Crash by JG Ballard REVIEWED

I'm a fan of controversial books. Therefore, thought I upon hearing of 1973's Crash, which explores a subculture of people who become sexually obsessed with car crashes, I must read this. (Now that's a sentence with words in an order wrongly put.) Anyway, I did just that. Would you like to know my opinions on it? Good.

Crash is, to be blunt, a badly written book. Written in a highly sensationalistic manner, the novel obsesses over its graphic descriptions of hundreds of in-car sexual acts to such an extent that the novel can be little else. There is not much character development, except in the case of Vaughan, the former TV producer who befriends the narrator James and introduces him to symphorophilia (yes, it has a name), who we see deteriorating into a state similar to drug addiction. The other characters, few though they are, have no roles to speak off - they are simply fucked and then forgotten about.

In terms of its ideas and concepts, Crash is in fact very interesting. The interplay between sexuality and technology in modern society may be rather overplayed by Ballard, but it is certainly a significant issue and one dealt with well by the book. Similarly, the hyperreal sense of a blurring of fiction and reality - Vaughan's greatest desire is to die in a collision with the film actress Elizabeth Taylor - is very strong, and one of the most visited themes within Ballard's work. All this is very good.

But the style of the novel, rather than leading to an exploration of the reader's own morality as was intended, seems only to bore and desensitise. Not helped by his constant repetition of the graphic description of sexual acts, Ballard's writing seems to ooze over the page (sorry...!) and the ultimate effect approaches the soporific. Similarly, the thematic assertions of the work are almost ridiculously overstated.On almost every page, Ballard draws a connection between the shape of cars and the form of the human body, in both being sexualised and made into art - I don't think I've ever read the word "stylization" more often.

Overall, Crash is valuable to all fans of dystopia and sci-fi horror as an exploration of the dark side of our advertisement visions of sexuality and technology. But the disengaging style, while ostensibly in order to make the reader complicit in the amorality of the story, serves only to bore them to such an extent that they don't actually care what happens.

6/10

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides REVIEWED

(Also posted on tumblr, guys. Experiment.)

Yo ho me hearties! Today I went to see the new Pirates movie. I certainly had mixed feelings on going in, because of the largely negative reviews it’s been getting from the critics. There was much in the film to justify their negativity, but it was nonetheless enjoyable to me.

I thought the acting was much better all round than in the previous episodes. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow continues to be one of my favourite cinematic characters, and the performances of Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush were nicely piratical. With the other characters I was less enamoured, although overall it was well enough done.

Rob Marshall’s direction sparkles with wit and there are many great visual moments. However, it can’t really hold together the muddled script which seems to move pointlessly from one action scene to another without great reason. Some seems shamelessly cribbed out of other films, including unexpectedly The Italian Job. There seems to be very little real tension within the first and second acts, so the film largely mopes along until it draws towards the climax. The five principals seem to drift in and out of the story on occasions, and there is very little sense of narrative cohesion until the later part of the film. I thought while watching the previous films that the writers had a talent for creating great individual moments but were less proficient at shaping an entire narrative - On Stranger Tides reinforced this message.

The special effects and cinematography are spectacular, as befits a Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer movie. However, the proliferation of very dark scenes, made worse by watching in 3D, started to irritate me as I simply could not see what was going on. Overall, the film cannot hold a tallow candle to The Curse of the Black Pearl, but in a climate of so many magical realist/fantastical movies, it stood out because of its strong central character, its direction and its wit.

Verdict: 6/10

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The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People REVIEWED

It seems this blog has rather degenerated into merely reviewing this series of Doctor Who. Which is no bad thing, but certainly not what I intended it for. But I have so little time. So I keep telling myself.

Anyway, let's review Doctor Who. SHOOT.

The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, set in a characterful island monastery, is a story telling of a group of researchers who make doppelgangers of themselves in order to carry out their "dirty work". A lightning storm gives these so-called Gangers the freedom to act independently of their human counterparts, and the stage is set for a classically Gothic Frankensteinian adventure. This is exactly the kind of story that Who should be telling; a philosophical morality tale as much as an action-adventure, an exciting concept to go along with the explosive storytelling.

