It Came From The Archives! - Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death

When Walt Whitman wrote the words, “Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost”, he could’ve been talking about the internet. Nowadays, Nothing is ever really deleted. Which is how I’ve found the first published review I ever wrote, for a re-release of A Matter of Life and Death, that originally appeared all the way back in April 2000 on the long-defunct 6degrees and is now archived at The Powell & Pressburger Pages.

A Matter of Life and Death was already comfortably ensconced in my Top Ten Favourite Movies of All Time back then (it still is), and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to see it on a freshly-struck 35mm print at the BFI’s building on Stephen Street. (I was even more fortunate to watch it on a big screen again in 2003 in the company of the late, great Jack Cardiff, but that’s a story for another time).

Looking back at this down down the barrel of thirteen years, the review fails at all the things that I believe good film criticism should do - it’s not particularly informative or insightful or entertaining. But, hell, at least I could string a sentence together and it was my first time out of the gate, so maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on my younger self. (That doesn't stop me from cringing at Every Single Sentence and trite observation below.) Anyway, for the sake of posterity and to serve as a reminder to myself of how far I’ve come, here’s that review:

The Ministry of Information must have been shocked when, having commissioned Powell and Pressburger to come up with a propaganda puff piece to aid Anglo-American relations, they got A Matter of Life and Death in return. This 1946 masterwork starts with a cracking opening sequence and just gets better from there. During World War II, Squadron Leader Peter Carter (an exceptionally suave David Niven, even by his standards) is hurtling towards terra firma in a shot-up plane, with a dead crew and a shredded parachute, sharing his last moments with American WAC June (Kim Hunter) before surrendering to his imminent and inevitable death.

But, due to that most traditional of English weather, fog, he doesn't die. And before Heaven's administrators realise a mistake has been made, Carter and June fall in love, much to the chagrin of the celestial emissary who comes to take him away. And the film is only just getting started...

Before the end titles roll, we are treated to a cosmic battle for life and love in both Heaven and Earth, as Carter's crippling headaches intensify and the pencil pushers of Heaven conspire to spirit him away, as the drama unfolds in the mind of the poet-cum-airman. 

A Matter of Life and Death works on so many levels that it demands repeated viewings, and gives all the more reason to welcome this new 35mm print. Warm, fuzzy romanticism and unsentimental cynicism rub shoulders comfortably throughout the film, resulting in an ultimately positive meditation on the power of love to conquer all. What could potentially be trite and banal actually works incredibly well.

The film explores the nature of national identity and post-war relations, the power of love and sacrifice and the effect of war on those who live through it, and yet not once does it lose sight of the intimate tale of two lovers fighting for one another.

The contrast between the lush dreamlike fantastical Earth and the harsh monochrome red-tape hell that is Heaven is perfectly rendered. "One is starved of Technicolor up there!" complains Conductor 71 on one of his forays to Earth to retrieve his errant charge.

The film is exquisitely shot by Jack Cardiff, utilising all the tricks and tools of cinema, and is full of memorable visual effects: the table tennis ball frozen in mid-air; Dr. Reeves' camera obscura; the panoramic view of the heavenly court room, quite literally packed to the rafters with spectators. But these all take second place to the seemingly endless staircase between our world and the next. (The film was unfortunately named Stairway to Heaven on its US release). 

A Matter of Life and Death is full of sparkling banter that bounces between the characters, and the performances are uniformly excellent. Roger Livesey plays Dr. Frank Reeves, Carter's defender in both worlds, with great authority and presence. Raymond Massey scowls throughout as Abraham Farlan, who will be damned if he will let a young Boston girl be lost to an Englishman. But it is Marius Göring as the foppish dandy Conductor 71, who steals the film from the rest of the cast with his infectious charm.

The film confirms Powell and Pressburger's reputation as great directors, and A Matter of Life and Death is the greatest of their films. However, you can't help being slightly saddened at the fact that, with its humour, ambition, scope, vitality and, above all, optimism, they really don't make 'em like this anymore.

Master Blaster

Meant to post this towards the end of last year, but I forgot...

