The latest in my occasional series of blogs about SF movies;, good, bad, and all points in between…

Space Truckers (1996) is one of the greatest films never made…instead they made a much worse film with  the same title.  Enjoyable, yes.  Good, no.

The premise is genius – Dennis Hopper plays a trucker driving a rig through space.  His space-truck looks like a bendy bus, with its vast containers of cargo.  And when he delivers his first load, he’s ripped off by the Company, he acts wise, he gets into a bar room brawl.  What more can you ask for!

Visually it’s a tour de force with bright colours dazzling the eye, and suitably dingy space ships, and Hopper lending his own brand of creative integrity to the project; namely, you know that even it’s bad, he’s going to give a gazillion per cent to it.

The plot is that Hopper has to take a secret cargo through space. An accident causes the heating to go haywire (reminding me of a Farscape episode where this same spaceship malfunction scenario was used as an excuse to get Claudia Black and Ben Browder hot and horny together).  Sure enough, in Space Truckers it’s used as an excuse to get Stephen Dorff  and Debi Mazar  hot and horny together…hilariously, she has a green bra beneath her dayglo outfit.

Then our motley crew of truckers (Hopper, Debi who in the story is Hopper’s  fiance despite being thirty years younger than he is  - don’t ask! – and fellow trucker Stephen Dorff) are kidnapped by space pirates. At this point the plot gets clever, in ways I won’t describe, because you might actually watch this someday. But I would say that the great reveal of the film is when the cyborg villain who sounds a lot like Charles Dance turns out to be – Charles Dance! Lending his own brand of urbane dignity to the affair, even when he has to wind up his cybernetic penis.

There are a couple of great lines of dialogue. At least, there’s definitely one, and there may well be another. It comes when Dorff  rashly taunts the cyborg, and Hopper pours honey on troubled waters by arguing, ‘He respects the brave way you confront your disability.’

And the bad guys – robots with heads like plugs with lights – are impressively scary, though it’s a bit naff that they can be switched off whilst in a killing rage by a device that looks like and basically is a TV remote control.

But the story doesn’t sustain, and the narrative gaps and lurches are rather appalling really, when you consider the writer (Ted Mann) wrote 18 episodes of NYPD Blue and should surely know how to plot a story.

There are some truly terrible lines too.  The worst is when the dying Dance – his body severed at the waist, and only his cauterized arteries keeping him alive – says, ‘If I had an anus I’m probably soil myself.’ Oh Charlie! Has it really come to this!

And when the villain of the piece, Sags, is killed we’re told, ‘Somebody fragged Sags.’ Now is that great dialogue or crap dialogue? I can’t decide.

This feels like one of those films where the creative team lost faith in the script, by TV pro Mann, and starting making it up as they went along . Or maybe he was off form. As a result, a movie that ought to have been a solid piece of entertainment – an SF thriller with comic brio – falls through the floorboards into the ‘so bad it’s good’ territory.

The director, Stuart Gordon, made Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Re-Animator; so has a variable, but an impressive CV.  His mistake in Space Truckers is to settle for a screenplay that tells the story – instead of allowing a gifted writer to really enjoy the wit and quirk and character of these characters. There’s a whole world of story to be teased out of Hopper’s career as a space trucker… think of Robert Shaw’s character in Jaws as the object lesson in how to create a vivid three dimensional character by means of quiet and character revealing scenes within an action thriller narrative.

I found a cool site by the guy who made the spaceships.  Check out these models for the film…by model maker Steve Howarth.

Last night I watched His Girl Friday again, for the nth time.  It’s one of my favourite ever films.  One of those sharp sassy black and white movies with machine-gun fire dialogue, wit, edge and amazing screen chemistry.  It tells the story of a group of unscrupulous newspapermen, including one ‘newspaperman’ who is a woman, covering the case of convicted murderer Earl Williams, who is due to be hanged in the morning. Earl escapes and – well, to say more would be a spoiler.

But the extraordinary thing about the film is that it’s so FAST. Not only fast, devious, nimble-footed,  and bewilderingly cynical. It is at heart a coruscating satire of the amorality and immorality of newspaper folk  But yet, we love them.  Many people have gone into journalism after watching this movie, on the misapprehension that all journalists will be as clever, witty and beguiling as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (they’re not.)  And though both the leads, Grant and Russell, behave appallingly we love them, and we want them to fall in love.

If you’ve never seen it, do so; if you’ve seen it as often as I have, you haven’t seen it often enough.

All this is the segue for a wee bit of a discourse about movies and authors and the like.  On this website I’ve featured a number of long and sometimes quite scholarly (cue Archie Tait and Stuart McGregor) articles on movies, books and TV.  And in a little while I’ll be featuring a major piece by Stuart on the graphic novel author Warren Ellis.  Yes, Debatable Spaces does occasional venture beyond me blathering about my new novel release and pimping my own work (oh, by the way – Artemis goes on sale in – shut up Palmer!)

I was watching His Girl Friday as part of my current venture of teaching on a course in film  up at  the University of York.  It’s a job that came about by the usual circuitous route (my entire life is a series of random coincindences) and for me it’s been a great chance to reconnect with old movies and new movies in a rather more systematic fashion than has been my wont over the last year or so.  And a chance also to think about what movies mean, and how they work, which is invaluable to me in my other role as a screenwriter and co-producer of a feature film.

So what’s the story with His Girl Friday? Why is it so good?

Firstly, I’d argue, it’s a prime example of that cultural movement known as Pulp.  Think Raymond Chandler, think Dashiell Hammett; think also Billy Wilder’s fast and furious comedies, or the gangster movies of Jimmy Cagney (which I’ve also been revisiting).  They’re different things in different genres, but the one thing they have in common is blistering speed.  Paul Cain wrote a pulp crime novel called Fast One; that could be the name for that whole movement.  Compare and contrast with the novels of George R. R. Martin, which explore a world in a thorough and detailed and – though hugely exciting – slow fashion.  But in the 30s and 40s the vogue was for fast and furious; you get to the point, you make it, you move on.  In White Heat, for instance, by the third shot we know that Jimmy Cagney is about to rob a train.  In Reservoir Dogs, we spend AGES listening to the guys nattering on before we realise a bank job is about to occur.

There’s no right or wrong about this; it’s just the issue of how pace in storytelling can change.  I find that fascinating.  And when you watch an old movie by Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges, the first reaction is panic – my God, this is all happening so quickly, can I keep up?  We cod ourselves that we live in the age of fast editing and multi-tasking brains; but the average modern action blockbluster is a snail compared to the racing hares of yesteryear.

Then there’s the hat. Rosalind Russell’s hat. And her suit too – big shoulders, very mannish, sexy in a totally empowering way.  His Girl Friday is one of the great feminist movies of all times because Rosalind’s character is, from first to last, one of the guys; but on her own terms.  She’s ambitious, ruthless, smart-witted, fast-talking.  Allegedly, Russell hired her own screenwriter to amp up her own dialogue so she had just as much witty repartee as the guys; if so, that proves the actress  became her character. Take no shit, Rosalind.  Get in there and do the job.

Nowadays, it’s much rarer to see such a powerful and guileful woman in a mainstream movie; we live in the age of Lady Gaga and Beyonce.  It’s  still a world of empowered women – both those ladies certainly are – but to see Rosalind’s brand of  edge and wit and velocity in a female character  in a movie is not as common as it ought to be. Film-makers, take note.

If I may just slip in a week academic beat; there’s a famous semiotic study (stay with me! don’t flee!) about the pop singer Madonna, by academic John Fiske (in a book called Reception Study, edited by James Machor and Philip Goldstein).  According to the editors, Fiske ‘construes fans as active viewers and listeners for whom Madonna’s persona and music become a “site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchy and feminine resistance of capitalism and the subordinate.”  ’  Phew.  And according to Lucy, a 14 year old Madonna fan, as quoted by Fiske, ‘she’s tarty and seductive…but it look alright when she does it you know, what I mean, if anyone else did it it would like right tarty, a right tart you know, but with her it’s OK, it’s acceptable.’

‘Reception study’ by the way is that academic discipline that deals with the way that real people – you and me – respond and react to cultural phenomena.  Its method involves talking to people, finding out what they really believe, then discussing those conclusions.  So it’s not some arid theoretical discipline; it’s an evidence-based study of the phenomena of our everyday life.

And what Fiske learns about Madonna is that she dresses like a whore on stage in a ‘post-modern’, ironic, empowering way.  Girls feel good about themselves watching Madonna sing; she’s no dumb blonde.  She’s using exaggerative versions of the icons of sexuality (those conical breasts!) to say, Hey, look at me, I’m  a woman and I’m sexy and I’m cool with it.

But the hat worn by Rosalind Russell playing the role of Hildy Johnson – especially when tipped back, as it is in the photo above – tells a different story.  This woman is sexy but  doesn’t have to flaunt it.  She just wants to do her job, the best she can.  She’s not playing any artful erotic game; damn it all, she’s best ‘newspaperman’ in the business! That’s actually, to be honest, a little bit more feminist than Madonna’s schtick.  It’s also inspirational. And, for a film made in 1940, it’s a beacon and a symbol for all women in all audiences everywhere.  No more dumb blondes; this is the  way of women in the future.

All that is conveyed by the hat; not just the hat the whole demeanour of the character; not just the whole demeanour of the character, but the very tang and pace and dash of the film.  The film means more than just the story in other worlds.  It’s the epitome of a whole way of being.

That’s as much semiotics as I will perpetrate in this blog; forgive me my moment there.

Interestingly, the feminist subtext to the movie arose by chance. In the original version – - a hit Broadway stage play called The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – the role of Hildy Johnson was played by a man.  But after hearing his secretary read the lines, Hawks decided to make  Hildy Johnson a woman; which turned out to be an act of genius.   A whole new subplot and subtext arose; a love story within the satirical comedy.   (In the 1931 film Hildy Johnson was played by Pat O’Brien; in the 1974 version Hildy was played by Jack Lemmon.)

There now follows  a visual retrospective of some of the works of Howard Hawks (1896-1977):

How careers begin…this early (1927)  crime drama was directed by Joseph Von Sternberg and written by Ben Hecht, who wrote the play of The Front Page, on which His Girl Friday is based. But – uncredited – Hecht’s cowriter was the young Howard Hawks.

After producing more than 60 movies, and directing quite a few silent movies, this was Howard’s  first talkie:

An all-male cast… a pressure cooker environment…does that ring a bell?

In an interview with Joseph McBride (in the book Hawks on Hawks) the director spoke  of his approach to dialogue in this movie: ‘People liked the scenes because they were underdone, because they were thrown away. Nobody emoted in the pictures that I made.’  This is the very definition of what makes a Howard Hawks film; a casual thrown away approach to dialogue that roots the characters in the real.  I’ve worked with directors who used this as their defining aesthetic – ‘Just throw the line away’. ‘Don’t act it, just throw it away,’  etc etc. The opposite approach is to be big and emotional and for a character to ‘beat his chest’.

Of course, some directors and indeed actors still to this day prefer ‘big’ acting. Think Al Pacino in Scarface… (as opposed to Paul Muni in Scarface, the Howard Hawks’  movie with the same name – see below.)

This is a stunner of a movie; Muni is brooding; the acting is laconic.  Muni has a trick with a coin that is mesmerising.  This is still, post-Godfather, one of my favourite gangster movies.

This is the one where Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn inadvertently adopt a leopard.  Hawks has travelled the road from an all-male cast (Dawn Patrol) to directing a movie which has one of the best roles for a woman ever.  His strategy for the writing /directing of female roles both here and in His Girl Friday was identical; just treat ‘em like men.  The women are just as sassy, just as bold, just as annoying as the men.  This utterly non-sexist approach also underpins the writing role of Starbuck (Kara Thrace) in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica; in the original series, Starbuck was a guy.  In the reboot, Starbuck is a cigar-smoking whisky-swilling fist-fighting gal; same difference, huh?

Only Angels Have Wings features Cary Grant again, in a comedy about a guy who runs an air service. This is one I haven’t seen; must rectify!

And now we see Hawks’ range – from comedy back to war movie; this one was the highest-grossing film of its year.

His Girl Friday followed, in 1940, with this crap poster for a great film:

Then it was To Have and Have Not…Based loosely on the Ernest Hemmingway story, this was Lauren Bacall’s first role. She was spotted on the cover of a magazine by Hawks’ wife Slim; Hawks trained her how to pitch her voice low. And on the set, Bogie and Bacall fell in love…one of the greatest movie romances of all time, of the off-screen variety.  William Faulkner worked on the script, with Ernest Hemmingway.

Hawks once broke his hand when he hit Hemmingway in the face, to prove to he knew how to throw a  punch.  Hemmingway laughed like a drain and the hand never healed.  Sigh. Those were the days.

No, no, what am I saying – the writer should hit the DIRECTOR. That would be more like it…

(I’m kidding, honestly!)

Moving swiftly on to The Big Sleep, up there with The Maltese Falcon as one of the greatest detective movies of all time based on Chandler’s famously brilliant but narratively incoherent novel. (No one, not even the novelist, ever figured out who killed the chauffeur).  And in this we get more of that unique Bacall/Bogart chemistry. (If you look hard, you’ll see the title The Big Sleep underneath the words BOGART AND BACALL, which tells you all you need to know about how this film was marketed).

By 1948, a change of direction – from the maker of sassy contemporary comedies and hardboiled noir thrillers and war movies, we have….a Western. Perhaps the greatest Western ever. This is (as memory serves) the Western in which they cry ‘Yee-hah!’ , as parodied in City Slickers.

John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan, the cattle drive across a river. THE river. The Red River.

From there it’s a small step to science fiction… The Thing From Another World is based on the short story Who Goes There? by legendary SF editor Joseph W. Campbell. Years later John Carpenter re-made it as The Thing. The Carpenter version is a much better thriller, and those opening shots of the dog in the Arctic snows are stunning.  But, bluntly, the dialogue in the Carpenter version is workmanlike and the performances are vivid but not richly observed.

In the Hawks’ version, however, you get great dialogue, great character, great faces…shame the action peters out but it’s still a classic.

Around about now, 1949, Hawks put Cary Grant in a dress:

The premise of this movie (I Was a Male War Bride) is that Grant is a French officer (!) during the War who marries an American girl; but the only way he can travel to America to be with her is under the terms of the War Brides Act. Hence, the cross-dressing…this  is not one of the best known Hawks’ movies but it’s a sheer delight.

After knocking out a musical starring Marilyn Monroe,

Hawks returned to Westerns with Rio Bravo, his rebuttal to High Noon, a film which he and John Wayne loathed for its wishy-washy liberalism. And so instead of a story in which the townsfolk refuse to help the Marshal, we have a story in which the community rallies round. Even the town drunk (played by Dean Martin) shows his mettle, and there’s even a song.  For my money High Noon is a greater film; but this is still fab.

Then in 1967 Hawks made another Western with similar themes, also starring John Wayne.  Another cracker, though it’s quite some time since I’ve seen it.

This had a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, the (female) screenwriter who wrote The Big Sleep and also wrote The Empire Strikes Back; she was a successful SF author too, in the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ mould; I have a couple of her books on my shelf. When Wayne is about to shoot a bad guy in the belfry of a church, he says, ‘Let’s make music.’  This is the film in which Wayne makes his horse walk backwards…an under-taught skill in many drama schools.

Then it 1970 it was back to Westerns and Wayne with Rio Lobo; to be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen this one (yet!)

This isn’t the comprehensive list – and I’ve left out the silent films, none of which I’ve seen. But it’s an extraordinary back catalogue.

And, despite the range of genres, there are clear common factors in these movies.  First, the dialogue – fast, snappy, vivid, wonderful. Second the depth of characterisation for even the minor roles. Third, the in depth casting; which is another way of saying Second, because a great and perfectly cast actor can conjure up a character in almost no words.  Think of the guys sitting around the table waiting for Earl Williams to die in His Girl Friday; even one of them a lived-in  face, with laconic throwaway delivery. We know nothing about these guys but they are utterly real.

Here’s one of the best bit-part actors Hawks ever worked with; Walter Brennan:

Never has an actor looked less than an actor…and in Red River, he steals the movie.

All these distinctive  common factors make it possible to  instantly recognise a ‘Howard Hawks’ film.  But in his own time, Hawks was regarded as a journeyman director; it’s the films  which were famous, not him.  But then,  in the 60s, Hawks was rediscovered as an ‘auteur’, namely a director with an individual voice and vision.  And that’s absolutely right, and a great corrective to a culture which (at that time) often disparaged the vital and hugely creative role of movie director.  And from that moment on, the director’s role has come to be regarded as pivotal to the creative vision on any and every film.  And the cult of the ‘auteur’ has come to dominate the international film industry. Which again is fair enough; since directors do work terribly hard, and you really can’t make a movie without one.

However…

Oops. Here we go.  Rant alert!

Like all or most professional screenwriters, I have come to hate the word and concept ‘auteur’ .  Not because of what it means, but because of what people THINK  it means.

In other words, there’s a whole assumption in the film industry that every director should be an ‘auteur’ and hence should write or rewrite every movie he or she directs.  But this is silly.  A writer who also directs is fine – that’s what Quentin Tarantino does, and he was getting high value writing jobs before he became a director. The same is true of John Huston, and Preston Sturges.

But if there’s already a writer in place, and if that writer knows his/her stuff, then it’s a director’s job to support that writer’s vision, and talent, in a collaborative way.  It’s called script editing. Stephen Frears, one of the greatest directors in the world, is great precisely because he understands that process perfectly. He began his career working with Alan Bennett, one of the finest writers in the world; and Frears knows he’s a better director if he trusts his writer.  And when I was teaching TV at the National Film and Television School (the very cradle of British auteur theory), Frears arrived for a term’s teaching and raised hell with the directing students who were refusing to work with the writing students. He told them how it SHOULD  be done; and taught them how to give script notes, the rarest and most precious of skills.

The problem really is that the word ‘auteur’ has been corrupted and abused to mean the opposite of what it originally meant.  Originally, it emerged from the very reasonable and smart  point made by a bunch of French critics  that the supposed ‘hack’ directors of Hollywood often in fact had a very distinctive ‘authorial’ influence on their movies.  Hawks was one of the directors singled out, as was Alfred Hitchcock – both directors who prided themselves on working with top notch writers, as opposed to those directors (like Jean Renoir) who largely wrote their own stuff.

And  the American critic Andrew Sarris, whose article on the auteur theory really started the hare running, also included Hawks among his pantheon of top ‘auteur’ directors. But he also relegated directors like Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and David Lean to the second tier, which proves that for all his cleverness, the man was a fool; and his version of the ‘auteur theory’ was in effect no more than a way of codifying his own preferences/prejudices. I mean, let’s get a grip here. (Wilder in particular pretended not to be bitter at Sarris’s sniping, which means he was REALLY pissed off.  But Wilder was truly one of the greats; if he’d only ever made Some Like it Hot he’d be a genius, but he did a whole lot more…)

And now, ‘auteur’ is loosely used to mean a director who writes; or a director who RE-writes, usually in the process snaffling a co-writing credit.  I’m treading on eggshells here, because there are so many stories I could tell to illustrate this general point, but I can’t, for fear of not eating lunch in this or any town again.  I cite the example of a well known screenwriter who recently told me (no, I can’t tell THAT story.)  The only example I can/will give is of the time I worked on a Bill episode by a new director who went on to be quite famous, but whose script meddling was notorious and highly unwelcome.  He wrote a significantly changed draft of the script I’d written, not in a nice or collaborative way, breaking all the rules of good conduct on that show, and when the script editors saw the result they were appalled.  Because it was bad; the wrong tone, the wrong rhythm, no sense of the characters I’d created.  Luckily, in that environment – on a show where the writer’s voice was respected – I got most of my stuff back. But elsewhere, this kind of meddling is widespread and condoned, nay, encouraged.

But how is this different to having Howard Hawks rewrite your script?  His whole method depended on collaborating so closely with the writer he became  the de facto cowriter; he would also sometimes work with actors on set, reworking their lines, sometimes changing the character’s character.  Why is that allowed?

Well, because that’s part of the collaborative process, and as long as the writer is there, or welcome to be there, no one minds this stuff.  In fact, we relish it; we like being part of it; we ‘get’ it.  And Hawks was smart enough to know that you can impro lines and bits of business on set; but if you meddle with the heart and soul of the story, the invisible narrative structures carefully put in place by the screenwriter, the whole house of cards will fall down.

Many writers, including the gloriously outspoken William Goldman, have spoken out against the prevailing cult of the ‘auteur’ director, on the grounds it ignores the vital role of the screenwriter.

