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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The Doctor's Wife REVIEWED

Oh hai there internet. Our conversations have become a lot more unidirectional lately because of my revision and such. But now I finally get the chance to talk to you after all this time.

Much like the Tardis in the latest Doctor Who episode!

(Nice segue.)

So the Doctor's Wife. Well, I loved it. Definitely in my top 20 of all time, and possibly top 10. God, it was so frikkin' good!

I love everything that Neil Gaiman has ever written, so I was expecting to love this episode too. The steampunk setting of the Tardis graveyard and the patchwork people were such intrinsically Gaiman concepts. I thought the whole episode was so beautifully realised by the design team. It's a world away from the bright garish colours of earlier series, and of that I am hugely thankful. (On Confidential, Gaiman read from the stage directions of the script, which even written is a thing of beauty, and I was particularly taken with his description of the asteroid as the "Totter's Lane at the end of the universe". And if you don't understand that reference, go and watch An Unearthly Child now.)

The idea of the Doctor talking to the Tardis could have potentially been a terrible one. I think if another writer had done it, it could have descended into a sentimental, over-reverent pile of slush. But, Gaiman being Gaiman, he gave the Tardis character, Idris, such a mad, sexy, weird and wonderful characterisation that I instantly fell in love with it. Suranne Jones' fantastic portrayal really brought the Tardis to life, and her interactions with Matt Smith were simply joyous to watch. I loved the Pull To Open sequence, which has in an instant solved a debate that's been going on for forty years in the fandom, and there were so many other little references to Who history that it'll take me a number of rewatches to take them all in, I'm sure.

Finally we got to see the inside of the Tardis! Oh man. So good. The last time we really saw any of the other rooms was way back in The Invasion of Time, where it looked, as Neil Gaiman put it on Confidential, like an old-fashioned brick-built Victorian hospital. Probably because it was filmed in an old-fashioned brick-built Victorian hospital. But anyway, the idea of the Tardis being able to move its rooms around and delete them is very cool, and it was great to see the previous control set once more. It did amuse me that the corridors Amy and Rory were lost in had obviously not changed since the early 1970s! Rory's death this week was very unpleasant, and the whole thing about being lost in time in the corridors I thought was handled brilliantly. Though I don't know where the paint to write "Hate Amy, Kill Amy" on the walls came from....

Other things very quickly: Michael Sheen is a complete dude, I loved Auntie and Uncle and hope similar characters reappear, the built Tardis was brilliant and the little keyboard was such a great touch that only a child could have designed it, and, well, I wouldn't mind being inside Suranne Jones. *clears throat quickly* Er, I mean the Tardis. Yeah. 

Verdict: 10/10

Twitter: antmoorfield. kthxbai


PS. Since I didn't bother to review The Curse of the Black Spot last week, here's a one sentence reaction. Fun, throwaway episode, short on character and with a thin premise that could have been explored further, but still worth watching. Verdict: 6/10.

Antidisestablishmentarianism. (BSDA #7)

Today in my sociology class a guy known only to the world as Fonzie, for reasons very complicated to explain to anyone who doesn't know him, randomly shouted out the world antidisestablishmentarianism during a game of Pictionary. I can't really remember why - and often with him one simply cannot understand, one can only accept - but it was nonetheless hilarious and, more importantly, gave me something to talk about here. Since no-one I have ever met, seemingly, seems to understand what it means, I would like to attempt to define the word antidisestablishmentarianism now. Because it is an agglutinative construction, built from adding prefixes and suffixes onto an original verb, it can easily be broken down to aid understanding. GO.

Begin with establish, a word everyone knows, meaning to begin or create something.

Add -ment to create establishment, a word used to describe the act of setting something up, or the thing that has been created, or, in this specific case, the concept of having a state religion which is tied to the national government of a country.

Add dis- for disestablishment, the idea of, in this case, removing the legal connections between religion and government - something which happened in Ireland in 1871 and in Wales in 1920 but has still not happened in England.

And anti- to create antidisestablishment, the word for opposition to disestablishment.

Add -ary to create antidisestablishmentary, which means of or pertaining to antidisestablishment.

Add -an (and change the spelling slightly) for antidisestablishmentarian, or one is an opponent of disestablishment. Now to finish the pudding...

Add -ism to end your word. You now have antidisestablishmentarianism, which clearly means, as this staged procedure has shown, the movement or ideology of opposition to disestablishment.

There. That wasn't so hard, right? (Many people within this movement are hard-right, however.*)

I think I should finish this blog now, because I have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.**

*That was a very little pun.
** And that a very little joke.

Follow this blog for more pathetic jokes and pointless stuff you could have found out on Wikipedia. I will not see you and you will not see me, but you will read me (maybe) next time on antmoorfield takes on the world. Goodbye.

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.