The audio wizards at This Is My Jam gifted all of their users a little present before Christmas - a seamless mashup of a year's worth of their own personal audio selections - A Jam Odyssey, if you will. I've been endlessly delighted by mine, I'm still listening to it on repeat now, and I still cannot work out how the hell they did it. (I don't really want to know either - it would kind of spoil the magic).

I've become increasingly fond of This Is My Jam over the last few months, and it has slowly become my daily musical destination of choice when I'm parked in front of a screen for hours at a time. (The fact that I don't get frequently interrupted by commercials is a big selling point).

If you fancy giving my Jam Odyssey a spin, have a click and play spot the soundbite.

Days of Future Present

2013. The year in which Snake Plissken has to reluctantly fight his way across the island of Los Angeles, meting out nonchalant smackdowns to retrieve a MacGuffin. The few surviving graduates of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters will become the Anti-Sentinel Resistance in an attempt to avert a nuclear holocaust. And Kevin Costner will wander the desolate wastelands of Oregon, trying to scrape together food and water in return for performances of Shakespearean plays. Perhaps the most terrifying iteration of the next 365 days of them all. Welcome to the human race. Meanwhile, back in the real world...

I always try to start the year with some kind of statement of intent. In 2011, it was all about laying low. Keeping my head down, keeping a steady course. Feel free to pick your own lazy pre-cooked metaphor. Basically, I just needed to get through 2011 in one piece. And, with that humble non-ambition, I succeeded.

Last year was different. I started 2012 feeling stronger and hungry for more. It was time to start building things up again. So I did. Have I achieved as much as I’d hoped to by the end of 2012? No. But that’s OK. It’s that whole reach-grasp thing. No matter how much I do, I’ll never be satisfied that it’s enough. I got a helluva lot done, just not as much as I’d planned to. Still, on balance, I can treat this as a qualified success.

Which brings us all up to date. And...I can’t quite work out what the shape of 2013 is yet. I need to take a long, hard dispassionate look at the groundwork I laid last year and intensify my efforts there. I can smell change in the offing, but I can’t tell what or when or how. I just have a strong sense that I won’t be in the same place in my life this time next year. We shall see.

As usual, I’ve got a lot to do. But maybe, this time, it ain’t what I do, it’s the way that I do it. And I think this time, I’ll play it all with a little Bangkok Rules...

Listomania! My Favourite Films of 2012

Merry Listmas, Everyone! It’s time to unwrap my Top Eleven Films of 2012.

Compiling this list was incredibly easy. Every single one of the first ten films on this list was always going to have a spot from the minute I walked out of the cinema. And then there’s the eleventh. Which kind of snuck up on me. It’s the only film on the list that I really didn’t expect to have here at the end of the year. But here we are, and there it is. We’ll come back to that one later...

Some tedious disclaimers to nip any incipient reader pedantry in the bud: Yes, this is based on UK theatrical release dates. No, obviously I haven’t seen everything. Right. Let’s get on with it. In no particular order...It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights...

The Muppets

It is believed that the word "vaudeville" is originally derived from the expression "voix de ville" which roughly translates as "voice of the city" or "songs of the town", and the beginning of 2012 marked the triumphant return of Jim Henson’s merry band of anthropomorphic vaudevillians, replete with the finest voices and the catchiest songs. Scraping away all the barnacles that have become encrusted on their furry bottoms over the years, Jason Segel, Nicholas Stoller and James Bobin distilled exactly what it was that we loved about The Muppet Show in the first place, reminding us how smart and dumb and satirical and anarchic and uplifting and downright lovable the Muppets always were at their very best. An exuberant riff on a well-worn "Let’s get the gang back together and put on a show!" story, The Muppets managed to be extremely funny, surprisingly moving and genuinely exhilarating, often all at once. We always missed them, we just never realised quite how much. All together now: Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh...

