first film. The scenes inside the cult are filled with genuine mystery and a real sense of unease, and the further the journalists (and the audience) go, the more questions get raised. Apart from Marling, who played the cult leader with an eerie stillness, I don't know any of the other actors but they're all uniformly fantastic (especially Christopher Denham as the guy who starts out the more cynical of the two journos, but doesn't end that way). As things get weirder and the stakes get higher, the central couple's relationship fractures under the strain, and for about the last half an hour I was watching with my hand over my mouth. It's a stifling, sad, almost unbearably tense little film, and well worth a look.
Christos Tsiolkas' Dead Europe is a magnificent novel, but I already told you that months ago. When I heard there was going to be an adaptation, I was filled with equal parts anticipation and dread: I knew if they got it right, it could be brilliant, but if they got it wrong, it could very easily be a disaster of cosmic proportions. How did they go in the end? Honestly, Dead Europe pretty much splits the middle between those two extremes. It only took about five minutes for me to understand that they'd taken a chainsaw to the plot of the book (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), so I was able to let go of my expectations. And for the most part, their new, slimmed down version of the story worked quite well. It was a wonderfully atmospheric film, the music and cinematography combining to make us feel like the main character's doom was haunting him from the moment he stepped off his plane in Greece. Though episodic, the film doled out just enough information, and made just enough sense, for me to hang with it for most of its running time ... then unfortunately they blew the ending in spectacular fashion. Just as everything's coming to a head, and the plot and themes demand some kind of resolution, the film just cops out in the most infuriating way. I don't want to go into more detail, because that would spoil the ending, but it's flat-out disastrous. If the projector had broken down five minutes from the end, I'd have rated it a pretty good film; as is, I can only consider it a missed opportunity.
And that, mhghdrfqxhzz, is that. This was a pretty fantastic MIFF for me, I'd rate about half the films I saw as sitting somewhere between 'good' and 'great' on John's Scale Of Movie's Worth. Trust me when I tell you that proportion is pretty extraordinary. The Hunt and War Witch were the stand-outs, but there are heaps of films tied for third place. Guessing a film's quality based on the tiny blurb in the festival guide is a fool's game, but this year I got a lot of stuff right (umm ... does that make me a fool?). Anyways, thanks for reading, I'm off to bed.
Cheers, JC.
Entering week two, I'd come down with my usual case of the MIFF sniffles. Spending hour after hour sharing a room with five hundred strangers at the tail end of winter, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're gonna get sick at some point. So far it hasn't stopped me seeing any movies (which means I'm passing the germs on to others in my turn ...) but the reviews are probably going to get more negative, because I feel like shit!
Speaking of shit, Faust was a massive mis-fire on every level. This bizarre, nonsensical, almost slapstick re-telling of the Faust legend just made no sense whatsoever, and was excruciating to sit through. The plot swung between being non-existent or being incoherent, the acting was horribly over the top (it was like they thought they were in a panto or something), the changes to the original story were brazen betrayals of the material, and the director made some ridiculous stylistic choices which were horribly intrusive. Absolutely nothing worked. If you ever get a chance to see this film, run really hard in the opposite direction.
Beyond the Hills was a hard film to categorise: so much about it was so good, yet there were a handful of things that just didn't work at all. A woman in her early twenties travels to a church in the remote Romanian countryside to convince her best friend, who's now a novice nun, to leave with her. The collision between the modern world and the unyielding faith of the nuns is fascinating, and handled with an elegant touch. Unfortunately the film (which has a fairly slight story, in the end) is way too long. Through the middle section, as the visiting girl and the local priest push each other further and further in their conflicting ideals, it gets super repetitive. The bleak Romanian landscapes are beautifully shot, but man, I wish I'd seen less of them. Take out maybe half an hour, and this would have been one of the films of the festival. As is, I think it's a wasted opportunity.