The setting was once more fantastic - while the production team have still not got away from the Earth-centricity of the Russell T Davies era, at least we've moved away from grimy North London housing estates, hopefully for good. A Gothic medieval monastery on a desolate rocky island. The production made full use of the gorgeous Welsh architecture available to create a grandiose but decayed complex suitable for such a story. The strong cast held together the complex narrative well, although I felt there was one too many workers, which made certain scenes a bit full. A problem that occasionally seems to plague Who is stilted dialogue - a sense of unnaturality and over-exposition within character conversations was visible within this story as well. On the other hand, the totally absurd opening sequence of The Rebel Flesh, which sees two of the characters laugh off the accidental killing of the third (a Ganger, of course, we later discover), set the scene beautifully and neatly introduced us to this episode's main theme, the sanctity of life.

How we define someone/something as human, another integral concept, was intelligently explored through the character of Jenny, whose sequences with Rory offered both a gorgeous appraisal of the value of human memories and a way of exploring Amy Pond a little more. The portrayal of Amy as selfish and as taking Rory for granted throughout the series has partly alienated many viewers, me included, so I was very pleased that we were shown through her loneliness and partial helplessness without Rory that their relationship is two-way. This is another interesting angle that I hope will be explored further as the series progresses.

The conclusion of The Rebel Flesh was predictable, but that of The Almost People was certainly not. It sets up the mid-season finale something awesome, and that is some Northern slang I never expected to use in a review. Finally, the best thing about this two-parter was the way it was put together rather like a complex jigsaw. Everything that happened made perfect sense, and nothing felt forced or thrown in. I'd more or less worked out the twists (aside from the very last one!), but they didn't feel in any way obvious. It's a testament to the quality of the writing that the story invited such intelligent viewing. All that remains for me to say is OMG MOFFAT... Roll on next week.

Verdict: 7/10+9/10. Overall: 8/10


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The Impossible Astronaut (BSDA #16)

Yes, it’s Doctor Who time again. One of sci-fi’s greatest shows smashed back onto our screens tonight with The Impossible Astronaut, the first of a two-part episode, set, for the first time ever, in the United States of America. And now I’m reviewing it. SPOILERS. As River would, and did, say.

The episode begins with the Doctor sending four blue envelopes to certain people, asking them to meet at a particular time and location, which turns out to be the middle of the Utah desert. Amy and Rory, River Song, and an elderly man called Canton Delaware III all turn up to see the Doctor… die. Wow. I mean, wow. What a dramatic opening gambit from Steven Moffat, to kill the central character 10 minutes into the show! The death scene was suffused with a real sense of emotion, helped by some powerful sobbing from Karen Gillan, who’s finally made the role of Amy her own. But what really made it was the utter bathos of having the Doctor spring back into the show two minutes later, bouncy, arrogant and two hundred years younger. He himself was the fourth person invited to his own funeral, and, arriving after the fact, “can’t know” how he dies.

Then it gets even more interesting. The Doctor visits President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office and has to deal with mysterious voice who keeps ringing the President’s direct number. Weird. I can’t write any more about this strand of the plot at this stage, because I know as little as you. So then we meet the aliens, who are creepy. They are a very Moffat creation, scary by concept rather than by physical appearance; their unique twist is that you can only remember them when you are looking at them. (An interesting inversion of the Weeping Angels, really.) I have to say, I like this idea a lot. I hope it’s explored more next time because it is, really, brilliant.

America The Beautiful. This episode didn’t mess about with its presentation of the USA at all. All the classic elements were there – the stetson, the Mustang, the yellow school bus, the diner, the Oval Office; a veritable smorgasbord of Americana. Added to this, the production team managed to find some staggeringly beautiful locations to film in, with a wonderful sunset (or, in fact, sunrise, according to the behind the scenes footage on Doctor Who Confidential!) illuminating the Doctor’s cremation gorgeously. The brightness of the Utah sun really gave this episode something more in visual terms, and the whole thing had a wonderfully filmic quality about it.