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey

Not all of Henson’s shaggy progeny were entertainers. Some of them were educators, and I come not to bury Kevin Clash, but to praise him. Being Elmo not only places Jim Henson’s natural successor squarely in the spotlight (which is remarkable considering how shy and modest Clash appears to be), but it also manages to tell a wider story about the history of one of television's finest achievements: Sesame Street. It would be a damn shame if this documentary now becomes a buried museum piece in the wake of allegations that have surfaced about Clash in recent months, but I’m no rumourmonger and I certainly have no intention of getting into all that mess here. On the basis of Being Elmo, however, it’s difficult to square the stories that have bubbled up from the fetid toilet bowl of gossip sites with the picture portrayed here of a man who genuinely loved Being Elmo, loved being a Muppeteer and loved putting a smile on the faces of everyone that saw the open arms, gaping smile, wide eyes and bright red fur of Sesame Street’s biggest star. If you haven’t already seen it, just watch it and judge for yourself. And as a companion piece, I highly recommend Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis.

21 Jump Street
"We're reviving a canceled undercover project from the '80s and revamping it for modern times. The people behind this lack creativity and they've run out of ideas, so what they do now is just recycle shit from the past and hope that nobody will notice." And with that defiant statement of intent, I was sold.

On paper, this movie sounds like a horrible idea. It even has an entire sequence showing people out of their minds on drugs and, as a rule, trippy scenes like that are almost always fist-gnawingly self-indulgent. Not here, though. 21 Jump Street is a glorious, shining example of how to do it right and, as an added bonus, it introduces "Fuck You, Science!" into the lexicon of eminently quotable movie lines. Channing Tatum is a revelation - the man has some serious comedy chops. But the real star of 21 Jump Street is screenwriter / alchemist Michael Bacall who took the lead dumped in his lap and turned it into a finely-honed chunk of comedy gold.

Dark Shadows
Some people think that the lack of a defining, signature auteur style is what makes a truly great director (Steven Soderbergh, for example). But as Russ Meyer taught us over the course of his career, sometimes mining, refining and returning to certain preoccupations can also be hallmarks of a world-class filmmaker. In this particular instance I’m thinking of Tim Burton, who snags two spots in my Top Eleven.

Dark Shadows often feels as if Burton picked up a Beetlejuice-like anti-hero and dumped him into the anarchic, picaresque mess of a Mars Attacks!, and yet it is still very much it’s own thing. I’m not blind to the fact that Dark Shadows is messy and undisciplined and lacking in focus, but I almost love it more for that. It picks up, drops and sometimes just throws away storylines and plot threads, but it is based on a long-running soap opera and it’s not uncommon for soap operas to do just that. In the spirit of Dark Shadows, here are some scattershot, unrelated reasons why I loved it:

Burton doesn’t soft-peddle the darker elements of Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins, yet you never stop rooting for him.

It doesn’t hurt that Curtis Mayfield appears on the soundtrack - I am powerless in the face of a sliver of Superfly.

Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel shoots the hell out of it, nailing the grey washed out tones of daytime television circa 1972, whilst also managing to capture the deep blacks and reds of Burton’s gothic flourishes or the popping colours of the more blatantly kitsch retro sequences.

The shot of Collins cowering in the glare of McDonald’s golden arches is amongst my favourite images of the year.

It is frequently very funny indeed and if you’re still not sold after all of that unequivocal praise, check out the best thing I’ve read about Dark Shadows so far by The Film Doctor here.

 

Frankenweenie
Your second helping of Burton magic: A black-and-white animated valentine to old Universal and Hammer horror movies which celebrates inquisitive and creative children that play with dead things. Love, loss, friendship and mutated corpses, all wrapped up in a lush, evocative, bombastic Danny Elfman score and gorgeous visuals.

Serbuan maut (The Raid)
A moving picture that really, really moves. It always feels somehow inappropriate to try and encapsulate in words the visceral, breathless thrills of a truly great action movie. I should just be able to point you at it and tell you to see it yourself: Every vertiginous back-flip, every excruciating bone-snap, every gravity-defying physical contortion. I saw it in an auditorium where the cinema rumbled for the duration with sympathy-groans at every cracked skull and shattered kneecap. I remember the first time I saw Die Hard and Hard Boiled and Enter the Dragon. Watching The Raid for the first time was exactly the same. Extraordinary and exhilarating are only two of the inadequate superlatives that just don’t do it justice.