Goldman even claims (in Adventures in the Screen Trade) that Jean-Luc Goddard, one of the originators of auteur theory, said in an interview “that the whole thing was patent bullshit from the beginning, an idea devised by the then young scufflers to draw some attention to themselves”  Of course, being Goldman, author of a book about his experiences in Hollywood called Which Lie Did I Tell?, this quote from Godard  may be apochryphal.

Goldman also offers a classic example of the preposterousness of auteurism:

“Peter Benchley reads an article in a newspaper about a fisherman who captures a forty-five-hundred-pound shark off the coast of Long Island and he thinks, “What if the shark became territorial, what if it wouldn’t go away?”  And eventually he writes a novel on that notion and Zanuck-Brown buy the movie rights, and Benchley and Carl Gottlieb write a screenplay, and Bill Butler is hired to shoot the movie, and Joseph Alves, Jr. designs it, and Verna Fields is brought in to edit, and maybe most importantly of all, Bob Mattey is brought out of retirement to make the monster.  And John Williams composes perhaps his most memorable score.  How in the world is Steven Spielberg the “author” of that?  Why is it often referred to today as “Steven Spielberg’s Jaws”?… There’s no author to that movie that I can see.”

One American critic has coined the term Schreiber theory (from the Yiddish word for writer) as a counterbalance to the prevailing auterist approach.  However, only screenwriters subscribe to this theory; and no one takes us guys  seriously.

And, getting back on track, I would argue that  Hawks is a great director BECAUSE he worked with such great writers. And he knew  it too.  He was asked why he rarely took a writing credit on his movies, and he said, ‘Because if I did, I couldn’t get such good writers to work with me.’

He did have a very particular method, however, based on working long hours with a writer, and working on scenes by each person taking a character and busking lines.  And out of this came the kind of dialogue that Hemmingway (one of his collaborators) called ‘oblique dialogue’ and Hawks himself called ‘three cushion dialogue’.  Because you hit it over here, then over  there, to get the meaning. Aaron Sorkin uses a similar  type of three cushion dialogue in The West Wing.

That’s collaboration; and Hawks is an auteur ie a great and distinctive director because he was a great collaborator.  And his particular directorial style is virtually unmistakable. Okay, maybe sometimes you might wonder if a film is directed by Hawks or by Billy Wilder – also a master of three cushion dialogue. But it’s certainly pretty special.

Interestingly, for me the weakest film of his is The Thing From Another World  because of the lack of thriller tension.  And though it’s SF, that’s definitely a thriller story.  His other films are all in genres where thriller tension isn’t that important. In the screwball comedies, it’s character that counts. In the kind of Westerns he made – as opposed to the Sam Peckinpah or Sergio Leone action Westerns – it’s character that counts. Even The Big Sleep, a classic detective noir, it’s not the thriller tension that matters, it’s the characters, as they are revealed by the machinations of a (as all concerned admitted) at times impenetrable narrative.

However, it would be interesting to see what had happened if Hawks had managed to (as he tried to) get the rights to the Bond movies; instead they were snapped up by his former assistant director Cubby Broccoli.

Imagine how Hawks might have re-envisioned that suave secret agent:

BOND: Hello.  My  name is Bond. James -

BOND GIRL: Will you shut up and listen to me?

BOND: – Bond. Hey! You’re not meant to -

BOND GIRL:  Guys like you, you drive me mad!

BOND: – interrupt me. (SOBS)

Ah well, we’ll never know.

Character is at the heart of these Hawks movies.  And he choose his collaborators because a) they liked to work with him and b) they were great at dialogue and c) they were great at character. Hence his long term relationships with, in particular, Leigh Brackett, Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer.

Anyway – rant over.  Now I have to track down Rio Lobo and Dawn Patrol, to fill in the gaps in my Hawks-watching…

At the recent British Fantasy Convention in Brighton, I was privileged to share a panel on movies with the inimitable Kim Newman, a man who has seen more movies than I’ve had hot meals; which, if you know me at all, means an awful lot of movies.

I can’t pretend to compete with Kim’s encyclopedic knowledge of weird, wonderful SF and fantasy films. But I have been quietly studying some of the great and not so great movies of yesteryear; in particular, alien movies (since aliens are very much the subject of my novel Hell Ship.)

One of the best of this bunch is Lifeforce (1985).  Has anyone else seen Lifeforce? It’s not a great film, I admit. It’s too long.  It’s unremittingly salacious.  But damn it all, it’s  fun. It’s vampires in space. It stars  Peter Firth, the real star of the BBC series Spooks, in the role that OUGHT to have catapulted him into the A-List of movie actors.  It also features Patrick Stewart, in his pre-Picard days, showing that SF is in his blood.  It’s a 1980s movie that didn’t achieve the fame or acclaim of Alien or Terminator.  But it’s one to be treasured as a home grown SF gem.

Although, admittedly, it’s not an entirely British affair. The story is based on a novel by Brit Colin Wilson, who has written some very eerie stuff about serial killers. The cast, as I’ve mentioned, is awash with Brits. But the screenplay is by co-written by Dan O’Bannon, the special effects whizzo who is also one of the most successful SF screenwriters ever. His student film Dark Star (which he made with director John Carpenter, and in which he played a key role) secured a theatrical release and launched Carpenter’s career.  And, using ideas filched from his own first movie, Dan O’Bannon then wrote the screenplay to Alien.

Yes, THAT Dan O’Bannon.

A bitter man, it must be said, after considerable furore over the screenwriting credits for Alien. But let’s gloss over that.

Lifeforce is a movie about space vampires.

Yeah, that is just SO good, isn’t it?

Originally they are found on a space ship by astronauts from Earth; these winged creatures are very eerie, and can be seen here….

When they attack their victims, they drain the bodies and turn them into corpses, thus.

And one of these space vampires,  played by Mathilda May, escapes from custody and has no clothes for a considerable part of the film. Hey, this is a B movie after all.  A scientist, played by Frank Finlay, correctly  guesses that the aliens have the ability to suck ‘lifeforce’ from humans, and speculates they may have come to Earth before.  Colonel Caine of the SAS (played by Firth) comes to sort this out, and he’s assisted by Steve Railsback as a surviving astronaut ( an actor later acclaimed for having ‘the scariest eyes in the business’).  They track the space vampire to an asylum run by Dr Patrick Stewart, baldy-headed even then; and for reasons I forget, he is drugged and starts talking like a girl.

And then London is aflame! It’s a genuinely exhilarating action finale which merges SF and horror seamfully, but enjoyably.

It’s not well directed, by and large, by Tobe Hooper, of Texas Chain Saw Massacre fame. There’s a fair amount of dead air in the dialogue scenes. But the actors in the film who happen to be genuinely great thespians (including Railsback) know how to make their scenes come alive; Firth and Finlay are electrifying together, and give a masterclass in how gifted actors can take ordinary lines of dialogue and invest them with urgency, rhythm, and screen chemistry.

For me it’s the perfect schlock experience. Enough great moments to make the lame bits forgiveable; a genuinely fab  concept; and a bunch of British actors at the top of their game.  It’s SUCH a shame Peter Firth never became a movie star; and Finlay was truly one of the greats.  Patrick Stewart is the only one of that gang to have broken into the international big league, though only when in his Federation uniform.

And Mathilda May is now officially on my list of Top Ten Best Aliens in Movies, despite being not very scary.

And this is a  list I shall be adding to in due course, in future blogs.

I truly can’t wait for the spectacle and silliness of the new Conan the Barbarian Movie…I love Robert E. Howard’s stories and understated stories, and always loved the Arnie version. As a teaser, here are the posters for the Jason Momoa version:

We also of course discussed that old perennial topic – the way that our genre, science fiction and fantasy, is constantly marginalised by the mainstream media.  Stephen Hunt recently unleashed a scream of rage at this very phenomenon, after a BBC Book Night failed to properly focus on any SFF genre books, focusing instead on thrillers, romances, and literary novels. And DongWon had seen some very belittling comments about the forthcoming HBO series A Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic series A Song of  Ice and Fire.  Why is it, we wondered, that our genre is always being patronised by the people who run culture?

But do you know what – I’m beginning to think DongWon and I and all the rest of us have the wrong end of the stick there.  Because when you think about it, who’s winning this war?  I mean of course the war between Genre Fiction and Posh Literary Fiction?  Answer; we are.  We’re not only winning, we’ve damn well won.

Take Exhibit A, that very same George R.R. Martin series.  It’s on HBO – HBO! – and it has a stellar cast including our very own Brit bruiser Sean Bean.  It’s got a great budget, it’s been given a prime slot, and it’s one of the cornerstone programmes on the new Sky Atlantic Channel which also boasts Boardwalk Empire and Blue Bloods.  (The fact that despite having 3,000,o00 channels on my telly available from every electronic orifice I still CAN’T GET SKY ATLANTIC – because I’m with Virgin Vision – and hence can’t see any of these shows till they come out on DVD is a rant best reserved for another day.)  There have been two major profiles of the series on my paper The Guardian – in the main paper and the weekend Guide – both of which were respectful and knowledgable about the genre.  It’s had billboard coverage. It’s a huge media event. HOW IS THAT BEING MARGINALISED? Answer: it’s not really.

Take Exhibit B; the massive success of Lord of the Rings, which has basically bankrolled New Zealand for the last decade and has finally spawned the next Tolkien epic, The Hobbit – which also has been the subject of massive media attention.

Or Take Exhibit C: Marvel Comics.  Marvel Comics were the passion of my childhood, and I always dreamed that one day I’d see a movie that did justice to the extravagant wondefulness of the comics. Well, be careful what you wish for; because we now have X-Men First Class, following on from the previous three X Films, plus the Wolverine Origins movie, plus another Wolverine to come, plus of course Thor (out this month), Captain America: The First Avenger, plus – actually it’s virtually impossible to keep track. I’ve just been reading this month’s Empire magazine which features Kenneth Branagah – once hailed as the next Olivier! – writing about how thrilled he is to be directing the Thor movie.  And it also features James McAvoy – star of Atonement and Shameless, and one of the brightest stars of his generation – talking about how thrilled he is to be playing Professor X, following in the footsteps of his great hero Patrick Stewart, one of the giants of the British stage.  In the same article, Michael Fassbender - star of the great arthouse movie Hunger and another one of the brightest stars of his generation – explains how thrilled he is to be playing Magneto (a character he’d clearly never heard of until he was offered his pay or play deal), following in the footsteps of one of the greatest thespians of all time, Sir Ian McKellen.  Add to that the list of great actors who have been employed in the various Harry Potter movies – Alan Rickman, Ken Branagh, Zoe Wanamaker, Richard Harris, Robert Hardy, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Helena Bonham-Carter, and many many more – and one thing becomes clear.

We’ve won.

In other words, genre fiction IS the mainstream.  And in the movies, the science fiction and fantasy genres rule supreme – if you count superhero movies as SFF, which you should.  So why, oh why, do we insecure thin-skinned genre-ites get so touchy when the BBC or the newspapers belittle our genres?  Who are these people, who presume a cock a snook at us? Answer: They are nobodies.  They are the losers in the war between snobby elitist culture and vibrant exciting popular culture.  And, like all losers, they like to sit on the sidelines sniping. Well, let’s ignore ‘em!

I’m not here arguing against literary fiction or arthouse movies or non-genre television drama series; far from it.  Nor am I saying that the only fiction worth reading is genre fiction – I love great writing of whatever kind. I’m merely saying that this automatic assumption that what’s written in the newspapers or said on the telly is the “mainstream” view is a delusion - on their part, and on ours. These guys are NOT the mainstream; they are a dribbley little rivulet that leads nowhere. [Um, I know nothing about waterways, so forgive me if that metaphor makes no sense.)  But in terms of market dominance, media prominence, and cultural importance – genre fiction, genre movies and genre telly, including but not exclusively SFF stuff – is now where it’s at. 

The internet has also changed everything; bloggers who care about what they are talking about have more importance in the SFF genre that any number of idiots whittering on in broadsheet papers.  And often they write better too.  I still take a huge amount of my cultural information in through my newspaper – but for any detailed commentaries, I’ll go to favourite blogs.  And the very definition of “mainstream culture” relates to WHO GETS TO JUDGE.  Well, the SFF genres have their own judges now; and in any case, word of mouth has always mattered more than any stamp of approval from the “respectable” critics.  (I totally ignore film reviews when it comes to judging which film to see; they are so wrong, so often, that I’ve lost all faith in them.)

But if we’ve won, why doesn’t it feel that way?  Well that’s the class structure of our society for you.  We’re all indoctrinated with insecurity; worried about what our headteacher will say; wanting a pat on the head from Daddy or Mummy to tell us when we’ve been good. (At least, I am like that and always have been  - though my own daughter DOESN’T GIVE TWO HOOTS what I say!) It’s called “cultural cringe”, aka having an inferiority complex. 

So let’s shake that off.  Let’s admit we’ve won, and we’re proud of it.  For when the histories of twenty first century culture are written, epic fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction will be seen as the predominant culture influences of that era – OUR era.  So hey  – let’s be smug!

I’m still pissed off though that I can’t watch A Game of Thrones  – because Rupert Murdoch has stolen all the good shows and put it in a channel I can’t receive! And another thing [sorry, that rant will have to wait – Ed.)

Refreshingly therefore Kick-Ass wins Best British Film.  It wasn’t even mentioned in the BAFTAs, and according to the bizarre etiquette of the British Film Industry it isn’t considered to be a British film because it was financed with  American money.  But it’s produced and directed by Matthew Vaughn, the Brit who produced Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, then went on to direct the brilliant Layer Cake and the excellent Stardust;  and it’s written by Brit Jane Goldman.  Sure, Vaughn’s production company MARV Films is based in LA, but he’s still British; and his company also recently produced the Brit movie Harry Brown with Michael Caine.  He’s one of ours, guys! 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 wins the Longest Title in a Franchise Which I Stopped Watching a While Back award; and also wins best Sci-Fi/Fantasy.  This is because Inception was given Best Film, and they wanted to share the gongs out fairly.

To my regret, there’s no mention of the excellent Repo Men, directed by Miguel Sapochnik and written by Garrett Lerner and Eric Garcia from the novel by Eric Garcia.  For me this was the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy AND the best Comedy of 2010; it’s a black tale of a world in which, if you fail to keep up the payments on your transplanted organ, Repo Men are sent to shoot you with stun guns and rip the organ back out again.  It’s a dazzlingly scary thriller AND it’s funny. And Jude Law is well back on form.  Also not nominated was the slick and exhilarating heist movie Takers, which for my money was far superior to the lachrymose and pretentious (though often very exciting) heist movie The Town, which WAS nominated.

I also think it’s perverse not to give the Best Film Award to True Grit; the most elegantly written, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted film of last year. 

Keira Knightly gets a special award for being Keira Knightly – and she was indeedly unexpectedly excellent in the spooky SF drama Never Let Me Go, also a 2010 release.  And Colin Firth gets his obligatory Best Actor Award for that movie in which the best actor was Geoffrey Rush. (I’m not really sniping – it was a great performance.)

And Bravo!  to Empire for having the balls to have separate genre categories for their awards – it’s a scandal that the Oscars and the BAFTAs so rarely acknowledge the great thrillers, comedies, horrors, and SFF movies that are made each year.

And this is what I thought: it’s fantastic.  It’s action packed, thrilling, visually extraordinary and daringly imaginative.  And I don’t at all accept Anne Billson’s argument that the women in it all wear porno fetish wear.  The heroine Babydoll (played by 23-year old Australian actress Emily Browning) has pig tails and has a school uniformy kind of outfit, reminscient of Britney Spears in that video. And the other girls in her crew wear leather and carry guns, but we’re not talking Halle Berry in Catwoman here. It’s superhero garb, nothing more.  And the fact that the heroine (whose character is 20 years old) dresses like a schoolgirl isn’t necessarily sinister.  Buffy was a schoolgirl too, remember!  And the school uniform thing evolved as a party-goer’s  fad, a knowing joke by consenting adults,  it’s not a paedophile fantasy.   

Here’s Babydoll:

Silly, yes. Pervy?  I don’t think so.

So essentially what we have is a Charlie’s Angels set up where Babydoll and her crew (Sweet Pea, Rocket, and Blondie) fight assorted enemies.  And it’s bravura stuff.   The wrinkly Wise Man played by Scott Glenn briefs Babydoll on her assignment; she has to acquire four objects and solve a mystery to save the day.  And each time she has to fight a CGI enemy of a dastardly nature. 

First it’s three samurai robot giants, who Babydoll fights solo.  Then she and the crew have to get a map by invading a First World War type bunker inhabited by zombie Germans.  Then they’re on an alien planet trying to defuse a bomb on a train.  And there’s another big setpiece too, the details of which have flown out of my fickle memory; but that was fab too!  We’re talking movie-as-computer-game here.  There’s no characterisation, no subtlety, just kick ass glory; Snyder is like a jazz saxophonist improvising riffs, and even if you can’t tell what the melody is, it’s still sublime.  Babydoll leaps and kicks and uses a sword and gun with equal panache and the camera flies here and there – bliss!  This is why I love Snyder; he pushes the boundaries of the visual, just as the Wachowskis did way back when with The Matrix.

So that’s what I think about Sucker Punch.  But here’s another take on what I think about Sucker Punch.

It’s SHITE. It’s incoherent, stupid, horribly grey and visually boring, badly acted, and ineptly conceived.  The women are all whores – and possibly feeble-minded.   And here’s the worst thing about the movie – BEWARE MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD – and it comes in the finale - when Babydoll is lobotomised, and enjoys it!  Yup, girls love to be lobotomised! Who’d have thought it, eh! 

I mean, what kind of out-of-touch-with-reality geek would believe a thing like that?

By this point you may have discerned that there’s a Jekyll and Hyde quality to this critique.  I love this film; and I hate this film.  That’s because Synyder has made TWO DIFFERENT FILMS, loosely joined together. 

Film 1 is an action movie in which Babydoll and her crew fight real enemies that exist in some kind of imaginative space.  Think The Matrix or even Inception and you’ll see how interesting that could have been.  You’ve got five women fighting evil that manifests in ways that traverse a variety of iconographies – from giant samurai robots to zombie Krauts.  It’s like an anime movie crossed with Kim Newman’s The Bloody Red Baron (which features vampires in World War I) crossed with Kill Bill (which also features a kick ass character in school girl clothes) crossed with Mission Impossible crossed with – well, it’s got EVERYTHING in there.  And that’s a movie I’d loved to have seen; and indeed, DID see. 

But Snyder and his co-writer Steve Shibuya decided it wasn’t enough to be kickass cool; they also wanted to be clever.  So the action movie segments only exist as, in effect, a dream dreamed by Babydoll.  In “reality” Babydoll is wrongly incarcerated in a mental home by her evil stepfather (after a stunning opening sequence played out to the sounds of the Eurythmic’s Sweet Dreams).  Babydoll then discovers that when she dances, she dreams – of the action movie universe – and her dance (which we never see) seduces all who see it.  But even that’s a (ANOTHER SPOILER AHEAD, BUT DO YOU REALLY CARE? I MEAN, YOU REALLY DON’T NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE, I TOOK THE BLOODY HIT FOR YOU, GUYS!!!)  dream. So it’s all a dream! Nothing we see is real except for the beginning bit, and the very end, I think.  Or is it?  Who knows!

There’s a voiceover coda explaning that the meaning of life is You, or something; and a clever narrative trick about who the hero of the story actually is.  But basically this whole strand of the movie is utter drivel.  It’s not been thought through at any level – unlike the Matrix where gnostic philosophy and science fictional extrapolation were harnessed together to create the Matrix world which seems to be real, but isn’t.  But here nonsense is piled upon nonsense until gibberish results. 

I actually really enjoyed the experience of watching the movie, because I just ignored the rubbish bits and waited for the brilliant setpiece “fantasy” bits.  And you could easily re-edit this movie and create a genius 40 minute action movie as a teaser for the computer games which this deserves to inspire.  But without the genius of Frank Miller ( 300) and the equal genius of Alan Moore (Watchmen) Snyder is lost. 

He’s a great action movie director! He should therefore direct great action movies; and leave the philosophy and the narrative twists and turns to better and more seasoned writers. 

I have to admit that I often walk out of movies that I find boring – Season of the Witch was the last one I bailed on. But I never felt the urge to leave Sucker Punch; because I was buoyed by the certain knowledge that the terrible bit I was watching would soon be followed by a great bit.  It’ s not enjoyment as such, but nor was it tedium. So I hope Snyder keeps the Superman gig; because that’s a character and a concept equal to his considerable talents.

But there seem to be quite a few people out there who think Snyder is the embodiment of heartless soulless film-making…

Anyway, the film is now out in UK cinemas, so I’m looking forward to seeing it, so I can judge for myself.