My second Takashi Miike film of the festival (he made Ace Attorney as well; apparently he makes three or four movies a year) was called Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. (Guess how it ends ...) A period film, it's about a wandering samurai who, finding himself with no useful work in a time of peace, visits a lord's castle to ask permission to commit an honourable suicide. As the samurai and the lord talk through his request, it becomes clear there's a whole lot more to his mission than meets the eye, and a series of extended flashbacks fill us in on what's actually going on. Everything we see in the castle itself is fascinating, as these strong-willed men explore the very edges of their rigid honour codes. It's also gorgeous to look at: whoever does his production design needs kudos in a big way (though the 3D they shot in was completely useless). Unfortunately, the flashback sequences (one of them in particular) are much too long, and they stop the narrative momentum of the story dead. I can see why they're there: some of the info disclosed in them is absolutely vital to our understanding of the story. They just needed to be much more economical in giving us that info, so we could get back to the castle and the main story without the film losing its drive. It's such a shame, because there was so much to like about this movie, but (like Beyond the Hills) it was much longer than it should have been. If there's one lesson for film-makers from my experiences at this festival so far, it'd be that you've gotta know how long your film should be.
On the other hand, Sleepless Night, a French thriller set almost entirely in a huge nightclub, was a real find. A deceptively complicated little film, it gets great mileage out of putting a bunch of well-defined characters into a situation, then using the ways their motivations come into conflict to drive the film from one action set-piece to the next. The script was brilliantly structured, one scene leading inexorably to the next as the good guys bad guys, and sorta-kinda-both guys put their plans and counter-plans into action. The fights were brilliantly directed as well (unlike the vast majority of contemporary action movies), one showdown in an industrial kitchen having an incredible visceral punch to it. A brutal, well-directed, brilliantly structured, self-contained action thriller, leavened with moments of organic humour ... honestly, it kinda reminded me of Die Hard, and that's very high praise, because Die Hard is basically the king of 'brilliantly structured self-contained thrillers'. Obviously it's not going to be to everyone's taste, but if you dig action movies, give this one a try. It won't disappoint.
A fascinating Iranian buddy movie, Facing Mirrors is a devastating critique of the inflexible moral codes that rule that country. Rana is driving her husband's cab while he's in prison; one day she picks up Adineh (or Eddie), a pre-op transsexual trying to flee the country to escape an arranged marriage. As the two overcome their initial distrust and open up to each other, the sexual politics underpinning Iranian society are laid bare, and held up for analysis. Two great performances from the leads (particularly from Shayesteh Irani, fucking fearless and totally convincing as Adineh/Eddie) and a subtle, slow-burn to their burgeoning friendship made this one a real highlight.
The word 'quirky', when used to describe a film, usually leads to either awesomeness or disaster, and rarely to anything in between. Although 'awesome' might be over-stating things a bit, Safety Not Guaranteed definitely fell on the right side of the ledger. An indie sci-fi romantic drama comedy thing (man, is that a mash-up of every single genre? If it had somehow managed to also be a sword 'n' sandals western, I think they could have made history...), the film-makers had the good sense to base their bizarre, fantastical plot elements on a grounding of sympathetic, believably damaged characters (okay, it's not that believable that Aubrey Plaza, who's basically my dream woman, is playing a friendless loser, but I'll forgive it that one flaw). Each of the four main characters has their own personal journey of discovery, and it's in the way those stories collide and lend each other deeper meaning that the film really shines. It's more than the sum of its parts ... and it's also very funny, which helps a lot. This one will definitely be hitting cinemas at some point I reckon (code for: it's American), see it if you get a chance. It was lovely.
From Hong Kong, Vulgaria was silly and funny and, yes, vulgar, and left most of the cinema in stitches. Those who didn't like it, though, took great pleasure in walking out in an ostentatious huff: it's that kind of a film. During a Q&A at a university, a bumbling, inept film producer recounts the many disasters that dogged the making of his latest film. The wild story includes bestiality-obsessed gangsters, vain elderly former porn stars, an eye-popping oral sex technique, exploding body parts, a videogame that simulates masturbation, and a sexual harassment case based on an unfortunately misheard word. It's pretty much batshit crazy, but it's also a whole heap of raucous fun.
21 films down, 7 to go. I can make it! Oh God, can I make it? The MIFF sniffles are turning into something worse, and (like last year) I suspect there'll be at least one day when I just have to stay in bed and let the movies carry on without me. Hope not, though, there's still a few films left that are among my most anticipated flicks of the whole festival. Wish me luck! And if you sat/sit next to me and I give you a cold, I'm really sorry.
Cheers, JC.