Killer Joe
On the junket circuit recently, Quentin Tarantino has been making a lot of noise about the importance of a filmmaker’s legacy and the sanctity of a solid filmography, arguing that directors in their later years lack the passion, potency and innovation present in their earlier work. He obviously hasn’t seen Killer Joe. Dark, playful, twisted and disarmingly funny, William Friedkin’s Killer Joe is the work of an old master refusing to go gently into that good night, with a blistering psychosexual thriller that shows he has every intention of continuing to burn and rave at close of day. It’s also worth pointing out that Friedkin and his cinematographer Caleb Deschanel get some moody, bright and beautiful footage shooting digitally. (So don’t write off digital cameras just yet, Quentin).

Matthew McConaughey has always been big. It's the pictures that got small. After far too long in the multiplex wilderness, picking up pay cheques for smirks and shirt removal, McConaughey slides into the role of Killer Joe like one of those snug black leather gloves he seems so fond of, knowing that the only way to play the part is to go all the way over-the-top and into the darkness. Surrounded by incredibly strong support from Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church and a particularly fearless turn from Gina Gershon, Killer Joe has the finest ensemble acting in any movie this year. My absolute favourite film of the year, and here comes my second favourite...

Berberian Sound Studio
"This is not a horror film – this is a Santini film!". Peter Strickland lingers lovingly on the obsolete audio technology of the recent past, the demolished innards of violated vegetables and the excruciating sounds of unseen giallo The Equestrian Vortex, as timid foley artist Toby Jones gets to grips (or is that loses his grip?) on the noises he has been tasked with making in the name of art. Slippery, sickly, gorgeous and with an unexpected streak of gallows humour - in particular the verbal descriptions of the action that is always just out of shot: "The dangerously aroused goblin prowls the dormitory". Very much looking forward to Strickland’s third feature The Duke of Burgundy, a dark melodrama that is currently in production with Ben Wheatley’s Rook Films.

Looper
Repeat after me: Time travel movies are not mathematical equations. They don’t have to fit together perfectly. They can’t fit together perfectly. If you spend all of your time trying to figure out how everything slots together seamlessly, you just won’t enjoy yourself. And if you don’t want to enjoy yourself, you have no business going to watch something as enjoyable, rich and multi-layered as Looper. That’s the true paradox of a time paradox film. Through his scrubby beard, Jeff Daniels warns the audience: "This time travel crap, just fries your brain like a egg..." You would do well to heed his words.

When Bruce Willis was 31, he was appearing in the Second Season of Moonlighting. When Joseph Gordon-Levitt was 31, he was playing a young Bruce Willis in Looper. I find this bit of trivia endlessly distracting now, especially when I look at Levitt’s prosthetic nose and wonder why he doesn’t look like David Addison...

Argo
The moment I saw that 70s-era Warner Brothers logo at the beginning of Argo, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy myself. Deliberately invoking an era of classic political thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View is a ballsy, dangerous gambit, but Ben Affleck pulls it off. Argo is far pulpier than its forebears, and the final movement of the film certainly feels like it indulges in a hefty dollop of dramatic licence just to amp up the tension, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is a confident, accomplished and compelling yarn about a largely unknown part of our recent secret history.

The Avengers
When I started thinking about this list, I wasn’t sure that it would make the cut. But I would be guilty of the worst kind of inverse snobbery if I didn’t find an eleventh spot on this list for The Avengers. Joss Whedon pulls together all the strands of the Marvel Universe that have been building towards this moment for years and ties it all together with spectacle, snappy banter and a handful of genuine punch-the-air crowd-pleasing moments. Unlike The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall, The Avengers is not remotely embarrassed of its source material and wholeheartedly embraces it. Colourful, epic, just the right side of silly and heaps of fun. On top of that, Whedon does what no-one has been able to do since the days when Lou Ferrigno ruled the cathode ray: He not only made the Hulk work in a movie, he made him the star. Incredible and Smashing.

Listomania! Prologue

It’s that time again.

As I start to look back over the last twelve months so that I can cobble together a list of my favourite films of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to look a little bit further than that to remind myself of the films that I had loved in previous years. And that’s when I realised that I hadn’t actually published any Year-End Favourite Lists for quite a few years running now. So, consider this a corrective.