However, sigh, the world is an imperfect place.  Writers DO have to pitch.  Especially in the movie and television industries.  To be a screenwriter, you need three things: a calling card script, a thick skin, and a talent for pitching.

These thoughts have been in my mind recently because I’ve been taking place in an impressive venture run by my friend Hugo Heppell, Head of Production at Screen Yorkshire.  Hugo has been doing an amazing amount to encourage and develop new and not-so-new writers up in Yorkshire, and this year he has created three different schemes which came together last weekend in a weekend at Bradford University with literally dozens of participants.

The three schemes are First Sparks – an opportunity for writers to work with a professional script editor on developing a feature project to the point where it can work as a calling card script – or even as a producable script. I’ve been attached as script editor to 3 projects on this scheme – and all have proved to be a delight and a joy.

The second scheme is Triangle, which has been simmering away up there for some months and involves putting together writer/producer/director teams who develop a project with the advice of seasoned producers and then, ideally, MAKE THE MOVIE.

And the third scheme, in which I’ve been involved as “team coach”, is Pitch Factor. Yes, it’s a course in how to pitch!

Pitch Factor reached its culmination last weekend, in that 2 day workshop in the University of Bradford.  I chaired a morning panel about the dark arts of pitching, which featured producers Alex Usborne (of Picture Palace North), Caroline Cooper Charles (formerly of Warp Films, and now freelance), screenwriting guru and director Alby James, and Hugo himself.  And we talked a little about best and worst pitches. (I restrained the urge to describe my own worst pitches – it would have taken days to recount them all!)

Caroline spoke about the brilliant pitch she heard from the writer/director of Hush (Mark Tonderai) in which his vision and passion were so great that it was obvious this film WOULD get made.  And so it was, with Warp producing and  Hugo as executive producer.  Hugo then screened some amazing one minutes pitches from the Tribeca Film Festival.  Take a look at this – worst pitch ever? Surely it is! Though I wonder if this guy is like the contestants who deliberately give bad performances on X Factor to win a bet at the pub.  And Alex – magnificently – delivered a real live pitch, for a documentary set in Sheffield which was funded and produced on the basis of the pitch.

I was somewhat awed at Alex’s pitch and the Usborne Guide to Pitching.  Of course, he was mainly talking about how producers pitch – for writers it’s different, but you do have to do it.  I’ve pitched to the BBC, to ITV, at the AFM, at Cannes, to my wife (that one got me a co-habitation deal) and to any number of development executives over the years.  Does that make me an expert on pitching? Far from it.  I always come away from meetings thinking, ‘I wish I’d said X’, or done Y.  But the art of pitching – for writers – is to say enough to create interest in the project. After that – it’s the project itself (whether in script or treatment form) that has to do the work. But the pitch prepares the way.

Or, embarrassingly, not.

But what IS a pitch?  Is it a formal presentation with slides and photos? Or a casual conversation in which the project is described, but not in any detail? The answer is both, according to the context.  American companies tend to prefer more polished pitches; British companies (except for Working Title) often prefer the Pitch Informal.  But if you’re pitching with a director, then it does all get more intense. 

To be honest, I’ve only once in my life had to pitch a project with a director and a producer in the room. That was for my BBC Film The Many Lives of Albert Walker, in which I told the story to head honcho Jane Tranter and got us the gig.  “We’ll have that,’” she said; and that was the film greenlit…

Usually, for most of my career, it’s been just me, schmoozing a development person.  Since I’ve become a producer however , I’ve had to learn how to pitch more assertively and theatrically, sometimes with a coproducer in tow.  Once, I had to give an “elevator pitch” – that’s a very brief  pitch made  “as if” you’re pitching to a studio exec in the elevator between floors.  That was about 3 weeks ago; I elevator pitched my movie in exactly sixty seconds  to a room of 70 or more people; and I still bear the scar tissue.  Another time,  I had to pitch a movie in ten seconds to an American exec who was an hour late for our meeting.  Um, that pitch was crap.  And all too often, I’ve given very passionate pitches – complete with arm waving and spittle spraying – only to find that the development exec is staring at me with glazed eyes, having lost the plot round about scene 421.  Oh, er….

But the value of Pitch Factor for me is that it’s about encouraging writers to learn how to THINK ABOUT their project.  Because to pitch a story, you have to know a story.  You have to be able to describe the sort of story it is – thriller, romantic comedy, shoot ‘em up, whatever – and what the idea of the story is, in just a very words.  That’s “front-loading” the pitch, letting the listener in on the overall concept and tone.  ‘It’s a stylised action thriller in which characters karate kick while flying, set in a beautiful world that only exists in the characters’ imagination.’ (The Matrix’)  ‘It’s about a teenage girl who wants to take revenge for the death of her father, who hires an ornery, drunken, foul-mouthed lawman to help her get her man.’ (True Grit).  That’s the concept or premise of the movie – sometimes called the log line – and if you know the story well enough to summarise it that briefly, YOU KNOW THE STORY.

Pitching, in other words, is a form of oral storytelling.  The director of my noir thriller Inferno is always pitching it to his pals and colleagues, because he knows that telling the story out loud is a way of identifying the faults and cracks in the story. (‘Phil – this story has no darn ending!’)  And so for me, the four mentoring sessions I did before the Pitch Factor Weekend were all about the processs  of script editing via pitching. Because if I hear a story and it doesn’t work – that means the writer needs to do more work on the story.  It’s an almost infallible rule of thumb. (In fact, when I’m script editing or teaching, I very often ask writers to pitch the story verbally – even if I’ve already read their script.)

Anyway, back to the Bradford weekend.  The afternoon session on the Saturday was devoted to mentoring and coaching.  I heard my Pitch Factor participants re-pitch their projects, sharing the mentoring duties with the delightful Jeremy Dyson, a member of the League of Gentlemen and also the author of the hit West End show Ghost Stories, who studied screenwriting at the Northern Film School (where Hugo Heppell and I both worked as tutors.)  Jeremy relished his mentoring role, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy hearing the varied pitches – from thrillers to comedies to horrors and also including one movie idea about a one-eyed racing cat called Midge.

On the following day the Pitch Factor participants were treated to an exploration of the development and pitching process by Alby James, followed by the main event – a real live pitch to a panel of people with actual power, AND A CASH PRIZE.  The winner was the extremely nice Jessica Sinyard, who pitched a drama set in Australia with a powerful ecological theme.  The script is already written and has won a screenwriting award at an American festival; I wish Jessica well in her continuing career.

My One Palmer Rule for Pitching would be:  DON’T be yourself, but be a better, calmer version of yourself. Because at the end of the day, when a producer hears a writer’s pitch – he’s learning something about the writer as well as the project. Do you have passion? Energy? Sincerity? Do you really want to write this project? 

And the Second Palmer Rule of Pitching is: Have a good story. 

And the Third Palmer Rule of Pitching is: Don’t spit.  And if you do, aim the spittle over the producer’s head.

The movie is called Inferno; and it’s a film noir in the James M. Cain tradition.  In other words, there’s a guy, a girl, torrid sex, and a murder.  And it’s also a film that’s very much inspired by landscape.  Port Talbot is a steel town, and the vast Abbey Steel Works is as large as many villages. When you drive past it at night on the motorway, it looms up like something from Dante’s Inferno (hence the film’s title) – with chimneys spouting flame, and clouds of smoke eclipsing the stars.  Here are a couple of photos to illustrate:

I can still remember the original inspiration for the movie; it was an article I read in Empire Magazine which said that Ridley Scott’s inspiration for the opening cityscape sequence in Blade Runner was the Port Talbot Steel Works; he was driving past it one night on his way to West Wales and was awed at the kind of images I’ve shown above.  And so I thought – well, why not use this great location in a movie that’s actually set there.

In real life, I have to admit, Port Talbot is a grey industrial town without much glamour or magic.  Here’s what it really looks like:

These would be the moodboard images for the Ken Loach movie set in Port Talbot; but I wanted to write something about a place that was beautiful and cinematic.  The town as it OUGHT to be, not as it actually is.  It’s what the Americans do so well in their movies – they mythologise places, by focusing on the iconic and the extraordinary.  So my movie Port Talbot bears only a glancing relationship with the real place. 

This gulf between reality and fantasy was brought home to me vividly a while back, when I taken on a tour of the Port Talbot Steel Works and Harbour by my uncle Tony who used to work there.  It was a great day out – and a chance to hear some amazing stories from my uncle, who had worked as a boatman in the Harbour for many years and knew all the great characters of those days.  But at the end of the day, I realised I was drowning in images of the real place.  Grey chimneys, rusty pipes, dismal factory buildings  that’s what I saw in real life. But a few weeks later I started work on the script again – and I re-discovered the mythological town that only really exists in my my imagination.  It’s a place of beauty and ugliness; with the steel works looming over the river, and the green mountains of Wales stretching beyond.  This mythological town DOES exist in reality; but only sometimes, in certain lights.  Like this:

This is the beach where I used to play as a kid – not much of a beach, with heavy industry on one side and coal on the sand.  But at certain times…it’s an enchanted place.  Oh, and here’s the field where I used to play rugby and cricket, in Little Warren.  It’s just a field!  A patch of grass with goal posts. But one day I saw this:

It’s not beautiful – but it IS sublime. 

All this fascinates me.   And I continue to be inspired by places when I write.  I’ve just been commissioned to write a low budget movie set in Reading, and I spent a day on Friday with the producer walking around all the locations where we might film.  There’s a lovely little park area near the station which would a great place for someone to be trapped in by bad guys.  And there’s a rundown area near the Hexagon Theatre which would be a GREAT location for a night-time chase, with our hero being pursued by guys with guns.  And so, by looking at places with a view to how we could film there, Reading was no longer a dull commuter city but instead was the setting for an atmospheric noir thriller.  

And I remember going on a trip to Glasgow a while back which reacquainted me with the glorious black-stoned architecture of that city, with thin church spires looming high and Victorian architecture at its best at every turn.  There is a ‘spirit of the place’ in Glasgow – a city I already knew from my time working as a development executive on the great Scottish TV crime series Taggart (‘There’s been a murrrrrder’  was the show’s legendary catch-phrase.)  And the spirit of that place was channeled by me into the city of Bompasso, aka Lawless City, on Belladonna – as featured in Version 43.  Lawless City IS Glasgow, but without the Scottish accents. 

All these musings come out of looking at photographs of a place where I was born; which is now in my head a movie location. 

Inferno now has a great cast attached and an  inspired and brilliant director, though is not yet fully financed;  but if all goes well I’ll have a chance to see the familiar locations of my childhood transformed by the magic of cinema into a place of wonder and visual magnificence.  (Unless of course we end up shooting in Prague because it’s cheaper! You just never know in this business…)   And assuming all goes well I’ll be blogging quite a bit more about the process of getting Inferno out of my brain and on to the screen.

But remember: it all started with the location…

Ah, the BAFTAs! Weren’t they great!  Jonathan Ross redeemed himself with a string of actually funny gags.  I especially liked his claim that the doors had been locked to keep out Ricky Gervais.  The blessed Helena Bonham Carter gave an adorable and far too long speech – and was without doubt the deserved winner of the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress.  The King’s Speech, as everyone predicted, triumphed in almost every category except for best director, which went to Davd Fincher for The Social Network.  The cameraman, cruelly, kept a lens permanently focused on tufty-haired Danny Boyle,  strangely overlooked for his bravura direction of 127 Hours.  But Danny, who I like because he was very nice to me when I was a young lad starting out in the business, kept smiling with genuine pleasure.  Here’s a man who loves cinema, and doesn’t waste energy on envying others. 

Oh and Christopher Lee, awarded a BAFTA fellowship, delivered a wonderful speech, his voice croaky but his eyes alert.  He’s one of the legendary figures of cinema – and apparently has more movie credits than any other actor in the world.  All in all, a splendid evening, in which only very good films won stuff.

But it’s also puzzling to see which films get missed out.  Kick Ass for instance – where is it?  Surely a stand-out movie of the year.  And A Prophet doesn’t get a mention in the Best Non-English Language Film category. I saw it in 2010; surely it qualifies?

Mulling about this,  I read a fun blog on the Guardian site in which reader voted for their best and worst films.     And, in the same spirit, I would offer my own nominations for best films of the year, in assorted categories:

Best Kick-Ass Blockbuster Movie

Kick-Ass

Best Science Fiction Black Comedy

Repo Men – much under-rated.   Jude Law is great. It’s really funny, if you’re as sick and black-hearted as I am. And the twists are genuinely clever. I preferred this to Inception to be Honest.  (Which ISN’T a comedy, but made me laugh at times with its narrative absurdity.)

Best Crime  Drama with Comedy Moments Starring Bruce Willis

Now that has to be RED, based on the Warren Ellis comic, starring Bruce and Helen Mirren and Brian Cox.  Great actors all; loving every moment of it.

Best Gangster Movie Set in Prison

The winner here is A Prophet, the French film directed by Jacques Audiard and written by Thomas Bidegain and Jacques Audiard.   I’ve seen it twice – it’s an out and out masterpiece, a hauntingly poetic work of art; but it’s also suspenseful and compelling and the action scenes are fantastic. 

Best Gangster Movie In Which the Protagonist Breaks out of Prison, Goes on the Run, Goes BACK To Prison to Kill the Bastard Prison Officers Who Tortured Him Then Goes Back on The Run Again and Embarks Upon a Crime Spree That Lasts Two Entire Movies

A tricky one – spoiled for choice here! – but in the end I went for Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1, both directed by Jean-Francois Richet and starring Vincent Cassel as the true-life gangster Jacques Mesrine who, um, goes to prison, breaks out, goes back – etc etc etc. 

 Best Dumb Comedy

The Hangover, the hilarious Las Vegas nightmare-scenario farce (‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!”). Drected by Todd Phillips, and written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore.  This was made in 2009 but I didn’t see it till 2010 on DVD, so it counts.

Best Smart Comedy

The Kids Are All Right,  written by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blomberg, and directed by Lisa Cholodenko.  This is the one with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the lesbian couple with kids who are reunited with their sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo). It’s one of those fantastic American “indie” movies which ignores all the cliches and hits the truth button every time.  I found it enchanting; and the dinner scene rekindled my love for Joni Mitchell.

Director with the Coolest Name

Lisa Cholodenko.

Best Movie Directed by a Bloke Called Tom

Oddly enough, this was a fiercely contested category.  The two options were:

The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper, winner of umpteen BAFTAs and bound to clean up at the Oscars, and;

Scouting Book For Boys, a little British film directed by Tom HARPER, who no doubt gets fed up being confused with the more famous Tom Hooper.  But though I thoroughly enjoyed The King’s Speech, I’d have to say that The Scouting Book for Boys is a much better film. It’s written by Jack Thorne (who’s written for Skins) and tells a subtle tell of a girl who gets lots in her own fantasies. The performances are note perfect, the dialogue is full of wit and truth, and the direction is exemplary.  Harper has a mastery of pace and sound and image that is unshowy, but magnificent.  His DOP Robbie Ryan excels himself.  I’m astonished this film wasn’t nominated for a BAFTA in fact.  Hardly anyone saw it – but far more people WOULD see it if they knew how fab it is.

Best Crime Thriller With Astonishingly Sexy Argentinian Accents

No competition here! It’s The Secret In Their Eyes directed by Juan Jose Campanella, and written by Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri (who also wrote the original novel.)  It’s a complex but utterly engrossing film which tells through flashback the story of a murder investigation. Ricardo Darin plays a former federal justice agent who is writing a book about his most famous, unsolved case.   And his boss, played by Solledad Villami, is the one with the MOST astonishingly sexy of the sexy Argentinian accents.  This won the Best Foreign Film Oscar last year, and was nominated this year for Best Film Not in the English Language at the BAFTAs. It lost out to The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, which I haven’t seen yet.

Best Science Fiction Film with Monsters

Last year that was District 9; this year it goes to the wonderful though narrative-light Monsters, written and directed by Gareth Edwards. It’s an anecdote not a fully fledged yarn – guy and girl have to get past monsters to freedom, and that’s about all there is to it.  But it’s sumptuously beautiful to watch, the actors are in my view (though I know others disagree) unaffected and highly watchable.  And the travelogue of Mexico (with monsters!) is to die for.

Best Actress Who Truly Deserves to Get Roles That Show How Briliiant She Is

That would be Gemma Arterton in Tamara Drewe.  It’s a lovely film, and she’s fab in it.  But in my view, she has a charisma and an energy she is barely using in her roles to date; and was mesmerising in the low budget Manx thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Best Heist Movie That Critics Ignored Because They Were Too Busy Raving over The Town

That would be Takers, directed by John Luessenhop, written by Peter Alan and Gabriel Casseus, and starring Chris Brown, Matt Dillon and Idris Elba as members of a stylish American bank robber or ‘takers’.  Like The Town, this has electrifying action sequences.  But it’s a cleverer film, with cleverer gangsters; and it isn’t marred by dreadful sentimentality and boring “character” scenes. Instead, it’s cool, fast and furious; and yet slowly we are drawn into caring about the characters.  Especially Idris – who along with his junkie sister becomes the centre of our attention and loyalty as the movie proceeds.  A totally neglected gem.  The best heist movie I’ve seen since 2007, when Sidney Lumet’s hilariously tragic Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead won my heart. 

Anyway, those are my choices for films that were better and more interesting than the BAFTA winners.  Any other suggestions?

It’s a fascinating topic, and Mark has some very shrewd things to say about it.   There are some great comments on his thread too.  I’m genuinely fascinated by the subject of how some critics or bloggers become ‘opinion beacons’; and how and why herd mentality can kick in even when you’re dealing with idiosyncratic and strong-willed bloggers.  It’s also a point of real interest to me that book critics in the quality press are often pals of the writers they review; which is why blogging can sometimes be a better source of impartial and honest criticism than the reviews by “professional” critics.

And having absorbed all these comments, I then looked on the Guardian Book Blog page and saw many other fascinating comments.   I always love what Philip French has to say; and I think the comments from Jessa Crispin, editor of Bookslut, were terrific. 

HOWEVER – I do have a major problem with this whole debate .  And I’m willing to admit it may reflect badly on me.  Because I did read the original article in The Guardian, which inspired this whole flurry of excellent commentary, and I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND IT. 

Does that ever happen to you? You read words on a page, and they are big words, written in complicated sentences, by someone terribly clever, and yet they make no sense? 

Yes? No? Is it just me?

*Sigh.*  It may be just me.

But let me try and defend myself here.  This is the original article, by writer Neil Gabler.  And the subheading reads:

If you missed it, the best thing on telly last year was Misfits on E4. A superhero show; a comedy; a dark drama – it had it all.  Ace script reader and writer Danny Stack wrote with insight and a fan’s true enthusiasm about the magnificent series 1 on this site a while back.  And I think the second series – culminating in a Christmas special of blasphemous hilarity – was a stand-out.

Misfits tells the story of a bunch of Asbos with superpowers.  There’s Nathan who’s gobby and immortal.  Kelly, who’s gobby and telepathic.  Simon, who’s a nerd, socially incompetent, and has the power of invisibility.  The beautiful Alisha, who has the power to drive men and women mad with desire if she touches them -which means she can’t ever touch ANYONE.  And the athletic and often be-vested Curtis, who has the power to turn back time; but it rarely works.

These are pretty stupid superpowers.  And, what’s more, these are the most useless superheroes you’ve ever met.  All this makes it  more subversive than Kick-Ass – because it never plays by the rules of the superhero genre at ANY point. These dorks blunder their way through from one crisis to another, often accidentally murdering people along the way. Oh and they’re rude, and socially maladjusted; that’s why they got served with Asbos! [For US readers - an Asbo is a court order made against someone who hasn't necessarily broken the law, but has in some way been a jerk.)

The show is made by Clerkenwell Films; and it was developed by creative producer and Head of Drama Petra Fried, a friend and former colleague (from our days as development executives at Scottish Televison.)  She had the guts to back writer Howard Overman's lunatic vision; and she's helped to create what is, in my view, one of the greatest TV shows ever. Up there with Buffy - but ruder, and even funnier.

I can't say more because I really don't want to get tangled up in plot spoilers.  Catch up with it if you've missed it. And here are some pics:

Nathan dressed as Santa

Alisah, realising she's sold her power to make people horny to the wrong guy.

Curtis in a vest

Kelly, the telepathic chav

Simon and Alisha, spattered in afterbirth. Don't ask!

The mysterious superhoodie...