It’s now clear to me that Doctor Who has completely left behind the Russell T Davies era. The kitschy set design, bright colour palette, soap opera characters and bombastic plotting all belong to the past. This is now definitely Steven Moffat’s show, and, as such, it’s cleverer, darker, more humorous, more experimental and more cinematic. I personally like this style A LOT more. It feels more like science fiction, and seems both more modern (or even a bit postmodern) and more traditional in terms of the show itself – I was recently watching 1980’s Full Circle, and you can definitely see the similarities with 2011 with regard to the pacing, dialogue, visual style and concepts. In short, this is Doctor Who again. Similarly, Matt Smith, who I confess took a while to get used to, has now leapfrogged David Tennant and Patrick Troughton to move from fourth to second in my list of favourite Doctors. He now sits below only Tom Baker. And, as his Doctor develops, I think he could have a real chance at the top spot.

Overall, this was a wonderful episode, though not without its flaws. It was so very different from any other season openers that it’s difficult to compare it to anything, but nevertheless, I’m going to compare it to something. You have to question how much of the plot would have been understood by younger viewers and the fact that it raised SO MANY questions while providing so few answers must have been disconcerting to people used to watching episodes as discrete stories in their own right. I guess I need to wait until Day of the Moon to see exactly how good The Impossible Astronaut was, but, on the whole, I was thoroughly impressed.

Verdict: 9/10

Other things I didn’t have time to write about: the Doctor and River flirting, the reusing of concepts such as secrets and hidden memories, the awesomeness of Mark Sheppard, the fact that Stephen Milligan looked more like Lyndon Johnson than Richard Nixon, and Amy’s pregnancy.

Your thoughts would be welcome in comments. Follow this blog, tweet me @ antmoorfield, and be back here next week for the Day of the Moon review. In the meantime, politics. Because.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex REVIEWED. (BSDA #5)

So today I watched a film called the Baader-Meinhof Complex, about the Rote Armee Fraktion, the extremist left-wing terrorist organisation which operated in Germany mainly in the 1970s. Let's start with the simple bit. It was an extremely good film which I would recommend to anyone with an interest in terrorism (not in that way, you understand), late German history or social revolutions. Or indeed simply if you like good films. (Parental advisory, of course, given the copious amounts of violence, drug use and nudity.)

Fred Kaplan of the New York Times said that "when the film opened in Germany last year, some younger viewers came out of theaters crestfallen that the Red Army Faction members, still mythologized, were such dead-enders. Some who were older complained that the film had made the gang look too attractive. But they were dead-enders, and they were attractive. A film about them, or any other popular terrorist movement, has to account for both facts if it seeks to explain not just their crimes but also their existence."

I think this is a brilliant review, hence the shameless stealing. The best thing about this film is that it neither totally glamorises nor totally pathologises the RAF - instead it gives you the whole story. The violence, the sexual freedom, the casual misogyny, the brutal murders, the disdain for the law both from the RAF and the authorities, the madness, the Marxian politics and the wider picture of the radicalised German left of the time. There's very little in the way of moralising here; some have argued there's too little. It is the viewer's decision as to how to interpret the actions of the RAF: are they just brutal killers? Sexy freedom fighters? A group with ideals gone wrong? To me, the latter seems the case, but this is a matter of individual interpretation. 

Despite the German film industry only having about four actors, the movie is superbly acted throughout. Even the guys in bit part roles manage to fill you with an understanding of their characters' complexities and the difficulties of living in such a radical and brutal world as that of the RAF. I did however think some of the characters' roles were underdeveloped, and too many characters simply popped in and out of the action randomly, though this is probably a necessary consequence of trying to summarise the actions of a movement over ten years within two and a half hours. 

Whether you watch it as a study of a hugely controversial group in recent history, or as a crime drama, or as a political thriller, there is very little wrong with this film. It was a worthy recipient of its many awards, and is only a part of the 21st century renaissance within German film which happily shows no signs of abating.

9/10

Oi oi oi. If you enjoyed reading this, there's only one thing to do now. No, not hijack a plane or storm the German embassy in Stockholm. Follow this blog. And good stuff will probably happen.