A quick note: I don’t really do Top Tens. Ten seems like an incredibly arbitrary number, and I have absolutely no intention of adding or subtracting movies I love from a list just because of some meaningless, predefined “That’s What Everybody Else Does” rule. None of the lists below add up to ten. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. (At the moment, it looks like my 2012 list is going to feature eleven titles in total. I laugh in the face of your quaint, archaic Round Numbers!)

So. I present my favourites from the last three years in alphabetical order, without explanation or apology. Let’s do it:

2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord & Chris Miller)
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Moon (Duncan Jones)
Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson)
White Lightnin’ (Dominic Murphy)

2010

Buried (Rodrigo Cortés)
Four Lions (Chris Morris)
Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess)
La nana (The Maid) (Sebastián Silva)
Madeo (Mother) (Joon-ho Bong)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright)

2011

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
The Interrupters (Steve James)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Rango (Gore Verbinski)
Source Code (Duncan Jones)
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)

Popism

Online research is a minefield. You start off with the best of intentions, with a specific target in mind. And then you start to click. Click click click. Before you know it, the morning has evaporated, your browser is creaking under the weight of a slew of open tabs that are spawning at an unholy rate and you’ve forgotten what you were looking for in the first place. That’s not always such a bad thing, because if you kick enough rocks, you never know what you might find. For example...

I’ve never been a huge fan of Andy Warhol’s art, but I am a fan of his work ethic. Today’s indiscriminate clickery led me to this morsel of Warholia:

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

Which is great. And true. And which, with a few more judicious keystrokes, led me this:

“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” -- from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975)

Preach on, Andy!

The Deadly Sounds of Kung Fu

May you live in interesting times.

For quite a while now we’ve been living in an age where, if you can imagine it, someone else can make it. Or, at the very least, fake it. Technology makes it possible for visual storytellers to show us a convincing Middle Earth or a plausible Narnia. Robots turn into cars, aliens invade on a seasonal basis, and a raging green behemoth can punch a Norse demi-god across a room to rapturous applause. But the ability to realise anything on screen almost somehow makes it less impressive. I’m not dismissing these significant achievements in visual effects at all - I’m just saying that the extraordinary has become a little bit ordinary. The effects aren’t quite as special as they used to be - it’s just Standard Operating Procedure for another summer at the movies.

And so I tend to retreat from the uncanny valley and return to my beloved old-school bone-crunchers. The stuff you can’t fake. It may all be meticulously choreographed, but fists still connect with jaws and heads still collide with walls. Anyone who has ever sat through a Jackie Chan gag-reel knows that they are looking at real blood, real bruises and real teeth scattered on the ground in puddles of fresh mouth gore. I’ve been watching a lot of this stuff this year - my idea of comfort viewing is wincing in sympathy as someone gets kicked in the face. A cry of “Ow! My balls!” is a clarion call to attention for my jaded CGI-weary eyes. Whether it’s Gina Carano in Haywire, Iko Uwais in The Raid, Saoirse Ronan in Hanna or Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung or Jackie Chan in pretty much anything, nothing beats the primal thrills of two people artfully beating the ever-loving shit out of each other in the name of cinematic entertainment. As Werner Herzog once said: “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.” And it would be madness to disagree with Werner Herzog.

Which is an incredibly circuitous way of saying that I was watching the great Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow recently. The directorial debut of Chinese martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, starring Jackie Chan in his first breakout hit and co-starring the director’s father Yuen Siu-tien as Jackie’s sifu, if you’ve seen Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, then you know how magnificent the physical contortions on display are. But this isn’t a review. If you want that, I’d suggest clicking through to Robert Makin’s piece here.

As I was enjoying the original Chinese language print of the film, I was somewhat distracted by the incongruous sounds of Space’s Magic Fly over the opening titles. It sounds like this:

But that’s not all. There are more anachronistic synths in the form of Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygène (Part II) over a couple of training sequences later on in the film.

And so after the film, I decided to fire up the MagiGoogle Portal of Wisdom & Tax Avoidance to see what else I could find. And I discovered that there were a lot of other unusual music cues that I’d missed. (Credit where it's due: Most of the heavy-lifting here has been done thanks to the Martial Arts Music Wiki.) In addition to the original score by Chou Fu-liang, there were snippets of scores filched from Hollywood movies. This sort of musical pilfering was common in Hong Kong cinema back then. This is what I learned.