I caught a blog on Jeff Somers’ site a while back,  extolling the marvellousness of a micro-budget SF movie called MONSTERS. And I finally managed to catch up with it this week. It’s a tremendous, playful, imaginative, and very beautiful fillm. A lot of micro-budget movies – like OPEN WATER, the one where the characters are trapped in shark-infested waters, or even THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – have a deliberately grungey and verite look to them, making a virtue of the lack of finance. MONSTERS interestingly plays a different game. It is beautifully shot, richly coloured, splendidly art designed, and entirely cinematic. The special effects are great, the monsters are superbly rendered. It’s a shock really to see such utterly classy cinema entertainment made for less than half a million dollars.

The story is simple: aliens have invaded the bit between Mexico and the United States, which is now called the Infected Zone. And our photographer hero (played by Scoot McNairy) has to take his boss’s daughter (played by Whitney Able) to safety. It’s that simple; but the joy of the premise is that you get time to enjoy the chemistry between these two delightful and unaffacted actors. The film for much of the time is like a deranged travelogue, ‘My Holiday in Mexico Where, Oops, there are Aliens.’ These two are the only named characters; and the camera loves them, and I love them too.

Film-maker Gareth Edwards (who wrote, directed, lit, and art designed the whole shebang) avoids the familiar cliche of ‘not showing the aliens’ (which got so tedious in CLOVERFIELD.) So we do see the aliens, early on; but not often. And most of the time the alien presence is evoked by oblique means. A jeep stuck up a tree. A US fighter plane sunk in the lake.  (Remember how Spielberg played it in WAR OF THE WORLDS, where Tom Cruise sees bodies floating down the river – we don’t see them die, but it’s a hundred times scarier than watching action stuff.)

And signs – this is a film that’s all about sign. ’15KM to the Infected Zone’, a sign will tell us. The UK poster (above) plays on that, with its casual  warning about the ‘Extra-Terrestrial Infected Zone.’   And these techniques make the horror of it feel so real; in the mundanest and most chilling of ways.

Edwards is now making a remake to GODZILLA. Some call this a sell-out. I say – hurrah! Bring it on!

A shitstorm has descended upon the offending website; and the ethics of it all  seem fairly straightforward. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.

But is that always the case?  As we know,  ’illegally downloading’ movies from pirate sites is considered cool by many.  But, like most people who work in the movie business, I have real problems with people who do this; because if EVERYONE did this, then it would be even harder for movies to get made. And it’s already, trust me, hard enough.  

Here, the offending editor seems to have got hold of the idea that everything on the web is free.  Just because SOME  of it is.  Open source software and content sites, for instance, are a joy available to all without cash changing hands. (I use Mozilla Thunderbird for emails, which is totally free; I’d be lost with Wikipedia.)

This is a dangerous topic of course, because there are many thoughtful individuals out there, possessed of shitstorm-generating superpowers,  who do believe that EVERYTHING SHOULD BE FREE ON THE WEB.  And there are also those – usually global corporations – who believe that nothing should be free.  Not even healthcare. (Oops, party political point crept in there.)

I was very impressed at the recent NewCon convention by Paul Cornell’s bravura solo spot to the convention audience on the issue of internet piracy, in which he tackled the argument that you can’t stop people pirating stuff on the web, by pointing out that you can’t stop murder either. But you can at least discourage it.  And in my experience, with the exception of Cory Doctorow, who I don’t know,  all writers hate piracy.  It takes money from the mouths of our children, if we have children; or it severely depletes our coke and booze budget, if we don’t. 

However, I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s nothing new under the sun.  The digital age didn’t invent plagiarism; nor did it invent piracy.  The web changes many things; but not basic questions about right or wrong; it merely AMPLIFIES the problems that always existed

Book piracy, for instance,  was pioneered by the public library service.  For many years, until the advent of PLR, it was considered moral and normal to give away books for zero money on a rental basis to members of the public.  This is a great way to impoverish authors.  Because a book that’s been borrowed a hundred times has only been bought once!

Second hand bookshops!  They are the buccaneers of the book trade. A second hand book may be sold a dozen different times but again,  the author only gets paid once.  We authors notice these things.

So illegally downloading books is no different, in principle, than going to Hay-on-Wye.  Fact! 

The difference is that I’ve never illegally downloaded a book (come on! switching on a computer is a challenge for me!). But I grew up on the library system; my passion for books was fed by thrice-weekly visits to my local library, where I devoured virtually every book in the children’s section, pillaged the teen section, and made a huge indendation in the adult section before discovering that I needed to OWN books.  It’s my addiction and my passion.  It also helps me to keep track; when I was borrowing books I kept forgetting which ones I’d read. Now, when I buy a book, I only have to look at my shelves to realise I ALREADY OWN IT.  (Yeah, a better memory would help.)

But I’m not being facetious about the moral issues here.  When I started getting published I stopped buying second hand science fiction novels from authors still alive or not-rich.  So I’ll buy second-hand Stephen King, though only occasionally,  but I’d never buy Al Reynolds’  latest in a second hand bookshop, because  he’s a real writer earning a living.  I do though buy all my Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels (my current passion)  second hand via Amazon, mainly because the old Del Rey editions are so stunning, and I’m pretty sure they’re out of print.

So that’s my moral code, based on the opinion that borrowing books from a pal and illegally downloading books are pretty much the same thing, ethically speaking. In other words, it’s okay to get stuff free sometimes, as long as you OFTEN pay. 

This shows that my morality is a pretty fuzzy entity; and I’d argue this is a good thing.  If we enforced a strict black and white moral code then we’d never steal stationery from our office, never take pens from hotel rooms, never drive away with someone else’s Ferrari from the valet parking spot (damn, I do regret that), never amp up our expenses when doing a tax return (harumph! Not that I ever would!), and never fail to buy a round.  (Message to Mike Carey; one day I’ll pay you back!)  It’s what I call the moral ecology.  A little bit of naughtiness sustains us in our lives; too much and we’re evil, too little and we’re boring as hell.

On the issue of plagiarism, things are murkier still. All writers steal!  That’s my golden rule – an aphorism which of course I invented and claim the credit for. (!)   And quite often, writers plagiarise themselves – familiar lines of dialogue repeat, themes recur, plot twists get recycled in another form. The most extreme case of this concerns a writer I can’t name on a show I can’t mention.  All I can say is: this writer wrote several episodes of an action adventure series for television, which used exactly the same storylines as he had used when writing for a DIFFERENT action adventure series aired on television ten years previously.  A member of the crew had worked on both shows, found himself puzzled by a strange sense of deja vu, then eventually sussed it and grassed the writer up.  The outcome was not a good one.  And yet – surely we can steal our OWN ideas? 

But I do see the producer’s point of view here. When you pay a writer,  you expect to get originality as part of the package. Unless that writer is [NAME REDACTED].

This reminds me: I should take this opportunity to plug my latest book with Orbit. It’s called THE SPACE PIRATE, and it tells the story of a space pirate called Flanagan who kidnaps a beautiful young woman called Lena and attempts to negotiate with the evil emperor whose daughter she is.  And then – well, I won’t say more, but suffice to say, it’s a cracking read and my agent John Jarrold has just negotiated a HUGE advance from the publishers for this story!  (Hey, John, do you think they’ll ever rumble us???)

Getting back on point:  I also used to  write articles on cinema for a trade periodical, during my time as an academic up in Leeds, only to learn that one of the other contributing authors had plagiarised every article of [his or hers]  from the work of different authors. Again, bad stuff ensued.  Because that’s cheating. Well of course it is!  You’re not allowed to steal other people’s articles, any more than you’re allowed to go for a joyride in that Ferrari (look, enough about the Ferrari, okay?!?)

But I have to say I get fed up of some of the moral misunderstandings about what you can and can’t do on the web.  When writing a blog for this site once, I wanted to feature paintings by the artist William Blake, and found images on a gallery site which blazoned the phrases, ‘These images are in copyright.’  Well how, and why? Blake died in poverty centuries ago; how can some gallery own the copyright on his images? How moral is THAT?

The basic rule is one of ‘fair use’; you can quote, you can’t steal. Images can be cited, in my view, and according to any sensible reading of the law; even film clips can be “quoted”.  Yet the producers of the film Downfall took issue with the brilliant YouTube “memes” in which a clip of Hitler from that film is subtitled with rants on a number of themes, including the breakup of Oasis.  The producers’  legal argument, which prevailed, was that they “owned” these images.  But the film’s director thought they were being daft, as did I.  Quoting a single scene from a film isn’t the same as selling a DVD of it in a pub.  If anything, it will help public awareness of the movie; it is surely the most globally famous obscure arthouse movie every made. (It’s a masterpiece, by the way – do watch it. Legally!)

Oh, and the parodies are back on You Tube. Here’s one.

Another delicate issue is one of stealing ideas.  It’s not possible to copyright ideas, unless they are written down in treatment form.  But I’ve heard many accounts  of writers pitching ideas verbally or in writing to TV companies, then finding those stories appearing on the screen credited to other writers.  I know of at least one occasion when something dodgy almost certainly occurred. (My lips are sealed however.)   And yet! It’s a fact that different writers often have the same idea at the same time.  It’s a zeitgeist thing.  So by and large, you just have to let it go.  Life’s too short. If someone steals an entire article – that’s different.  But Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both thought of the concept of evolution independently; and J.K. Rowling surely wasn’t the first writer to think of setting a story in a boarding school for young magicians. …

An even more delicate issue concerns the copyrighting of lives.   When the movie The Sting was released,  academic David Maurer was outraged to find that he himself had been ‘stung’ – because the characters and the cons in the movie were (in his view) based on and inspired by a reading of his text book The Big Con, based on interviews with numerous real-life underworld figures.  Maurer sued and the studio were obliged to settle with him. (For a fuller account of this, read this fascinating blog.)

Well I’m sure Maurer had a point.  But how come he got to “own” these people and their ideas? One of the major cons Maurer described is “the Wire”, which is at the heart of the movie’s plot.  But did Maurer invent this, or merely describe it?  I have on my shelf a book by Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, a real life con artist who was one of those interviewed by Maurer.  In his own (no doubt ghosted, but written in the first person) book (‘Yellow Kid’ Weil – Con Man)  Yellow Kid describes how he cheated a sucker called Macallister:

‘What is your proposition, Mr Weil?’ Macallister asked.

‘My brother-in-law,’ I confided, ‘is in desperate need of twenty-five hundred dollars.  If you will lend it to him, I will show you how to make a fortune.’

‘What does he need twenty-five hundred dollars for?’ he inquired.

‘Well, he’s hopelessly addicted to betting on the horses….Now he’s in the clutches of the loan sharks….’

‘How can a man like that help me make a fortune?’

‘By giving you absolutely reliable information on the races.  He works for Western Union.  He will tip you off on a horse after it has won.  You can make a bet on the nose and you can’t lose.’

This is pretty much the plot of The Sting, minus the revenge story.  Robert Shaw’s character is suckered by the scam called The Wire, which Yellow Kid (according to this account) devised and pioneered. All Maurer did was interview him; Yellow Kid was the author of the scam.

So why didn’t the con artist get the credit he deserved? How unfair is that!

To me this is dangerous territory.  It’s tricky enough when real people claim the coyright on their own lives; but when the writers who write about the real people claim ownership – well, the courts made their judgement in the case of Maurer, but it’s certainly a can of worms.

I found myself in a similar delicate position over a drama I wrote for the BBC called The Many Lives of Albert Walker, based on a real  life murderer called, er,  Albert Walker. The legal constraints on us were enormous; and the Canadian production company optioned a book on the subject which I’d never actually read, just to secure a claim on the copyright to the story.  Walker was convicted of murdering and stealing the identity of his friend;  but fortunately it was never suggested he own the copyright to his own act of murder.  (Our problems arose when a careless interview suggested that Walker was guilty of incest – and we had to put up a title card to explain that Walker was never charged with or convicted of this offence, even though he and his daughter lived together as man and wife and they had a child which they were raising as theirs.  It could of course have been the child of some other man; I would not be able to comment.) 

So it’s easy to slip into stealing without realising it.  And there are no absolutes.  The only certainty, for me, is that every working person is entitled to be paid for the fruits of their labour.  If you CHOOSE to give away your work - that’s different.  If someone quotes from your work, or alludes to it, or is influenced by it, that’s cool too.  But the prevailing myth that the internet has changed the way morality works is a nonsense in my view.  The internet did not invent generosity; although it does enable GLOBAL generosity.  I can read free blogs from all around the world on a variety of topics written with intelligence and humour, offering better critical content than is to be found in many paid-for periodicals.  I can download open sources software with minimals adverts too, thanks to the generosity of that particular community of cyber nerds.  That to me is the spirit of the internet age – don’t sweat it. Be generous.   Let stuff be given away and hope for payback in the form of good karma. 

And in terms of the moral ecology,  that works, because if I lend an SF novel by X to a pal, that pal might BUY the next book.  If I borrow books from the library obsessively as a teenager, I will surely end up purchasing more than I borrow over the course of my entire life.  The same with downloads.  File-sharing became, quite some time ago, a systematic attempt to defraud – it’s not file-sharing, it’s a goddamned industry!  And all the sites I’ve visited are very dishonest about the legality of what they’re doing. To me that’s well dodgy. But I’ve been on sites where TV fans are offering to ‘share’  ancient VHS cassettes of old cult TV shows – of course that’s cool!  This stuff is hard to get otherwise.  That’s generosity. 

Generosity good, theft bad, that’s my moral code. And hey, you big corporations with the itchy lawyers – don’t be so defensive.  Get a sense of humour guys. 

And about that Ferrari…

Treasure Mary-Louise Parker – Josh’s girlfriend in The West Wing  – as the office worker sucked into the mad paranoid universe spawned by Ellis’s mad paranoid brain.  John Malkovich plays a lunatic sidekick convinced that the authorities are spying on him and tried to brainwash him – duh, all true.  And Helen Mirren and Brian Cox show what British thesps can do – namely, deliver kickass with added panache. 

Bruce Willis excels as the lead RED – the code name for CIA killers who are now designated Retired Extremely dangerous.

Here are the cool poster images:

And here’s the trailer.

I admire Winterbottom as a film-maker – his Twenty Four Hour Party People is a masterpiece – and I love noir in general, and the books of Jim Thompson in particular. To be honest though I found the film a bit of a yawn; BECAUSE IT WASN’T NEARLY VIOLENT ENOUGH.

I am in fact staggered at some of the reviewers who felt it was the most shocking thing they’d ever seen in the cinema.  There’s a scene where Casey Affleck bashes up Jennifer Alba; and there’s a second assault scene; and that’s about it really.  Compared to what you get in many thrillers and action movies and horror flicks, it’s very mild stuff. 

What IS weird however about both ‘beating up women’ scenes is that the women don’t fight back – which makes the violence feel oddly detached, and not-credible; and hence makes it hard to care about the story and its characters. 

I think there’s real merit in the argument that Winterbottom has created cliched female characters who don’t respond in the way that real people would.  There’s a hint that Alba’s character in a masochist; but if so, that should be dramatised.  She should BEG to be beaten, which would truly shock us; and I would strongly argue that there’s nothing inherently misogynistic about showing masochism  in a woman. Because  masochists DO exist.  I was once the fly on a wall in a Metropolitan Police investigation into a group of masochists who did the most appalling things - one chap hammered a nail through his own penis – and no one can deny it’s a real psychological phenomenon. (What would be unacceptable, however, is to hint at the lie that ALL women like to be hurt – that gets you into the immoral/indefensible territory).

I think the real issue for me here is that Winterbottom is a cerebral arthouse director who hasn’t mastered the basic concept that violence in cinema is there to be ENJOYED.  We love to be scared, appalled, terrified; we enjoy getting inside the head of evil serial killers; we relish being pursued by a psycho who has killed all our friends.  That’s how violence works in genre cinema, and even in ‘serious’ cinema.  The violence in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall gives energy and adrenalin to this brilliant study of the last days of Hitler.  The violence in The Godfather – not your common or garden gangster flick but a true masterpiece about organised crime – is deliciously awful.  Luca Brasi having a knife in the hand before being garrotted! James Caan being plugged full of holes!

The horrible cop getting his head shot apart by Michael Corleone! 

These acts of violence function as essential elements of the overall pleasure that cinema  offers. And it’s not just Hollywood movies which allow us to “enjoy’ violence. One of my favourite films of last year was the verite arthouse movie A Prophet by Jacques Audiard, an unflinching study of life in a French prison. Except it’s not really a ‘study’ or an ‘analysis’; it’s a movie, and a gripping one, with savourable sequences of ghastly violence that keep you glued to the seat. In particular, the murder committed in the first third of the film is one of the most compellingly enjoyable pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen; it doesn’t ‘glorify’ violence, but boy, it’s fun to watch.

What I’m saying is; let’s stop pretending.  Of course violence, when it’s in fiction rather than in life, is fun.  It’s part of the imaginative experience; imagination is our way of living other lives, and since we can do so without incurring actual injury, the more violent the better.  It’s cathartic, it’s exhilarating, it can be beautiful; but the key point is; IF YOU’RE A SANE AND MORAL PERSON, WATCHING VIOLENT MOVIES DOESN’T MAKE YOU VIOLENT.  Reality, fiction; fiction, reality: two different things. 

And, as a writer of action SF, I have to concede that violence is my business. I write violence, I read violent books by other authors; I spend large parts of my day wondering whether a character should die by having his head blown up, or whether it would be more fun to have him eat a live snake and be consumed from the inside out. 

Adam Roberts, in his masterly and very funny novel Yellow Blue Tibia, explains how the science fiction writer approaches the art of violence, as a group of Russian SF authors (including the first person narrator) plot a story of alien invasion:

‘Let’s have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine, ‘ [said Frenkel], ‘That would be the best option.

How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually?  This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one….Writers, you see,  daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in that respect.  A realist writer might break his character’s leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be  more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying.  He will do this every working day through his life.  How can this not produce calluses on the those tenderest portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?

Adam is bang on here; science fiction writers, and their close allies,  fantasy writers, are truly evil creatures. We are the people who cannot bear to write crime novels about serial killers because the body count is so darned low.  We celebrate the intellectual and extrapolative essence of our genre whilst shamelessly wallowing in atrocity and horrific acts of barbarity, evisceration, beheading, and worse.

Here’s a sample of some of the stuff I’ve been reading recently:

Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal lift packs.  The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arch of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.

He came in with a pulse-blade, ghettho style. I let it chew at my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid end of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the other three worrying Johnny.

(from Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons)

There were heads and arms and legs and halves of bodies writhing and squirming and cursing under foot, and headless bodies dashing about the room colliding with friend and foe indiscriminately.  If ever there was a shambles it was there in the great council chamber of the seven jeds of Morbus.

(from Synthetic Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs)

I launched myself into the one I’d decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right.  He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back.  As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side.

(from The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers)

Hell, I read this stuff all the time, and what I write is often WORSE in terms of gruesome barbarity. (Red Claw got a great review from a site called Emotionally Fourteen, which then graded it 10 out of 10 for Number of Eviscerations- and I’m  actually proud of this.)  So does that mean I have calluses on the tenderest parts of my mind, the bits that are used to focus empathy, as Adam so beautifully if cruelly phrases it?

Well perhaps so.  But on balance I feel that constantly wallowing in imaginative violence has made me not one whit more aggressive, or capable of violence. I remain as timid, fearful, and cowardly as I have  always been.  I would happily slay a Barsoomian plant man with my long sword; but I am not in the habit of mugging elderly ladies, or randomly shooting people in pubs.

This is why I get very wary when kind-minded commentators praise a film like The Killer Within Me because it shows the ‘reality’ of violence.  It does nothing of the sort!  It’s just a movie.  Real violence is what happens in the real world, and I abhor it; and I don’t need films to tell me it’s undesirable.  (That doesn’t mean fictional stories should be immoral;  the art of writing violent fiction is being able to shock the audience with gory stuff without losing track of the real moral values we, the authors,  believe in.) 

But why, I am forced to ask, does violence in fiction appeal so strongly, to me and to so many of you?  Why do we not daydream about peaceful characters, who broker peace and leave a trail of concord and amity behind them? Why do we prefer the Man with No Name, or Conan, who are more inclined to leave a trail of corpses behind them?

I guess the answer is obvious; we’re never more alive than when we are in fear of dying.  And to experience that intensity of life while reading a book, or watching a film, and without any ACTUAL possibility of dying, is vicarious ecstasy. 

So I will continue to read books and watch films that glorify and revel in violence; I will splash in blood and gore as my protagonist hews a path through his or her enemies with a broadsword, or a plasma gun; and I’ll continue to treat senseless murder as a staple element of my daily entertainment. 

And let’s not forget, violence can be wonderfully beautiful – WHEN IT’S NOT REAL.  Tarantino shows this in his magnificent Kill Bill, a glorification of violence in all its forms and traditions. So I’ll end with some images from that, one of my favourite violent movies ever.

I was looking for a movie to watch last night, and I saw this write-up of Repo Men in my paper, the Guardian:

‘The nasty but futuristic business of retrieving artificial organs from broke people is given a nasty but futuristic treatment in this silly, violent sci-fi’. 

Well, that didn’t sound very good, and I was all set to go and watch Centurion.  But the times didn’t work so it was Repo Men after all; and naturally I feared the worst.

But what a joy, and a relevation, it proved to be!  This is the funniest, most brilliantly satiricial science fiction movie since Robo Cop. It’s a dystopian vision with its tongue in its cheek; the acting is immaculate, the dialogue zings; the twists keep twisting. 

This is cinema for grown-ups who can appreciate wit allied with violence; and the Guardian reviewer is clearly utterly tone-deaf. Because this is a film which changes tone and genre constantly but subtly, in a way that allows the viewer to think about morality and social justice and STILL enjoy vicious kick-ass action.

The script is by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, from the novel by Eric Garcia; the director is the stylish Miguel Sapochnik, who has a background as an art director

There’s absolutely nothing I can say about this film that won’t spoil the experience of watching it; so I’ll just conclude by saying this is the best science fiction movie I’ve seen since…um… Inglourious Basterds. 

I’ve just been reading a fabulous post at Juno Books, which gives an excellent account of the urban fantasy, paranormal romance and sword & sorcery genres. And it also attempts a definition of that wonderful word ‘kickassitude,’ which Juno editor Paula Guran considers to be a defining ingredient of urban fantasy.  

But what is kickassitude? Can only women have it? And who first coined this ridiculous but truly wonderful and adorably grammatically incorrect term? 

It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘violent’, ie kicking ass in the literal sense. But no one can deny that the little girl at the top of this blogpost has kickassitude in eponymous abundance. 

But I would argue that one of the original kick ass dudes is this guy: 

Philip Marlowe, the wise-cracking LA private eye created by Raymond Chandler, has attitude to spare. He’s rude to cops; he makes fun of beautiful women; he’s so smart,  he’s dumb. And I’d argue that Mike Carey’s exorcist detective Felix Castor is totally in this Chandler wisecracking authority-defying tradition. 

But kickassitude is also exemplified by this lady:  

Yes, the classic femme fatale.  Cool, deadly, scornful of authority.  The femme fatale is sometimes attacked as being a misogynist creation, spawned by male writers who were afraid of female emancipation and who therefore regarded women as monsters to be feared. But hey, lighten up; femme fatales are female bad guys.  They’re fun roles; and these are empowered women.  And they’re funny too.  Here are a couple more oldie but goldie kickass gals: 

Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity

Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday

In modern urban fantasy, you can spot the attitude from the cover; moody, brooding, cool, either dressed in jeans 

or in sexy leather. 

Or dangerously armed: 

And go on, really spoil yourself, here’s the Urban Fantasy Book Parade featuring a gallery of empowered ladies, together with a plethora of butts, backs, tattoos and moons. 

One of my favourite kick ass characters is played by Charlize Theron in the mildly under-rated Aeon Flux (directed by Karyn Kusama, who went on to the direct the Diablo Cody-scripted horror Jennifer’s Body.)  Our heroine Aeon looks amazing, and utterly cool, with hair that never moves, no matter how many knock down fights she gets into. And most important, when she is violent, she is gracefully violent, and does an excellent multiple back flip that looks exhausting.  This is violence choroegraphed like dance floor moves; and boy, it’s great. 

The essence of kickassitude is what it’s not; these women do not crave approval, they do not flatter and plead, and they are not defined by their relationship to men.  Men beg for their attention, not vice versa. (Just as it is in my own personal life!)  So I would mark out Claudia Black in Farscape as a cool kick ass lady; she’s a violent psychopath who’s slowly discovering a conscience. 

Kara Thrace has kickassitude in abundance of course.  But Elle in Heroes merely pretends to have it; she curls her lip rather well, but she does not command our fear.  It need hardly be said that Buffy kicks ass - but I’ll say it anyway – and one could certainly put up a case for Eve Myles in Torchwood as an exemplar of kickassitude: 

These are Independent Women; capable women; scary women; and sassy women. And if you look on the urban fantasy and SFF bookshelves, you’ll find them in abundance. 

In modern Hollywood however – with a few exceptions – kickassitude is in short supply.  There are still SO many movies where the women are token women, eyecandy and sidekicks, rather than being  fully fledged heroines or co-protagonists. Even Io (Gemma Arterton) in Clash of the Titans, for all her godly wisdom, doesn’t DO much; and she has no damned kickassitude. 

So in my view, Hollywood hasn’t cottoned on yet to what its audience wants from its female protagonists; butts, tattooes, backs,  a vivid personality, and…attitude.

If you could have a superpower, which superpower would it be?

Oh please! Don’t pretend you’ve never thought about this.  It’s the first daydream of every card-carrying SFF fan. The entire genre depends on wish-fulfillments fantasies…we all grow up dreaming of being a superhero of some kind or another.

(Or, if comics aren’t your thing, then you may have dreamed of being a warrior, or a beautiful kick-ass princess, or a daring space captain,  or a vampire, or a werewolf….tick box as appropriate…)

I always wanted to be this guy (NOT THE WEEDY SWOT, THE BIG MACHO ONE!):

In retrospect, this is embarrassing.  It would have been cooler to want to be Spider-Man. He might have icky-sticky webbing – hello, sexual metaphor alert! – but at least he doesn’t become hugely engorged and large and green, i.e. (using the celebrated Palmer metaphor translation device) Angry Hulk =  monstrous erection the colour of a frog.

When I was older, and knew better, I wanted to be this guy:

Wolverine of course has a variety of powers; strength, feral rage, a healing factor, and an adamantium skeleton. But his main superpower is that he is cool. He is Indiana Jones with added attitude; he is the ultimate bad-ass.  He even smokes cigars (cigars make me cough, and I hate the smell they leave on your clothes – but this is a daydream, right?)

I have never, however, daydreamed of having this guy’s superpower:

Stretchy limbs, a stick  up his arse, and grey hair blooming at his temples? What’s the fun of that?

Even Johnny Storm’s power was dorky; Flame on!  It’s somehow so juvenile.  I’d much rather be the Beast – especially when he had the coloured fur.

But most of all, I wanted the full package; the super-power, and the inner torment.  The Hulk is not a happy superhero; he’s tortured, hated, mocked by society.  Peter Parker is insecure.  Wolverine has a dark back story (revealed over a billion comic stories, and rather oddly synopsised in the movie X Men Origins: Wolverine.)  The key common factor – for the adolescent me, daydreaming of being a superhero – was the notion of being a loner, an outsider, ‘not understood, ‘special’.

The essence of being a teenager dreaming of having a superpower, in other words, is to feel just like you do when you DON’T have a superpower.

In one of my favourite ever SF novels, however, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, the characters have a rather different superpower.  Six characters who separately are confused and unhappy creatures are able to join together to form a new kind of entity  – a homo gestalt.  Lone – the Idiot as he’s known in the early chapters – is the first person who is able to make the gestalt ‘blesh’;  but it brings him little happiness.  Bonnie and Beanie are two twins who can teleport but cannot speak; Baby, another member of the gestalt, is a mongoloid baby with the mind of a computer.

It’s a masterly book, in my view; one of the greatest SF novels ever. But it’s not the stuff of which daydreams are made. Here’s the first paragraph:

The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.  His clothes were old and many-windowed.  Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.

Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them.

Lone has a superpower – telepathy – but more than that, he is a vital piece in a new kind of human species, a gestalt entity that is larger than the sum of its (human) parts. But who would want to be this sad lonely freak!  It’s  a dystopian vision; the superpower as curse, not blessing.

The recent Brit TV show Misfits also, darkly but hilariously, created a gang of superheroes who are cursed not blessed. Simon has the power of invisibility; but since he’s such an annoying dork he was pretty much invisible anyway.  Sexy, charismatic  Alisha  is cursed with the power to make men desire her when she touches them; which means she’s constantly subject to attempted rapes, and can only make love to her boyfriend though mutual, non-touching, masturbation.  And Kelly, the chav (for US readers – chavs are way lower down the social scale than trailer trash), is telepathic; which means she spends all her time hearing people think, ‘God what a slag SHE is.’

Wolverine is cursed too of course – but I would LIKE to be cursed the way he is.  I’d love to be haunted, lonely, an outcast from society, but still able to kick-ass and lord it over my enemies.

The Sturgeon vision, however – and the Misfits vision too – makes us experience what it would be like to have special powers that don’t make you feel special.  You’ d be better off being ordinary, than having THESE crap powers.

It’s the difference, of course, between wish-fulfillment genre stories and darker, more satirical explorations of the same subject matter. But it makes me aware of how very hard it would be to be ‘more than human’.  Because it’s our human frailties – our insecurity, our vanity, our ego, our petty jealousy of others – that makes us want to be superpowered in the first place.  If we really did evolve, to become better, wiser, more profound people – then Marvel Comics would go out of  business, and superheroes would go out of vogue.

This for me is one of the problems with Series 3  of Heroes, which I am watching at the moment (long after everyone else of course – Always The Last One To Catch On to a Cultural Phenomenon truly is my superpower.)  Because – without giving away actual plot details – I would say that one of the story conceits in this series is the idea that ANYONE can have a superpower. And in surprise twist after surprise twist, characters change powers, lose powers, and acquire powers when it was their role to be the character WITHOUT a power. All of this undermines the series’ original genius, its ability to create superheroes with original character traits. In the early eps, for instance,  Peter Petrelli, for instance, was gifted with the power of being able to see in 3 D despite having an annoying lock of hair dangling in front of one eye; and his brother Nathan was gifted with the power of looking like he had his elegantly cut suits sprayed on every morning.

But once characters lose their traits, and change their powers – it’s hard to root any more.  Because ‘rooting’ is at the very heart of this ‘which superpower would you like to have?’ game.  You define yourself by the character with whom you most empathise.  It works for Marvel Comics characters; it works equally well with Buffy characters. Are you Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Angel, or Xander? (I’m Giles – the annoying swotty one who never hits anyone. I’d like to be Xander, but in my heart I know I’m not good looking enough!)  But of course, in my dreams, I’m Buffy. (This is fantasy, changing sex is allowed…)

So let me answer my own opening question.

If I could be a Misfits character I’d be – well I wouldn’t be any of them actually. AARGH. Nightmare. I guess Curtis is the coolest, but his ability to turn back time would make life SO complicated.  It’s hard enough to keep track of just the ONE life…

If I could have the powers of any character in the series Heroes, it would have to be Hiro.

Not because he looks like me (I’m much closer to Peter Petrelli Parkman) but because stopping time is so cool.  Life rushes past so fast – wouldn’t it be great just to freeze it, and take a proper look!  (Time-travelling is less appealing to me, since, as with Curtis’s powers, it results in stories so complex they make my head hurt.) But Clare Bennet’s powers are also great - because they’re so limited! She has a healing gift, she can’t die, but has no superstrength and so has to use a gun or a taser against bad guys. And the sheer FRUSTRATION of that puts me in that character’s head, and makes me feel her inner torment. (The characters who can replicate other people’s powers, however, are TOO powerful.  There’s nothing ‘feel-special’ about that power; they’re all armour, no chink.)

And if I had to be a character in More than Human, I would be Lone.   Even though he’s a character who has no character; but I feel for his loneliness. I empathise with that.  It’s not wish-fulfillment – it’s connection.  I connect with Lone, the superhero who never defeats a supervillain, and lives and dies in sadness. (Damn, that sounds awful – honestly I don’t spend ALL my time in front of a computer – I really do have a BIT of a life…)

But all in all, I would rather be the Hulk.  Because the Hulk’s power is an inability to control rage within acceptable boundaries; and that’s exactly what I would love to do when I’m stuck on a country lane and the other car won’t back up an inch or so to the nearest passing place, and I have to reverse back half  a mile.  Or when I get stuck on hold calling the telephone company, and they play that annoying music. Or when…

You get the idea. There are moments when Hulk Rage would be nice.

Palmer….Kill!

Well, maybe not; maybe gentle snarky irony will always be my one and only superpower.

Inspired by Archie Tait’s sublime choice of SFF Song of the Week – with its anime theme – I’ve decided to make it Anime Week on Debatable Spaces.  Yes, I’m like that, wild and impetuous.

So today, and every now and then when we feel like it, are some fabulous images of anime heroes with intros from arch guest blogger on this site Stuart Angell McGregor – who, when he’s allowed out into the real world, also write screenplays, makes films, and reviews comics and graphic novels. (Adding all those things up – he’s clearly NEVER allowed out of the house.)

Stuart Angell McGregor writes:

ANIME HEROES (Part 1)

SHOTARO KANEDA (AKIRA, 1988)

I had a green jumper when I was a kid.

Not just any green jumper mind. Oh no, the front of this one was emblazoned with the loveable and furry face of my childhood hero, Dogtanian, the brave star of the Spanish/Japanese animated mish-mash ‘Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds’.

I ate in that jumper.

Slept in it.

Cuddled it lovingly as I ran around the playground, all carefree and childishly stupid, fingers grabbing at the frayed cuffs.

I was happy.

And then I saw ‘Akira’.

You see, in 1981, the American actor Cam Clarke voiced the spunky little anthropomorphised rascal I loved so much, and it wasn’t until 1994 – as I pushed my VHS copy of ‘Akira’, bought proudly with many weeks worth of pocket money, into my Aunt’s fat player – that I would come to discover how far Clarke had moved up in the world.

Toward the end of the 80s he found fame as Leonardo – the most ‘vanilla’ of the ninja turtles, despite those awesome swords – but here I was now, watching open-mouthed and wide-eyed as Clarke romped through the neon-soaked mess of Neo Tokyo, popping pills and kicking faces, as the voice of Shotaro Kaneda, leader of the teen biker gang ‘The Capsules’.

Kaneda, and Clarke, expertly exude two of the best kinds of rebellion – 1) a total lack of respect for any kind of authority (watch as Kaneda bad mouths school teachers, police officers, and baldy, serious-looking army generals alike), and 2) the ability to drive big shiny bikes very very quickly towards other gobby teens.

Kaneda can be a wonderfully vacuous character at times. He looks cool, driven by aesthetics, wearing a great jacket and riding the best bike in the world (EVER!), but also displays amazing moments of charming stupidity.

However, as the landmark ‘Akira’ marches on, shifting focus from these ongoing violent biker conflicts, to the post – WW3 Japan’s abuse and betrayal of its army of young psychics, the sheer joy of Kaneda’s delinquency becomes tempered somewhat. His youthful alienation gives way to a sense of both place and purpose as he falls in with proud underground rebels, and the fate of the world comes to literally rest in his hands.

But then, that’s the problem with all teen rebels.

Ultimately, some day, they have to grow up.

Some day, they have to become us.

*sighs jealously*

In my very first posting on this site, I claimed to have had a colourful life as a spy, explorer, murderer, and film producer.  Students of Palmer irony will recognise this was largely a pack of lies; I’ve never done any of these exciting things!

Except, um, being a film producer.  Because, unlikely as it sounds, I actually am one.

This is, let’s face, a cool kind of a job,  and I’ve written about it before on this site.  I’ve blogged about going to Cannes; and I wrote about my trip to the American Film Market, in LA, and conceded that being a film producer is indeed a curious hobby for a science fiction novelist.   

The truth is -  producing a feature film is HARD.  And no matter how much effort you put in, there’s no guarantee of success. That’s why being a movie producer is not a job for a sane person.

Hence – I qualify!

At the moment though, rather to my surprise in fact, I find the process of getting a movie made is happening all around me. Co-producers. A director. A casting director.  Cinematographers reading the script.  Funding sources identified.  Casting discussions. It’s exciting as all hell and, let’s face it, it’s glamorous too. It’s much cooler than my real life as a nerdy (nay, one of the MOST nerdy!)  SF novelist.

Here’s a glimpse of the location for my movie, which is called Inferno:

This is an image of the steel works at Port Talbot – the visual inspiration for Ridley Scott’s opening sequence of Blade Runner (he was driving past on the M4 and saw THIS.)  And this is the mythic landscape for my film about murder, sex, love and gritty working class life in a Welsh seaport.

This is the kind of movie I’ve always wanted to make – it’s inspired by Double Indemnity and Body Heat and Chinatown and that whole noir tradition; and a passion for genre movies like those  is why I became a screenwriter.  But the film business is a extraordinary industry:  mad, criminal, incompetent, unfair, glorious, inspiring, and I LOVE IT.  And because it’s such a mad business, the only way to achieve your vision as a movie writer is to GET OUT THERE AND MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.

As a novelist – especially if you work for the wonderful Orbit Books (*creep* *creep* but I do mean it) (and hey guys – how about a hike on that last advance?) it’s much easier. The guys who run SFF publishing care; they are passionate; they take risks; they support creativity. 

In movies, however, it’s all about being a distributor, stealing all the  money off creatives, and spending it on lap dancers, champagne and coke.  NO GUYS! GIVE US THE MONEY, SO WE CAN MAKE REAL MOVIES! (And, er, if there’s any left over, I wouldn’t mind a glass of champagne?) 

I used the ‘V’ word – Vision – just now, and that  sounds a wee bit pretentious I know. But you really have to HAVE to have one, or indeed several, if you’re going to be a creative artist.  Obviously you have to listen, collaborate, accept that other people have valid points, take notes, etc etc etc.  But once you’ve done that: you must STICK TO YOUR VISION. 

My vision of Inferno is a lot to do with landscape, and a lot to do with myth. I mentioned the Ridley Scott story above – this is one of my pitches for the movie when talking to potential financiers.  And when I first read that story, in Empire magazine, I realised – this is my back yard - my home town -  and Ridley himself believes it’s a mythic landscape. So why don’t I do something with that?

Another part of my vision for the film is a rebellion against the dominant social realist verite-filmmaking tradition of the British film industry – the kind of lowkey, truthful movies that Ken Loach makes, and Andrea Arnold makes. I love many of these movies; but I don’t want to make them. I’d prefer to create films that are visually rich, intense, utterly enjoyable, and which offer a rollercoaster experience with soul and passion. Movies like The Last Seduction, Body Heat, Grosse Pointe Blank, Sherlock Holmes (the recent one) and Kill Bill excite me far more than Brit flicks like, for instance, An Education. (Which is a lovely little film – but not for me THRILLING.)

My love/hate relationship with the British film industry goes back a bunch of years.  One of my first jobs was a script reader for major companies like Columbia UK and Granada Films, when I met wonderful producers like David Puttnam and Lynda Myles and Margaret Matheson and Scott Meek. I script edited a movie called The Bull Dance by the legendary Robin Hardy (who made The Wicker Man); though sadly the company who made it became kaput.   And Granada Films, one of my major employers at that time,  also went out of business. Goldcrest – slightly before my time – was the great UK film company, and they  too went bust (though, technically, they didn’t declare actual bankruptcy.)

You get the idea; it’s a volatile and unpredictable industry; just about as safe as building houses on volcanic rock, in the shadow of an active volcano.  And so, as I say,  you have to go out make your own chances. And that’s what I’m doing now.

And all this helps to explain why I’m a gamekeeper turned poacher; a writer turned producer.  I have 3 movie projects in all; and  one of them – Inferno,  my Welsh film noir - is now at  that key stage where small platoons of people are behaving as if it will definitely happen.

Because that’s the only way movies get made; a critical mass of belief and passion has to be there, key personnel have to be attached, vital creative decisions have to be made; and then the money magically falls into place. (Okay, it may be a BIT harder than that – but fortunately I have two seasoned co-producers on board with 20+ film credits between them, and they do actually understand the details of film finance, and have the contacts to access it.)

And what I’ll be doing on this site, in irregular blogs like this one, is writing about the process of producing a movie.  How it works; why it often goes wrong; and why no stars EVER sleep with the screenwriter. The ups, the downs, the more downs, the sudden unexpected ups again. 

This is a story which doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending – we may fail to raise the finance, the movie may never get made. Well, guess what; that doesn’t scare me.  I can handle eventual defeat; NOT TRYING is the one thing that’s utterly alien to my nature.

Or, alternatively, the movie WILL get made; in which case the readers of this blog will have been on the inside track of the genesis of a moderately major new British feature film WHICH YOU WILL LOVE. (Trust me on this!)

The next step is preparing a budget (in hand), and finding a cinematographer.  So watch this space….

Actually I prefer Trinity…brrr!  But let’s not go there.

Neo is the coolest of the cool. He is Christ (aka the One), he is kick-ass, he wears shades, he has superpowers, and he is here to rescue us from the horrible terrible place that is The Matrix.