There are slivers of the epic bombast of John Williams from Star Wars dotted around at various points. (And when I say Star Wars, I mean what people now insist on tediously referring to as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. There are far too many colons in movie titles these days. Mumble grumble.)

So. Yeah. Star Wars. An excerpt of The Battle of Yavin appears in two places - at the end of the opening titles (which would mean at the end of the Space track, for those keeping track of all this stuff), and again just before a fight sequence towards the end of the film. (For people like me who don’t worship at the altar of the George Lucas Toy Factory, The Battle of Yavin is the bit when the Death Star blows up. If I’m wrong, no doubt someone will pop up in the comments to point out the error of my ways about something I don’t give a shit about).

What else? There’s supposed to be a bit of Ennio Morricone from A Fistful Of Dollars, but I can’t find it or where it appears. There’s a cue from Marvin Hamlisch’s The Tanker from The Spy Who Loved Me right after the opening credits. The “Something Dramatic is Happening!” music cue to denote things like character deaths in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow is the piano crash at the start of Jerry Fielding’s The Rape from The Outlaw Josey Wales. (This piano crash right here).

The memorable and distinctively Bondian A Drop In The Ocean by John Barry from You Only Live Twice also crops up in one scene. (Side note: I did not know before now that John Barry's full name was John Barry Prendergast. This amuses me far more than it should):

There are also two Johnny Harris tracks from Bloomfield - Love Theme and Closing Love Theme. Nothing says “training sequence” like a love theme...(Also: was the name "John" a prerequisite for having your tunes pinched for inclusion in a kung fu movie back then?)

When the film was distributed in America in the 1980s as The Eagle’s Shadow, producer Serafim Karalexis ensured that it appeared with a new score to dodge the copyright pitfalls there would have been with the original unlicensed soundtrack, replete with a cover of the Space track amongst the library tracks thrown into the mix.

And I’m done. I willingly concede that I may be the only person remotely interested in this stuff. If you’ve read this far, you deserve some kind of reward. Here, have an amusing screengrab:

Doublethink

Prompted in no small part by a sprawling Twitter discussion I was having yesterday with Anton Bitel and Craig Skinner about the parlous state of film criticism, questionable ethics and pastries, there’s a terrific quote from George Orwell that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since. If I only had the time or the mental real estate to spare, this would serve as a jumping-off point for a longer, no-holds-barred blogpost that would give me a chance to scratch beneath the 140-character surface and really tear into the meat of it. One day, one day...

But, until then...

“I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.” — George Orwell from Confessions of a Book Reviewer

Short Controlled Bursts

Because you can never have enough Online Procrastination Tools, I can now be found over on Letterboxd. In their words, Letterboxd is “a social network for sharing your taste in film” and I find myself on there on a regular basis making lists, updating my viewing diary and, sometimes, throwing together little capsule reviews largely cobbled together from tweets I’ve hurled out into the void upon exiting a cinema. If you feel like disappearing down the rabbit hole of my viewing habits, my Letterboxd page is here and if you fancy trying it yourself, just holler - I’ve still got a couple of invites going spare if anyone wants one.

As a dedicated proponent of recycling, I’ve grabbed a handful of recent Letterboxd mini-reviews, buffed them up a bit, and I’m chucking them up here. Go on, have a read. They’re only short.

Berberian Sound Studio

If it weren’t for the family-that-slays-together-stays-together-but-not-for-long grime of Killer Joe, then Berberian Sound Studio just might have been my Film of the Year. Grungy, queasy, elliptical and really very beautiful. An aphrodisiac for obsolete tech fetishists. Those spools, those knobs...But won't someone think of the vegetables? Those poor, poor vegetables...