I love The Matrix; Matrix 2 (Reloaded) not so much, Matrix 3 (Revolutions), let’s not go there.  But the first Matrix film came as an absolute shock; who could have thought cinema could be so kinetic, so visually wonderful, so like a comic book? 

There’s a lot of great writing in the script by the Andy and Larry (or Lana, if you believe the rumours) Wachowki. Not great dialogue (why don’t they get Joss Whedon to write dialogue for ALL science fiction movies?) but really clever ideas. The movie borrows ideas from Buddhism, Joseph W. Campebell’s book on myth, Alice in Wonderland, and gnosticism.  And it weaves that into a narrative that makes computer geeks look cool. 

There’s one flaw in the story – the good guys are all trying to destroy the Matrix. But I LOVE the Matrix. Who wants to live with the boring rebels in their boring hideaway, when you could be on the inside of a whizz-bang computer game where people can have superpowers?

The screenplay can be read here; and now here’s some pretty pics of brooding Keanu in what may be his best ever role, following by the wondrous trailer.

 Let me get one thing straight, before I commence my rant for today: Avatar is one of the best things to happen to the science fictional world in years.  It’s raised the credibility of the genre in the movie theatres - after all those Harry Potters and Hobbits in Pursuit of Rings movies and other fantasy epics of recent years. It’s got the world excited about aliens and space exploration. And it’s at the vanguard of a whole new generation of incredibly exciting and visually extraordinary blockbusters.  To cap it all, James Cameron is a director I admire enormously.

But he is, as I say, a traitor to his own species.

And he’s also made a film that in my view – despite breaking all box office records, and although it’s  pretty damned good – isn’t THAT good, or that special.  It’s fun, it’s certainly beautiful, the ending is exciting.  But I don’t really ‘get’ what’s so revolutionary about the 3D effects. Compared to Up, it’s no big deal; that movie set the bar for CGI 3D movie spectacle and Avatar comes nowhere near it.

Nor do I think the film is as visually extraordinary as everyone claims. The scenery and action scenes are marvellous, but it all lacks imagination. How come the aliens are blue, but the trees are made of bark and the leaves are GREEN? It could all be, well, much more alien. 

There’s nothing in this film to compare with Predator, perhaps the most visually spectacular SF film ever made. Director John McTiernan and cinematographer Donald McAlpine created a movie that is both a nail-biting kick-ass actioner, and a piece of modern art – by which I mean that every time we switch to Predator-POV the screen becomes filled with colours as vivid as a Kandinsky. 

But Predator plays a cleverer game.  It isn’t just about the scenery, it’s built around mythic concepts – chiefly, Arnie as the mud-coated (think woad-coated Celt) warrior going mano a mano with an alien.  The explosion scenes in that movie, too, are astonishing – visions of a Dantesque Hell on Earth.

Avatar, by contrast, has blue gazelle-like creatures running through what looks like the Amazon rainforest. Sweet – but not astonishing.

But that’s just my opinion – which in view of the box office triumph of the film, shouldn’t be taken too seriously (and, indeed, won’t be).  There’s no doubt that SOMETHING extraordinary is happening with this film to make it such a phenomenon.  And the media coverage in the press has been awesome. 

Online, too, Avatar has been covered extensively, and I’ve been taking a peek at some of the comments to be found out in cyberspace. There have been rave reviews, like this one in the Hollywood Reporter.     Fantasy SF Blog revealed that Cameron’s volcanic temper eclipses that of our our British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (once you’ve clicked the link, scroll down to ‘James Cameron, Benevolent Tyrant’.) John Scalzi got pretty much what he was expecting, and (unlike me!) felt no moral outrage at the ‘noble savage’ strand. Ann Wilkes’ Cherokee blood boiled at the way the natives were treated, and she loved the story. Revolution SF drew attention to the alarming phenomenon of Avatar fans who feel like committing suicide because they can’t live on the planet of the Na’vi. SF Gospel made some very smart points about the movie’s provable theology, and asks – would it be okay to kill the Na’vi if they DIDN’T have a provable God?

And the definitive review came from Richard Morgan. (He said it was ‘Very pretty.’)

But my final take on Cameron’s masterwork is, as I say: TRAITOR!

I’m referring of course to the second part of the film when (SPOILER ALERT! BUT I THINK THIS HAS ALL BEEN GIVEN AWAY IN TRAILERS) our hero dons the body of a blue-skinned alien and goes to war against the humans.

Think about it. Our main character is human! We are human. And yet we’re being asked to root against our own species, in favour of the aliens?

It’s not as if this is a minor spat between alien and human. It’s a brutal war.  Dozens and dozens of human beings die horribly, and we are invited to cheer.  Almost as many aliens die in the carnage, and we are clearly meant to be sad as each of them perishes.

This defies all the rules of rooting. You root for you own team, not the opposition. As a Welshman, even of the non-sporting variety, I am obliged to root for Wales every time there’s  Wales v. England rugby match. If I cheered on the English, I would be surgically de-Taffed.

The disloyalty to humankind comes, of course, cloaked in liberal good intentions.  The Na’vi are, you see, noble savages; they are metaphorical of the Native Americans and the Australian aboriginals and all the other Stone Age tribes who have been wretchedly treated by invaders from Europe.  And the movie manages to function simultaneously as a) a shoot-’em-up kickass action movie and b) as an ecological hymn to the glories of the nature, and the crapness of being an evil corporation that wants to destroy the rainforest and doesn’t care how many natives die in the process.

Well, I’m all in favour of hating those who pillage the natural world; and I certainly don’t condone the way the Native Americans or the aboriginals were treated.  So at one level, I’m certainly on Cameron’s side.

But on other hand – per-lease! Couldn’t the morality be a little more subtle?  The guy from the corporation virtually slavers with evil, his treatment of the Na’vi is both incompetent and buffoonish, and there’s a complete absence of moral ambiguity.  Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and a couple of others are good;  all the Na’vi are good; but all the soldiers and the horrible white capitalists who run the mining corporation are all utterly and irredeemably evil.

This kind of black & white morality is forgiveable, of course, in an action movie where you don’t look for rich characterisation and moral subtlety.  But in a movie that proclaims itself to be a moral force for good – well, maybe the script could have had just a LITTLE more work done on it. 

But that’s not my gripe. My gripe is – what’s so bad about humans? I mean – I’m human,  my friends are human:  all the people I like and  admire,  alive and dead, are human. Humans are – well, what can I say? We’re not SO very bad.

But in science fiction, we get a bad press, as the ignoble history of colonialism gets writ into stories set among the stars.  And Avatar is for me part of this syndrome – of neglecting the virtues and glories of humankind. 

And the chief virtue and glory of  humankind is – we’re not all jocks. We’re not all heavily bicepped, macho monsters who are so obsessed with gadgets and weapons of war that we lose sight of the finer things in life – like Nature, and art, and being nice to each other.  In fact, none of the people I know are like that.  All MY friends are weedy, cowardly, bookish, kind, and, well,  nice.

But in Cameron’s parallel universe, all humans are either soldiers or cruel capitalists (admittedly Signourney Weaver is a scientist and there are a couple of other scientists helping Jake Sully fight his good war – but these characters don’t really have much character.)

Contrast this with the weedy science graduate geek played by Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, cursed with a wisecracking dad, and always banging on about scientific things. A broad caricature yes – but there’s hope for humanity if there are a few of THESE entertainingly anal-retentive guys about.

Avatar would, in my view, been a richer and better film if there’d been more diversity among the characters, and less idealisation of the Na’vi.  They are supposed to be like the Native Americans – but they aren’t, not really. The Native Americans were a Stone Age tribe with a flair for war, especially of the sneaky variety;  as I recall from my past reading, ambush was considered by many tribes to be a worthy way of attacking an opponent. And, once confronted by an invasion of white-skins, the Native Americans proved themselves to be adaptable and savage; they learned to ride horses, they learned to shoot guns, they even copied the invaders’ trick of scalping their enemy.

All of which makes the Native Americans REAL, and flawed, and complex, as opposed to the holier-than-thou Na’vi, who can’t kill another creature without an act of gaian communion.

Cameron over-eggs it all in other words; the Na’vi are so perfect that I hate them. They don’t even LOOK like real aliens; they have the wide-eyed blank-faced look of characters in a manga comic.  For all the much vaunted brilliance of the CGI, I never forgot for a moment that I was watching blue simulations.  Indeed, in some ways I felt these aliens felt less ‘real’ than the animatronic aliens in Farscape.

Of course, I freely concede that in my own novels I don’t shirk from making the humans the bad guys -  it makes for a better story that way.    But I think we shouldn’t forget to celebrate the best of humanity – the geekiness, the wit, the camaraderie, the cleverness, and the heart-bursting loyal love of which humans are capable. 

Admittedly, Jake DOES fall in love, with the girl alien Neytiri, who IS quite pretty in an eerie ‘she looks like a blue Bambi, is he really going to do it with a deer?’ kind of a way.  But he’s a pretty dull character in other respects; we root for him because he’s the hero, not because he’s all that interesting.

A sequel to Avatar is being planned, I gather; I’d love to think that it involves a spaceship full of Jewish comedians who are airlifted down to teach the Na’vi the skills they clearly lack; self deprecation, grumbling, and the cruel taunting of the afflictions of others.  Not to mention, cake!

For my part, living on the planet of the Na’vi would be like living in the English countryside: beautiful, spiritually uplifting, and BORING.  I’d rather live in New York and eat bagels and pastrami with the aforesaid Jewish comedians, and indulge in daily rituals of sarcasm and ironic hyperbole. 

That’s what it is to be human.

Why I Love Misfits by Danny Stack

** MINOR SPOILERS **

Five teenagers get struck by lightning and develop strange super powers, blah, blah, blah. On paper, Misfits, E4’s new supernatural series, shouldn’t work. We’ve seen this idea before. Or at least, it certainly feels like it. Anybody within a five feet radius of the spec script pile will tell you it’s groaning from the weight of similar sci-fi ideas. All of a sudden, thanks to Heroes (the American smash hit series) superheroes were thrust into vogue. The geeks hadn’t just inherited the Earth, they’d taken over the TV.

In the UK, the success of Dr Who, Torchwood and Merlin (BBC) and Primeval on ITV meant that hey, the audience must really want to see these kind of shows, right? ITV tried again with Demons, which didn’t exactly work out, but at least ITV2’s sitcom No Heroics was a playful send-up of the genre. Still, enough superheroes. Time to move on, yes? And so, when it came to E4’s Misfits, the heart didn’t exactly jump with excitement. ‘Heroes meets Skins’, apparently. Hmm, an easy pitch, sure, but it would be so easy for Misfits to misfire. Luckily, within minutes of the first episode, you just knew that the show was going to get everything right. An instant classic was born.

First, why it works. The show is created and written by Howard Overman (a TV regular: Merlin, Spooks, Hustle, amongst others). You can’t over-emphasise the importance of the writing for a show like this to succeed. Right from the very start of Misfits, you can tell it’s got a style and assurance all of its own. You think: ‘yeah, Heroes meets Skins… but better’.

The characters are a bunch of teenage ASBOs, enslaved to community service. There’s gobby Nathan, chav Kelly, sexy Alisha, athletic Curtis and meek Simon.

Episode 1 pep talk

When they get hit by lightning, they discover they’ve got supernatural traits but their powers are far from cool or useful. Sexy Alisha gets a disturbing power where anyone who touches her skin is consumed with violent lust for her. Or as meek Simon puts it when Alisha touches his neck: “I want to rip off your clothes and piss on your tits”. This dialogue edge continues in its unashamed and bold fashion, making you do a double take of ‘did they just say that?!’ on a regular basis. The gobby Nathan won’t stop talking but thankfully what he has to say is always cheeky and witty. “I’m pretty sure this breaches the terms of my ASBO” he says when burying their community officer. Fun, fun, fun.

Oh, did I say they had to kill their community officer? Self-defence, obviously, because he had turned into some kind of crazed zombie who was going to kill them all. You begin to realize that the ‘Heroes meets Skins’ pitch is totally off. This has no American overtones whatsoever. This is ‘Dead Set meets Skins in a bastard world of Heroes’.

Meek Simon

Kelly holding Nathan's, um, wank sock.

Why it works, the second. The direction. It seems if you want a show to have a distinctive look and feel, then you got to hire directors called Tom. In this instance, Tom Harper and Tom Green. They give Misfits a delicious cinematic vibe with their careful composition and grading. ‘Let’s give it a cinematic look’ is a phrase often heard in the early rounds of TV development, only for the execs to change their minds in the edit suite as they panic whether the audience will hear the dialogue when the action stays in a wide shot. Thankfully, we get no such interference here as Misfits establishes a visual style that just reeks of class and cool. These are two hip directors to watch out for. Tom Harper has the film Scouting Book for Boys in the bag and we haven’t seen the last of Tom Green, that’s for sure.

Why it works, the third. The actors. Robert Sheehan (Nathan), Lauren Socha (Kelly), Antonia Thomas (Alisha), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Curtis), Iwan Rheon (Simon). They may be misfits, but they’re perfect. Then you have the brilliant Alex Reid out to find the truth about her missing boyfriend (the dead community officer) and guest star Amy Beth-Hayes who nearly steals the show in episode two. The main cast is where it’s at though. They’re characters we care about, and want to spend time with. Most importantly, we want to know what happens next.

Curtis and Alisha

Why it works, numero four. The setting. A community centre on the banks of a murky river. Possibly London, who knows, it could be anywhere, but what’s particularly genius about the choice of setting is that it keeps the action contained. This means that the production budget doesn’t spiral out of control, especially as it has to cough up some wonga for special effects. It’s also testament to the two Toms (directors) that they keep everything visually interesting. You never get bored of looking at what would be a very drab location in real life.

The drama and fun of the action zips by at a thoroughly enjoyable pace, and there’s effective character development for all concerned. The only Misfit misgiving is that the main arc of the series ends a bit sooner than you might expect, leaving the final episode to introduce something new and not altogether satisfying. Still, the final pay-off reveals Nathan’s super power and leaves things nicely open-ended to ensure that series two can pick up where they left off.

‘Nuff said. Stop reading. Get thee to your nearest DVD outlet and purchase Misfits immediately. Enjoy.

Ripley was the trail-blazer; but Kara Thrace (call sign ‘Starbuck’) is, for many of us, the quintessential female SF action hero.  She’s a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, maverick daughter-of-a-bitch who hates authority and always breaks the rules – but is, just, the best.  The bravest, the boldest, the best at piloting, the most-tattooed – what’s not to love?

By the last season of Battlestar Galactica, the show which made Kara famous, the plot twists were so complex and so numerous that any actor who dared to ask ‘Er, what’s my motivation in this scene?’ would receive a 400 page email in response.  Kara’s character suffered more than any other from this plot-monster syndrome – her character arc was abandoned in favour of a narrative twist so immense it actually squelched all the drama.  But before then..Kara’s on-off relationship with Lee Adama, her daughter-father relationship with Admiral Adama, and her open contempt for Colonel Tigh (who she punches in, I think, the pilot episode), all these are compelling and bewildering – in the way that real people ARE bewildering.  Kara is brave – but she’s also a mixed up kid.

So frak all detractors; Kara Thrace (played by actor Katee Sackhoff) is my SFF Hero of today.

As always, Scalzi is judicious in his diatribe, so though he does a comprehensive job of demolishing the ‘Basterds is SF’ argument, he also acknowledges that if fans want to claim it as SF, they should feel free to do so. As he puts it, ‘Hey, if you mess with the timeline, the geeks are going to come out of the woodwork and start chanting, “One of us! One of us!” I wouldn’t suggest that scifi fans shouldn’t feel as if Basterds fits into their genre. Take it! Love it! And, if it wins the Best Picture feel free to claim it as yours.’

I’ve written a rebuttal to Scalzi’s comments in my Comment to his blog; but I’m still left feeling there are big issues here to be thrashed out.  It takes us into the murky waters of genre theory. And it involves asking some major questions: What is genre? What is SF? What is the difference between SF and fantasy?  Millions of words have been expended on answers to these questions and yet, no one seems to agree.

And at some level, that fact kind of annoys me.   Healthy disagreement is, well, healthy; but this level of disagreement reeks of mental chaos. And as someone who loves science, and the rigour and logic of scientific methodology, it irks me; because if scientists were this ‘open-minded’ about every topic under the sun, there would be no science.  (To put it another way: if arts graduates had invented the space rocket, it would look exceedingly pretty, but it wouldn’t fly.)

So let me go through Scalzi’s points one by one; and then I’m going to put my head on the chopping block and offer my own attempted answers to all those big questions. 

Scalzi argues that Basterds isn’t SF because:

’1) It wasn’t marketed as SF.’

’2) The science fictional aspects of the story are not necessarily essential to it.’

’3) It’s kinda more like fantasy than SF anyway.’

’4) If Inglourious Basterds is science fiction, so are most historical movies.’

For those new to this debate, who haven’t seen the movie, the point to bear in mind is: Tarantino’s film is set in World War II, and tells a fictional but plausible story about a team of US guerrillas (the ‘Basterds’) operating in Hitler’s Germany; but certain events that take place in the movie most emphatically DID NOT happen in real life. In other words, it’s an alternate history drama; and alt-history is a recognised sub-genre of science fiction.

Okay.

Scalzi’s point 1) is a good one. It’s generally acknowledged that ‘genre’ is something that is in part created by marketing.  The  crime genre wouldn’t be as vividly defined as it is if the publishers didn’t market their tales of criminal activity under the banner of Crime Fiction. There are Crime bookshelves in bookshops; specialist Crime awards, etc etc.  And it’s a fact that a Margaret Attwood novel with ‘science fictional’ elements will be treated as a literary novel; but a Philip Palmer or a John Scalzi with SF elements will be sold, marketed, and branded as ‘SF’.

But that’s not good enough.  Genre is more than a marketing tool; it’s a vivid, real thing, a slippery but true concept that adds value to the fiction we read, and the movies we see.  Genre is like language; you can’t ‘explain’ it, but you can learn to understand it. 

To back up that opinion, I will call upon my second favourite Professor (after the ineffable Professor Nicole Peeler – hi Nicole!) namely Professor Rick Altman, of the University of Iowa, whose book Film/Genre is a definitive and brilliant analysis of what genre is, and how it works, and how it changes depending on the way it is perceived.

In Altman’s film theory jargon, ‘Genres are most commonly taken to come into being when a body of texts shares a sufficient number of semantic and syntactic elements. This production-driven definition needs to be matched with a reception-driven definition recognizing that genres do not exist until they become necessary to a lateral communication process, that is until they serve a constellated community.’

 Ouch. That was ugly! Sorry to inflict the jargon on you – but bear  in mind, this is a specialist academic book and these guys feel the need to talk that way. Elsewhere in the book, however, Altman is more readable; and the reason I think THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT is because he actually does research.  He uses a literary version of the scientific method; he studies a great deal of data, he finds the patterns that are hidden there, and thus draws his conclusions from evidence, not out of his own arse. 

And much of the data Altman assesses is to do with actual movies produced by actual movie studios.  He’s sifted through the files of  most of the major studios to find out how THEY define genres.  And the conclusions are startling.  The genre of ‘musical’ for instance, didn’t actually exist in the early days of movies.  Instead, it was used as an adjective, modifying nouns like comedy, romance, or melodrama.  Here’s an abbreviated version of a list of movies of the 20s and 30s and the genre descriptions that were attached to them in their publicity material:

Weary River – epic

The Broadway Melody – all talking, all singing, all dancing dramatic sensation.

The Vagabond Lover – romantic musical comedy

Devil May Care – romance punctured with subtle comedy.

The Tender Foot – a Merry Western Comedy full of Laughs and Ginger.

The Love Parade – light opera.

The Rogue’s Song – operetta.

Roadhouse Nights – melodrama  and button-busting comedy

College Love – 100% talking, singing, college picture.

There are two points here; The first is that we wouldn’t now necessarily define the genres of those films according to the way they were marketed THEN.  So Scalzi’s Point 1) falls off a cliff.

Point 2) is that genre is clearly evolutionary.  The very words we use to describe genre can change over time; and as far as movies are concerned, new genres are born all the time.  Altman is particularly brilliant about analysing this; he points out that Hollywood studios love to copy their own hits, and the hits of others. So one successful movie about gladiators (a ‘history drama’) will spawn a dozen more movies about gladiators (creating the ‘gladiator movie genre’.)  In the same way, the film Rififi is a brilliant movie about a gang of low lives staging a heist; and it’s now a template for the entire ‘heist movie genre’.

In the UK film industry, this ‘genre born out of coypcatting’ tendency is most clearly examplifed by the movie The Full Monty. It was a hugely successful movie; so for years UK producers have tried to produce other movies that are ‘like’ The Full Monty – ie ensemble comedies with quirky loveable British characters and rude moments based on an unlikely but true story. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a genre – but it is!  My friend Geoff Deane wrote one of the most successful of the Full Monty copycat movies – Kinky Boots, an ensemble comedy with quirky loveable British characters and rude moments based on an unlikely but true story. (The inspiration for the movie was a documentary about a guy up North who owned a shoe factory and started making fetish footwear.)  I’m not decrying the movie by saying it’s a copycat picture, nor I am in any way undervaluing the fabulous job Geoff did on the script. But that was always the deal – Geoff was told from the start that the producers wanted a ‘Full  Monty type hit’ and they got one.

Thus are genres born…

That’s a long rebuttal to Scalzi’s point 1).  But my underlying intent here is to suggest that you can’t define genre by what it says on the poster.  Any serious film scholar has to have a beady eye for what the genre really is, according to the actual material in the movie.

Point 2) is, I’m sorry, a dubious argument. The ending of the film is great, and it depends TOTALLY on this alt-history twist. Take that away, and the story collapses,  and becomes a less good movie. So yes, it IS essential to the movie.  A similar argument applies to Ken MacLeod’s splendid The Execution Channel, much of which takes place in a world that is very like our contemporary world, but which has a dazzling SF twist in the closing chapters.  If Ken had written a different ending, his publishers might have queried whether this was ‘really’ SF; but he didn’t! He knew all along the coup de roman he was going to pull off, and he pulled it off.

Point 3) is a tricky one.  Does alt-history have to have a scientific explanation to be SF? Does The Man in the High Castle have such an explanation? Does The Yiddish Policeman’s Union have such an explanation? Okay in Star Trek stories there were often tales that take place in alternate histories that depend on the Enterprise passing through a black hole, or some such.  But alternate history stories to my mind work best if they’re just presented ‘as if’. 

So does that make them fantasy, or SF? Strictly speaking, the answer should probably be neither: Alternate History could and maybe should be treated as a separate genre. But because it’s a subgenre that evolved out of SF, it kind of fits there.  And  of  course ‘science fiction’ is a term that by no means covers the full range of possibilities of the genre it describes.  It drives me mad  when people say: ’1984 can’t be an SF novel because it has no science’ (though in fact it does.)  For SF is about more than just science! It’s about speculation, and extrapolation – hence the attempt by some writers to rename the entire genre as ‘speculative fiction’.

But this gets to be angels dancing on pins stuff.  Alternate History IS Science Fiction, in my view, because that’s the genre that spawned it. It can also be fantasy (as in Naomi Novik’s fantasy series about the dragon Temeraire that fights in seabattles in Napoleonic times.)

Scalzi’s Point 4) is that lots of historical movies get the history wrong; so can’t they be classed as SF too? The answer; no they can’t.  That’s just, sorry, dumb-ass sophistry.  All drama relies on fictionalising, even the historical stuff!  And when in doubt, print the legend; that’s the golden principle of storytelling.  John – it’s just not the same thing!

This leaves one final question; does this actually matter? I mean, really?  I don’t think it matters hugely to Scalzi, to be honest. He’s just having fun, sounding off, teasing geeks  like me.  Scalzi is a guy I admire hugely; he’s a fine writer, and a master polemicist, who does one of these columns every week and is a master of arguing the contrary point just to get everyone talking.  So why, let’s be blunt about this, am I getting so genuinely hot under the collar?

The answer is: for me it DOES matter.  It matters because Inglourious Basterds is a fine film, and a valuable film. Yet though it’s had commercial success and Oscar nominations, it was pissed upon by all the critics I read, who mocked its excessive violence (which is in fact essential to its genre!) and Tarantino’s woeful ignorance of history.

But Tarantino knows his history! And he’s deliberately falsifying it, as part of his artistic strategy of ‘genre-mashing’, and playing games with the audience.  So though I’d argue it’s technically correct to class this as an ‘SF movie’, it’s equally correct to call it a war movie, and an action movie, and a B-movie hommage.  It’s all those things,  all at the same time.  That’s the game Tarantino plays; he makes movies for a sophisticated audience who know genre, and love genre, and enjoy the rollercoaster ride experience of totally changing genre a reel before the end.

Genre is a label but it’s not a straitjacket; it’s a creative tool, that offers a direct route to the audience’s imagination via their own insights and knowledge and expectations of ‘this kind’ of film.  Ultimately, many of Tarantino’s films (excluding Jackie Brown which plays a different game) constitute a genre of their own – the postmodern, genre-hopping, genre-mashing ‘Tarantino movie’ genre.

And smarter critics, steeped in the traditions and tropes of speculative fiction/science fiction/fantasy fiction, would have spotted all that, and not written such dumb reviews. 

Inglourious Basterds is in my view, a  fine and startling piece of work.  Like Hitchock’s Psycho – which also changes genres in mid-movie – it shocks by doing the truly unexpected just when you least expect anything  so unexpected to occur….

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to find Miss Buffy Summers on my list of SFF Heroes. The heroine of Joss Whedon’s seven series epic TV show has everything you’d expect in a hero – a smart mouth, a maverick attitude, a proficiency for kicking ass, and a total disrespect for authority. But she’s also a generous friend, emotionally vulnerable, and keeps falling love with unsuitable guys (check the teeth first, girl!) She’s also cute and dinky which, admittedly, can’t be said of more traditional heroes – like Conan. (See below.) But that all adds to her appeal; huge physical strength in a small girl body.

In the course of seven series, Buffy Summers grows up, as does Sarah Michelle Gellar; it’s an amazing journey to watch, and experience.

And to get you in the mood, let’s start with the theme tune for the show, played by rock band Nerf Herder.

Today’s SFF Hero feature is dedicated to Lilith Saintcrow, who was blogjay on this site yesterday and chose the wonderful Banned in Argo by Leslie Fish.  (See below, or click SFF Song of the Week to the left or click here. Come on, come on, I can’t make it any easier – find it!)

When writing the intro for her song choice, Lilith sent me an email telling me of her love for the soundtrack of Conan the Barbarian by the genius composer Basil Poledouris  And this reminded me how much I love Arnie’s movie of the classic Robert E. Howard tales.  Never has Schwarzenegger been so muscly, so almost naked, and so utterly right for the role.  (Well, except for his Terrminator role.)  It’s a smart, exciting, morally challenging movie, directed by John Milius who co-wrote it with  Oliver Stone; and it defines Conan as the quintessential fantasy hero.

If you want to hear a bit of the soundtrack and see the trailer, click on the arrow below. Some still images follow.

I’ve never liked Superman.  I enjoyed the Richard Donner movies, I’ve read some of the comics, but as a character he’s never worked for me – because he’s too powerful, hence a bit smug.  Kryptonite is cleary the writers’  desperate attempt to give him some vulnerability, but it doesn’t wash.  Superman is a lantern-jawed jock, and I kind of like it when he loses.

In Smallville,  however, the young Clark Kent is a shy, insecure, sometimes awkward kid – and he really is vulnerable.  He’s coming to terms with his powers. He still lets his dad (initially) and his mom boss him around. He’s crippled by his love for the beautiful Lana, but always get tongue tied. Clark Kent I like; Clark (as played by Tom Welling) is a hero I can identify with.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien and its sequels was the  pioneer female action hero.  She has no superpowers, but she’s tough and ruthless, she can run like hell, she loves big guns, and boy, she’s determined. 

It was wonderful to see Weaver return to SF in Avatar – she’s the best actor in it by far. 

Once upon a time, women in SF and Fantasy stories screamed fearfully and waited for the guy with the biceps to save the day. No more; thanks to Ripley.

No matter; Wolverine is still the best there is at what he does.  Here are some pics:

In pursuit of this ambition, I’ve been catching up on some classic movies, some of which I’ve seen before many times, some of which are new to me.

Today’s blog is about the daddy of all SF films, the Robert Wise version of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951).

Stephen King writes about this in his wonderful book DANSE MACABRE. He compares it with the later movie EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, an all action and terrifying tale of aliens invading Earth.  Like much movie SF, he argued, EVTFS is really a horror movie; THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL by contrast, ‘is one of a select handful – the real science fiction movies.’  It’s not, in other words, a futuristic version of a tale about the boogeyman. It’s not like ALIEN, with its vagina dentata alien conjuring up primal fears that we didn’t know we had.  It’s not about The Fear of Strangers, or of Otherness. It’s a cool, careful, masterly dissection of what shits humans are, and how and why aliens are right to fear us. 

This makes TDTEST sound rather cool and academic; but in fact, it’s an amazingly taut film.  I was delighted, in fact, to find that – despite a small special effects budget, and the incredibly over-precise diction of all the characters, that it’s not a dated or ‘old-fashioned’ kind of classic SF movie that is better left dust-covered in the archives.  Admittedly, the space suit worn by Klaatu the alien looks as if it was retained by some skinflint in order to be re-used by Cybermen in the sandpit in the early Dr Who eps.  And the interior of the ship is sadly inadequate compared to the Tardis.  But this film is, I discover, a masterpiece of suspense.

The plot, briefly, and without I hope too many spoilers: An alien  spaceship lands on Earth

and a humaniform alien called Klaatu (Michael Rennie) emerges, accompanied by a huge robot, Gort.  Klaatu comes in peace, but is treated with hostility by the authorities. And his attempt to summon a meeting of the leaders of the world is snubbed. So he escapes and – after befriending a young boy and her mother – explains to a kindly Professor with hair issues that the Earth is in deadly peril. 

That’s all I can say – if you haven’t already, see the film! – but the genius of this movie is how much is achieved by the simple act of Defining the Peril.  We know the Earth will be in dire danger unless certain things occur; and knowing that is enough.  It’s the opposite of 2012, where we have to SEE houses fall down, cars fall into the sea, planes fall from the sky, people dying horribly, in such graphic detail that it becomes, pretty quickly, a bit ordinary. (What! Only a hundred people just died! – what a yawn!)

Here the jeopardy is defined; the clock is set ticking; and it’s terrifying.  I was literally on the edge of my seat in the climactic sequence. Okay, the robot is not that scary – it has zappy eyes like Cyclops, but that’s all it does – but we know what it might do. And because its potential power is so awesome, its very presence terrifies.

All this artfulness is of course – at one crude level – a result of budgetary constraints.  Even in 1951 audiences liked action, not chat; spectacle, not thoughtful speculation.  But with limited resources, director Robert Wise and writer  Edmund H. North (working from a story by Harry Bates) dug deep into their bag of storytelling tricks and made us fear a man who does nothing malicous, at all, in the course of the entire film. But though he’s courteous, and pleasant, Klaatu is an utterly cold and decisive character. If he has to kill, he will kill, and he will kill vast numbers of those who deserve to die. 

Gulp.

For Klaatu is a rational being; and his rationality is the source of his scariness.  You can’t reason with him; because he’s right. And you can’t defy him; because, as the setpiece sequence of the movie proves, his power, casually executed, utterly dwarfs that of the humble Earthlings.

The music is another key element of this movie. Composer Bernard Herrman - who also wrote the scores for many of Hitchcock’s great suspense thrillers including PSYCHO, as well as providing the music for THE TWLIGHT ZONE and some of the 1960s LOST IN SPACE - creates a chilling, haunting soundscape of singing voices and jagged orchestral crescendos.  It’s a style that’s often imitated, but I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever seen/heard a movie with such a brilliantly tense score.  The opening sequence, when the spaceship lands and the tanks take their position, is utterly nervejangling, like having someone run a cold knife blade down your spine to test how thick the skin is.

At other times, the film IS dated. There’s a lot of talky stuff, the girl (played by Patricia Neal) is very much the typical ‘pretty, good Mom’ character you always see in 50s movies.  The army briefing scenes have a static, expository quality.  And, even in 1951, what Mom would let a total stranger wander off with her kid…?

But for much of the time, Wise and North show remarkable adroitness in the way in which they use newscasters and telephone operators and soldiers in jeeps to convey a rich, busy universe of action, without spending too much money.

I saw this movie on a lovely collector’s edition DVD which I bought last year at Eastercon, in that wonderful little stall on the far right.  As always, I bought a bunch of old movies thinking, ‘I must watch these some day.’  Fortunately, that day, for this movie, was yesterday.

Did you know? (I know you did):

The band Klaatu, named after the alien in this movie, wrote the song ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’.

The 2008 remake (a stinker, allegedly) stars Keanu Reeves, who actually IS an alien!

Take it away Adrian:

———————————————————————————-

DOES WHATEVER A FRANCHISE CAN: SAM RAIMI’S SPIDER-MAN by Adrian Reynolds

Timely Comics, established in the 1940s, produced titles about crime, romance, monsters, and cowboys as well as superheroes, whose role was to take on the Nazis in wartime pulps.  It was under the guidance of Stan Lee two decades later that the publisher — by now known as Marvel — created a new generation of winning superhero titles: Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man.  They were a clear departure from DC’s heroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, who were archetypes seemingly divorced from regular human experience.  By contrast, the characters Stan Lee concocted in collaboration with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were easy for their teenage readers to identify with.  The Hulk was effectively a teenage boy struggling to control a body undergoing transformation.  The Fantastic Four were a family as dysfunctional as your own.  And as for Spider-Man…

Spider-Man artwork by Steve Ditko

Peter Parker is a high school kid consumed by unspoken love for Mary Jane Watson, a science nerd living with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben.  Then he is bitten by a radioactive spider and rather than acquire leukaemia gains arachnid powers for himself, gifted with impossible acrobatic skills, heightened strength, able to scale vertical walls and sense danger.  Adding to that nifty repertoire, Peter’s invention of webfluid allows him to zip round the city suspended from ropes of web.  But…he still can’t talk to Mary Jane, and adding superheroics to his repertoire just means he has less time for college work, and that his life gets more complicated.   

 OK, the characterisation might be as two dimensional as the pages Spider-Man’s stories appeared on, but that’s one more dimension than DC’s leading icon, Superman, had back then.

 All of this, more or less, is present in Sam Raimi’s trio of Spider-Man films.  The first presents the story of Peter’s transition from human to superior human to superhero.  The distinction is important: he gains his powers first, but it’s following the death of Uncle Ben that he becomes a superhero, whose values inform his actions.  The bit about Ben telling Peter that “with great power comes great responsibility” is frequently quoted, but just as important is what Ben says before that: “these are the years a man changes into the man he’s going to become the rest of his life — just be careful who you change into.”

 Those two quotes anchor the trilogy, with every aspect of Peter Parker’s progress relating to those themes of maturity and honour.  The films chronicle a teenager growing into young adulthood, dealing with the responsibilities of work and the complexities of being a family member, and the distinction between the dream of love and its day to day reality.  Which serious business is thankfully leavened by a healthy dose of wisecracking, acrobatics, and fights with grotesque supervillains.  Phew.

 Something that distinguishes Peter Parker from the likes of Batman is that he has read superhero comics.  When Peter gets his powers, he tries out catchphrases such as ‘Shazam’ and others associated with classic comics heroes in the hope that it will reactivate his webbing — produced organically from his body in the films…adding to the squicky adolescence of this singular hero, Peter oozes sticky fluids — which takes a while to get under control.

 Reading comics is one thing, emulating their protagonists is quite another.  Bringing together superheroics with teenage tribulations was a stroke of genius on Stan Lee’s part.  Buzzing on his new powers, and realising he can use them to win money to buy a car to impress Mary Jane, Peter takes part in a wrestling tournament — and wins.  His jubilation is short-lived: the fight organiser weasels his way out of giving Peter the full prize money, and the consequences of that form a straight line to the murder of Uncle Ben. 

So, Spider-Man is haunted by his past actions, giving him the requisite dose of angst that adolescents thrive on.  And at the same time, he — literally — masks that guilt and adopts a joke-a-minute persona with the bad guys he takes on, seen to its fullest effect in the second film, when Peter is relishing his powers.  That mix of jauntiness and emo despair will be familiar to anyone who has been a teenager, or has one in their house.

 Any hero is defined by the calibre of their villain, and Spider-Man has a rogues gallery of bad guys on his tail.  In the first film it’s Norman Osborn, a zillionaire scientist entrepreneur whose son Harry goes to high school with Peter.  Norman sees Peter’s intellect as outranking his son’s, and the two get on fine initially.  But in designing a weapons system for the military, Norman Osborn is driven mad and becomes the Green Goblin, who after being thwarted by Spider-Man appoints himself as Peter’s nemesis.

As a rationale it works well enough, but there’s another motivation underlying the Green Goblin: merchandising.  Conveniently, Green Goblin’s armoured outfit looks just like a kids’ toy, complete with accessories.  Ideal for rolling out as actual toys to children worldwide, accompanying Happy Meals, essential in a franchise like Spider-Man.  Ho hum. 

Green Goblin gets killed in the first film, and Harry takes on his father’s mental mantle in the third, sworn to take down Spidey, who he mistakenly believes murdered him.  That kind of continuity is exactly what superhero comics are made of, somehow straddling soap opera and Greek drama at the same time.  Which is good: it gives the films a feeling of connectedness, and there are all kinds of easter eggs dotted in the trilogy for readers of the comics. 

One of the biggest assets of the trilogy is its lead actor, Tobey Maguire.   

It’s an inspired piece of casting: Tobey is credibly nerdish as Peter Parker, and has a physicality that suits Spider-Man, very much in line with the way that Steve Ditko drew him — he’s got a wiry build, not a muscle man’s.  

Maguire convinces as a harried young man trying to do the best he can, with a touch of puppy dog in his genetic make-up, quizzical at the curve balls life throws him.  And if he doesn’t always perform to his best as Spider-Man, that’s because in a lot of the longshots when he’s swooping through the city you’re actually looking at a digital simulation that sometimes has a rubbery feel. Other actors also turn in strong performances.  Kirsten Dunst is delectable as Mary Jane, and has her own character arc across the trilogy, experiencing the ups and downs of the acting profession, falling for Spidey and discovering that he and Peter are one and the same.  She has such a transparently good heart that it’s credible when, under her watchful eye, a bank employee puts back cash that bursts out everywhere during a robbery.  Of the supporting characters, the best is newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, brilliantly brought to life by actor J.K. Simmons, a foghorn-voiced penny-chiselling petty tyrant who hires Peter Parker to take photos of Spider-Man, only to use them in a campaign against Parker’s alter ego.  Which is typical of Peter’s luck, and gives rise to some great scenes in the offices of the Daily Bugle. The third film sees a rival compete with Peter to bring images of Spidey to Jonah’s attention — Eddie Brock, whose emnity towards Parker has tragic consequences. 

The relationship between Peter and Mary Jane is at the heart of the films.  That and the bond between Peter and Aunt May provides an emotional core to the story that grounds it in recognisable human feelings, important when there’d otherwise be a danger of getting lost in larger than life action.  One of the keynotes is a special moment between Spidey, hanging upside down, and Mary Jane, who pulls up the bottom half of his mask to give the hero an iconic kiss.    

 Comparing that kiss to one from her beau in the second film proves to Mary Jane that she really isn’t committed to the relationship — but she doesn’t get to kiss Peter and discover the whizzbang she feels when they lock lips as that’s when the bad guy turns up, a perennial problem of dating superheroes.  And the kiss is a touchstone once again when Spidey demonstrates the same move with a rival in front of a crowd celebrating what he’s done for New York — the city might be impressed, all Mary Jane sees is Peter cheapening ‘their’ kiss.  Impressive, on director Sam Raimi’s part, that something so apparently simple can be called back through the trilogy to demonstrate different facets of Peter and Mary Jane’s romance over time. 

Raimi is an interesting director, who started out with the horror classic Evil Dead, but is also a pal of the Coen Brothers, co-writing their The Hudsucker Proxy and being a sounding board for them as they are for him.  He’s more steeped in pop culture than the Coens, with a love for comics and tv and genre films that clearly comes out in his own work: the first Evil Dead film (which Joel Coen worked on) was very much a cheap horror, its sequel had comic elements to give it broader appeal, and he’s followed that pattern since: shocks leavened by humour, as seen to good effect in Drag Me To Hell. Maybe it’s Raimi’s relish for pulp fiction that makes him so adept at handling villains.  None are better than the second film’s bad guy, Doctor Octopus, played magnificently by Alfred Molina.  He starts out as anything but plain old Otto Octavius, a scientist dedicated to harnessing fusion technology to create cheap power for the world.  But as soon as he declares that he holds “the power of the sun in the palm of my hand” you know that hubris is going to bite him on the ass.  And it does.  An experiment — funded by Norman Osborn’s son, and Peter’s friend, Harry — goes wrong.  Result: the four robotic limbs that Otto uses for his experiments are fused to him, and lose the ability to be overridden by his conscious mind.  The snakish extensions are an amazing creation, and bring out a darker side of Otto, fuelled by the death of his wife in the experiment that went wrong.  He’s a tragic figure, and one who with Spider’s guidance comes to redeem himself when it counts, humanity winning out over baser instincts, saying with dignity “I will not die a monster” as he seeks to right what he has done. 