Ted

If you like the idea of Seth MacFarlane jerking off to Flash Gordon for 106 minutes, then Ted is the self-loathing Summer movie for you! Also, don't do an Airplane! homage in your piece-of-shit talking bear movie if you can't come up with at least one joke as good as that movie had, MacFarlane. Mean-spirited in a brazenly artificial, button-pushing way, and yet it doesn't even have the courage of its posturing convictions and pussies out for a happy Hollywood ending. Apparently, an earlier draft of the script contained a narrated framing sequence with Peter Falk, referencing The Princess Bride. This is the only (in)conceivable instance where it is acceptable to feel happy that Peter Falk is dead.

Due Date

The sheer fucking unwarranted hubris of Todd Phillips that he thought he could better (let alone equal) Planes, Trains & Automobiles. I laughed a total of two times - both times because Robert Downey Jr. pulled a facial expression that managed to rise above the pitiful slop of the script. (I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to sit down to watch this. Since my vitriolic screed about The Hangover everybody knows how much I despise the oeuvre of Todd Phillips by now, right?)

TRON: Legacy

I really didn't expect to enjoy TRON: Legacy at all. I’m not one of those people who gets a warm fuzzy nostalgic glow when I think about the original TRON - it hasn’t aged well at all. I’m not entirely convinced that it looked all that good to begin with. And there seems to be a little bit of revisionist history at play too - people seem to have forgotten that the double-whammy box-office failures of both TRON and The Black Hole scared Disney off live-action feature film production for a decade. It’s surprising that TRON: Legacy exists at all. But the irresistible soundtrack by Daft Punk (I can’t stop listening to the damn thing), the insanely camp performance by Michael Sheen, and Jeff Bridges going Full Hippie is a helluva lot of fun. I’ve watched it a few times now and I’m still enjoying the hell out of it. This would also make a fine double-bill of Neon Racing movies coupled with John Singleton’s anime-inflected 2 Fast 2 Furious. I’m not kidding. "Biodigital jazz, man."

Priest

The worst crime that the thuddingly dull Priest commits is having Mädchen Amick on screen for mere minutes before killing her off-screen. (I can’t be the only Twin Peaks aficionado who feels that way). Which is a damn shame, as I really enjoyed the previous Paul Bettany-Scott Charles Stewart collaboration, the diner-at-the-end-of-the-world angels-with-uzis Grand Guignol Legion.

Write Up My Alley

This is a sequel of sorts to a post I wrote a while back collecting words of wit and wisdom about writing, curated by me, a person deeply suspicious of One-Size-Fits-All writing advice. Nevertheless, occasionally a few choice observations manage to penetrate my thick carapace of scepticism to earn the AKA seal of approval. It’s no coincidence that all of the quotations below come from writers I admire. Here are some of my recent favourites:

"Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn’t writing, doesn’t."
Ernest Hemingway

"Write like everyone you know is dead. You can't please everyone, so don't try."
Joe R. Lansdale

(1) Write your nonsense stories out your system.
(2) Actually sit and write, treating it as a craft. FaceBook fighting is not writing.
(3) Take criticism as a criticism of your work and not you, despite how it feels. You are not perfect, everything can be improved. It will take someone other than yourself to usually find where you need to improve on that.
(4) Operate with realism not convenience, since the latter is detectable bullshit.
(5) Be aware of patterns in your writing.
Alex De Campi from this interview at 3quarksdaily. Also: Buy Her Comics! They're great.

"So put the work in and believe in yourself, believe in your ability to change yourself, if not the world, because changing the world does actually start with changing yourself."
Alan Moore from The Honest Alan Moore Interview - Part 3: On Comics, How to Break Into Comics, and Modern Culture

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Mark Twain

It doesn't matter what time of day you work, but you have to work every day because creation, like life, is always slipping away from you. You must write every day, but there's no time limit on how long you have to write.

One day you might read over what you've done and think about it. You pick up the pencil or turn on the computer, but no new words come. That's fine. Sometimes you can't go further. Correct a misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. You have re-entered the dream of the work, and that's enough to keep the story alive for another 24 hours.

The next day you might write for hours; there's no way to tell. The goal is not a number of words or hours spent writing. All you need to do is to keep your heart and mind open to the work.
Walter Mosley

"If we’re not doing something with the information we’re taking in, then we’re just pigs at the media trough."
Warren Ellis from his excellent blogpost The Manfred Macx Media Diet