The third film is perhaps weakened by having three villains.  Sandman is a stunning creation, run of the mill baddie Flint Marko escaping from the cops and leaping into a pile of sand that’s being used for an experiment (those scientists insist on messing with forces they can’t comprehend).  He gets zapped, and becomes a creature of sand, the effects for this transformation first class, and used to convey pathos as well. Less successful is the alien symbiote that turns Spider-Man’s costume black and boosts his powers, before moving onto another host in the form of photographer rival Eddie Brock.    

When the symbiote is with Spidey it’s a brilliant opportunity to showcase more of Tobey Maguire’s range, as a darkly seductive side to Peter comes to the surface, seen to fantastic effect in a scene set in a jazz bar where Mary Jane is singing.  Peter saunters in, accompanies her on piano (‘does whatever a spider can’ evidently includes keyboard wizardry), and launches into a dance routine in which he humiliates Mary Jane by flirting with a love rival in front of her.  The cad. But when Eddie Brock bonds with the symbiote, it’s not so interesting. 

Except, that is, for the matter of his defeat.  The crittur turns out to be vulnerable to certain sound frequencies, which Spider-Man discovers by accident when he wallops the Brock symbiote with a hollow metal pole.  Realising it’s effective, Spidey gets a bunch of similar poles and puts Eddie within a circle of them — the first time to my knowledge that an enemy has been defeated by tuned percussion since my uncle Len played the Mike Oldfield album Tubular Bells to drown out the carol singers at his door. 

The final villain of the trio is Green Goblin.  Kind of.  Norman Osborn died in the first film, and son Harry replaces him in the third.  But only after he has amnesia and forgets that he hates Peter, reigniting their former friendship for a while.  It’s a cute device, and of course it doesn’t last — Harry realises what the score is, and sets out to avenge his dad…or is that extend the franchise given the merchandising undertones of all this?  In the end, Harry has a change of heart and pairs up with Spidey to take on Sandman and the symbiote-boosted Eddie Brock. If it all seems rather fraught and melodramatic, it works because these costumed weirdos stay true to their characters.  Harry Osborn reverts to being Peter’s good pal.  Otto Octavius reasserts control over his serpentine limbs and dies a hero.  Sandman is forgiven by Peter for his involvement in Ben’s death and gets to live on, free to love the daughter he misses so much.  It’s only the symbiote that dies, and good riddance: it’s icky.  Besides, its function is to bring out the worst in people. 

The Spider-Man trilogy is a fine addition to the superhero movie canon, one of its more honorable entries given the amount of garbage out there (I’m looking at you Catwoman, you Daredevil, and — sad to say — Fantastic Four, whose comics can be fine stuff).  It’s a kinetic funfair ride with Spidey swooping between buildings, having cool fights in alleys, and on and in subway trains zooming through the metropolis, zinging out one-liners as he does.  What could be more fun?  Add an ongoing romance with a great looking girlfriend that takes us from teenage crush to real relationship with credible problems, and you’ve got a series that suits both genders, and every age.  Perfect family viewing, and worth going back to for some of the subtleties Raimi and his writers bring to the films that give the films a lingering fizz you might not be expecting. 

Copyright Adrian Reynolds, January 2010

THE MOVIES: 

Spider-Man (2002): Screenplay by David Koepp. Directed by Sam Raimi. 

Spider-Man 2 (2004):  Screen story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar & Michael Chabon, screenplay by Alvin Sergeant.  

Spider-Man 3 (2007): Screenplay & screen story by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi; screenplay by Alvin Sergeant. Directed by Sam Raimi.  

I do have a couple of gripes about the movie though.   And I accept that my criticisms probably say more about me than they do about James Cameron.

But really,  who would actually want to live on that ghastly planet full of simpering size zero models?  They’re all so skinny!  Where are the tubby aliens!

I also have a problem with the sheer unremitting niceness of the aliens.  Admittedly, Neytiri the cute alien love interest, does get to snarl and be cross from time to time, and those indeed are her sexiest scenes. But the deal is: humans, especially American soldier humans, and American mean-minded bureaucrat humans, are a Bad Thing (except for our small team of liberal-leaning American nice guys, including one Hispanic woman.)  And the aliens, by contrast, are a Good Thing. For they are ‘primitive’, at one with nature, in touch with their feelings, and receptive to the gaia of the planet in the way that rich materialistic Westerners (like me and, quite possibly, you) simply aren’t.  

Well okay, it’s a movie, and that’s the story, and I’m not going to knock it.  But there’s something about this vision of the sacred primitive that has always got my goat.  Because in reality, lots of ancient and primitive cultures have been violent and warmongering.  Some civilisations, like the Maya, died out because of greed and war.  The Incas and the Aztecs were also brutal violent cultures; and their Spanish invaders were no better, morally speaking, but also not that much worse.

And that’s humans for you. We are a violent, predatory, competitive species, and there’s never been a time in history or pre-history when that hasn’t been the case.  And no wonder: we are products of an evolutionary system that privileges survival over all else.  Nature is red and tooth and claw – damn, I wish I’d said that! – and the only way to stay alive is to kill better, flee better, or hide better than all the rival species. 

If primates had remained in the trees, and jackals had become sentient – would the world really be a better place?  Would capitalism be more humane and fair, if snarling hyenas in suits ran the banks and the financial institutions?  Would the streets be safer if wolves were in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme?  Or wouldn’t they just – being wolvish by nature – steal and kill and mug unsuspecting elderly wolves?

Lions are the kings of the jungle; but they are lazy, arrogant and savage beasts.  Would sentient lions do a better job of this planet?  Or wouldn’t they just sleep for eighteen hours a day then nuke all the other lions for two or three hours before going to bed again? 

Evolution is a cruel schoolteacher; and for that reason, my guess it that most aliens we encounter – all of whom will have been subject to evolutionary forces - will be just as violent and selfish and brutal as we, as a species, are.

Of course I like to believe that humanity is capable of better things.  Humans can be wise, poetic, liberal, gracious, and kind.  (I’m not saying I am any of those things though.)  But generally, I would say – looking around a post-Iraq War world, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, at a time when greedy bankers who almost destroyed our financial system are being rewarded by massive bonuses and new highly paid jobs – I’d say we are a species that has a long way to go before we can call ourselves a civilisation. 

In Avatar,  the balance of nature is vividly dramatised as a bond between all living things.  In evolution, I would more cynically argue, the balance of nature is that if there are too many herbivores, the predators will catch them more easily and then there will be fewer live herbivores.  And if the predators get too skilful, they’ll kill too many prey; and then they’ll die of starvation. 

Evolution is a battlefield littered with corpses; it’s really NOT that nice.

That doesn’t mean I’m defending the humans in Avatar.  Nor am I denying the beauty of Nature, and the extraordinariness of the way so many diverse creatures sustain life in a complex web of inter-relationships.  But ‘one-ness’ with Nature only gets you so far; it takes hard work, and moral courage, to pursue and enact the ideals of justice, peace, cooperation, democracy and fairness. 

So we, as a species, have a long way to go; but I’m betting that most other species in the universe will have the same problems, and the same flaws, as we do.  For that reason,  I’d prefer a less rose-tinted view of alien life.  Let them have flaws; let them make mistakes.  Let them be the slaves of their own evolution – whether they are predators, prey, parasites, or symbiotes. 

And let’s also hope that they, and we, learn to work together and with others, to build a culture that isn’t based around the desperate desire to thwart and humiliate others, in order to be ‘top dog’. 

I’ve recently started opening up this debatable space to guest blogs…most recently, Stuart Angell McGregor’s splendid piece on The X-Files and his own original, never-broadcast show The Flashlight Department.

Watch out for more of these guest pieces, which will generally be grouped under the heading of Movie Zone, TV Zone, and Book Zone.  And if you look to the left of this page, under Debatable Archives, you can enter any of these zones to read these blog-essays, or ‘blessays’, as I like to call them, though I doubt that word will catch on.

And here, in a mighty blog, is Archie Tait – cineaste and producer, who has worked as a pioneering film distributor and scheduler (at the ICA Cinema in London), and as a television producer and executive producer has created a staggeringly large and diverse body of work – from Bomber, to The Paradise Club, 99-1, The Uninvited, Chimera, and Heartbeat.

Archie and I have been talking a lot in recent years about science fiction and movies and,  well,  all sorts really.  And here’s his take on

Why Science Fiction Movies Aren’t More Like the Written Word

Take it away, Archie….
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Any Science Fiction maven, however old or young, knows the complaint.  Science Fiction is an enormous genre, covering philosophical, metaphysical, sociological, psychological, historical and spiritual speculation.  So why do so many people, not Science Fiction mavens, still think it’s about men in shiny suits shooting ray-guns?

Hmmm.  Maybe it’s because of this kind of thing…

Or this kind of thing….

Could be this….

It doesn’t even have to be men, and the suits don’t have to be shiny…

But it’s all pretty much the same image isn’t it?

In a recent Movie Zone blog  about The Watchmen, Philip Palmer concluded with this hope: ‘…that we get some rich science fictional variety in the movie theatres in the years to come – character-based SF that moves us, and touches us, existing side by side with Snyder-style (Watchmen) eye-banquets.’

I agree with Phil’s pluralist demands.  Still, Science Fiction isn’t just one or the other – emotions or images.  It’s about ideas too. Isn’t it?

In passing, though, I have to admonish young Philip on his late-onset adolescent infatuation with Snyder’s soft-core eye-candy in WATCHMEN.  The extended sex sequence not only stops the story dead in its tracks  but also quite contradicts the overall theme of the film: ageing Superheroes, and how they decay physically and morally.  In a film that has so much story, it can’t afford the time for any asides,  Snyder takes an extraordinary dog-leg away from the thematically-driven narrative to reveal that,  far from ageing,  Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg are actually remarkably well-preserved hot young things, who recover their youth and get it on before you can blink an eye.  I am certainly not against sex (where would we be without it),  and not at all against sex sequences in movies (which are always entertaining). But I am against filmmakers who include sex sequences that contradict their own narratives and themes, to placate an imaginary audience of adolescent boys who can’t watch any movies that doesn’t feature this scene.

Ahem… Now, where was I? Yes -  can Science Fiction movies articulate or develop ideas? Or will it always be about the power of the movie image to astound us?

Let’s consider this question…

Ray-Guns

Science Fiction by its very nature is a zone of infinite possibility.  So what about these ray-guns?  Why do these action-packed, violent images hold such sway in the popular imagination?

The short answer is – the movies.

Whatever else the movies do – they move.  They require action.  Science fiction in the movies tends to involve marauding monsters, alien invasions and star-fleet battles.

Back-in-the-Day-Guns

But hold on – surely even before the Movies, the very template of the genre was set by Jules Verne, the Father of Science Fiction, who yoked together the Speculative with Adventure?  Verne’s scientists – Professor Lindenbrock in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871), Michel Ardan in From the Earth to the Moon (1867), Nemo in 20,000 Leagues (1872) and The Mysterious Island (1874)– were explorers, adventurers in the world of the Future.  Men of Action.

It was from Jules Verne that the Movies borrowed not just plots, but the template for the Science Fiction Serials that developed the iconic figures of the Mad Scientist, opposed by the Two Fisted Adventurer.  FLASH GORDON (1936 and onwards) was the pinnacle, but dozens of others were churned out by poverty-row studios, incorporating stock footage plundered (usually abandoning any sense of continuity) from newsreels and European spectacles.

The Serials and the Poverty Row Programmers are the movie equivalent of the literary Pulps.  But unlike the sometimes beguiling, haunting and intellectually challenging stories that appeared from time to time in Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories, the Serials were all about Action.  Frequently contradictory in their story-telling, often senseless in their characterisation, the Serials are concerned only with moving to the next cliff-hanger, from which the Hero is extracted with little regard for science or logic.

From the serials, Science Fiction movies adopted the templates of Adventure and War.  Adventure plots would lead to the discovery of unknown monsters [KING KONG (1933) remains the greatest]; the War template was used for alien invasions [EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957)]. Spectacle is the name of the game.

But it all came from the Father of Science Fiction himself…

Dad                                                                           Mum

Attack of the Five-Foot Woman

But hold on again.  Let’s go further back into the pre-history of the genre – to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  She published ‘Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus in 1818 – fifty years before Verne published his first novel. Obviously her tag-cliché should be ‘the Mother of Science Fiction’ (though it’s not).   Here is an iconoclastic Explorer – Frankenstein – who through science questions the rules and assumptions by which we all live. Once he takes that step, and unforeseen forces are unleashed, it is not long before we meet Science Fiction’s equal and opposite requirement of the Active Protagonist – the fear that ‘There Are Some Things Man Is Not Meant To Know.’

We have entered the realm of Transgression:  an essentially moral arena,  a world of consequence,  in which our protagonists encounter the philosophical and the metaphysical.  We are going down a different road here.  We will not meet any ray-gun-blasting,  shiny-suited spacemen on it.

The Incredible Two-Headed Monster

In Frankenstein, we discover the invention of two major movie genres in the same story. Not only the Science Fiction movie, but also the Horror movie.

Though Science Fiction is generally about ‘The Outward Urge’, and Horror generally takes us into Inner Space, it is an indication of the richness of the genres that Science Fiction can take us on inward journeys [John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (1966)], and Horror movies can take us outwards on a huge scale [George Romero’s LIVING DEAD movies; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s PULSE (Kairo) (2001)], Horror and Science Fiction are two sides of the same coin. They are parallel explorations of speculative fiction through the rational and the irrational.

And it’s often hard to tell one from the other.  The SF Serials are themselves warehouses of the irrational; Arthur Crabtree’s FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) and Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979) are at least as much Horror movies as Science Fiction.  And over on the other side, the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN cycle, a key set of horror iconography, is an extended portrait of scientific ambition and discovery.

It is arguable in this Horror/Science Fiction overlap – in these smaller films –  that the cinema often finds its equivalent of those beguiling, haunting, intellectually challenging stories of the Science Fiction Pulps.

Literary Gold to Movie Tinsel: Alchemy in Reverse

Olaf Stapledon’s remarkable Science Fiction novels range from the then-unprecedented scale of ‘Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future’ (1930) and ‘Starmaker’ (1937) to the inner richness of ‘Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest’ (1935) and  ‘Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord’ (1944).

In ‘Last and First Men’ he traces the history of humanity across 2 billion years, and 18 successive species of humans; ‘Starmaker’ is nothing less than the entire history of life in the Universe.  By contrast, ‘Odd John’ is the life of one man, from birth to death, an intellectual superman; and ‘Sirius’, probably still his best-known work, the life of a dog born with the intelligence of humans, yet with entirely different instincts.

It is no accident that Stapledon was a moral philosopher; his novels are philosophical fictions of a radical kind.  In cinema, only Kubrick and Clark’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) has attempted anything approaching the enormous scope of ‘Last and First Men’, and then only in snapshot.  Despite the scale of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpieces METROPOLIS (1927) and WOMAN IN THE MOON (Frau im mond) (1929), he was never able to tell stories on the sheer scale of Stapledon, Robert Heinlein or Frank Herbert.  Arguably, only the Serials would have had the time and scope to be able to tell such epic stories, had they not been bound by budget and market to two-fisted ‘space western’ stories.

Since Lang,  cinema’s storytelling,  derived from silent movie grammar,  has speeded up,  but not advanced significantly beyond the narrative devices evolved by Edison,  Griffith,  Pudovkin and Eisenstein.  In fact, it could be argued that cinematic story-telling has actually regressed since Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916) and Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927).  It has devolved back into the earlier story-telling tropes of Lang’s (still eye-popping) earlier films DR. MABUSE THE GAMBLER (Dr. Mabuse der Spieler) (1922), SPIES (Spione) (1928) and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) (1933).  In these films Lang created the Mad Scientist / demagogue figures adopted by the poverty-row serials, and subsequently by the James Bond movies.

Small is Beautiful

Instead, it is in pockets of relative obscurity that we find cinema’s ability to tap into the most poetic and challenging areas of Science Fiction – in

Chris Marker’s LA JETEE (1962) [the source for Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS (1995)]; and in Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (Solyaris) (1972), STALKER(1979) and SACRIFICE (Offret) (1986).   And in those boldly dystopian small movies that invariably failed to find an audience when first released (Arch Oboler’s FIVE (1951); John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (1966); Joseph Sargent’s COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970); George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971) and Saul Bass’s PHASE IV (1974).

These are all ‘small movies’ – character-driven movies, scratching under the surface of their protagonists.

The Shrinking Man With the X-Ray Eyes

Let’s consider two beautiful, small-scale Science Fiction movies whose narrative trajectories are strikingly similar (and along the way, continue to consider how movies differ from prose).  Richard Matheson’s screenplay THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), directed by Jack Arnold; and Ray Russell and Robert Dillon’s original script X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963) directed by Roger Corman.  The titles are pure pulp exploitation.  The films are exciting, haunting and sad. Both are small-scale stories about single protagonists; yet each film metonymically invites the viewer to contemplate huge subjects.

The Shrinking Man Becomes ‘Incredible’

In Richard Matheson’s original novel ‘The Shrinking Man’ (1956) and in his own adaptation THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, size and scale are themselves the subject.  Scott Carey inhales insect spray, and is accidentally exposed to a radioactive cloud.  Then he begins to shrink.

That’s just about all the ‘science’ in this ‘Science Fiction’ story, which Stephen King argues in ‘Danse Macabre’ (1981), would be more accurately classed as a fantasy.  (I’d say he is largely correct, though when we get to considering the story’s conclusion, it’s really not quite as cut-and-dried as that).

The story, told in both versions from Scott’s point-of-view, is about what happens to your perception of yourself when something you have always accepted as immutable turns out not to be the case. Scott’s shrinkage is a great, multi-valent metaphor for just about everything in life we accept without too much thought.  It is a story about change – in ourselves, and in the world around us – and how we choose to adapt to it, or not.

Book vs. Film

Although both novel and film tell almost identical stories – the Big Events in the film are all drawn from the original novel – the book and the film have different emphases, and different outcomes.  And it is interesting to note Universal’s insertion of that extra word into the title.  As though the novel’s content – extraordinary as it is – weren’t quite enough.   As though for the movies, credibility isn’t quite enough – they have to be incredible; they have to challenge the very suspension of disbelief on which they rest.

In the novel, a medium in any event able to convey the detail of characters’ thought-process and state of mind, the emphasis is on Scott’s self-perception.  The metaphor of shrinkage is identical in both book and film.  But in the book Scott is not only married, he has a daughter; and his daughter has a teenage babysitter. As Scott shrinks, his relationship with his wife changes – his dominance in the marriage, as in the home, recedes, and with it his sexual confidence.  The sexuality of his marriage becomes nightmarish as he perceives his size – his ability to satisfy his wife sexually – shrinking.  As sex becomes a no-go area, his wife begins to treat him asexually, as a child; which puts the reverse-dominance through another cycle.

Scott becomes infatuated with his daughter’s teenage babysitter, but his knowledge that he is continually shrinking, more than his moral qualms, keep him from doing anything about it.  Finally, even his own 5-year-old daughter becomes a threat – she treats her father like a doll.  Compared with this, the next phase of Scott’s traumatic descent – threatened by a cat, and fighting off a giant spider with implements from a sewing basket – seems almost like a respite.

None of this psycho-sexual detailing is available to Matheson the screenwriter.  In the mid-50s, even if any Universal Pictures studio executive wanted to explore sexual themes in a special effects picture (they didn’t), the MPAA Production Code precluded them from doing so.  In the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, Scott and his wife have no daughter, so no teenage babysitter either.  Scott’s wife’s attitude moves directly from shock to sympathy.  The movie is therefore quite short (81 mins), and more interested in Scott fighting off giant beasts.

However, this is not to dismiss the movie as inferior to the novel. The movie is simpler than the novel, and because of that, the huge metaphor of the Shrinking Man, expressed visually, has its own remarkable power.  Shorn of much of the inwardness the novel allows Scott, the film allows us to form our own ideas about the significance of his shrinkage (though the movie does have a voice-over narration that simply and powerfully allows us access to Scott’s thoughts and feelings).

The novel achieves a remarkable intertwining of the stages of Scott’s realisation of his changes (derived from a parallel time-structure, as the story unfolds simultaneously in the present travails of a Lilliputian man, and in ruefully accounted flashback).  He is dogged by regret, and driven by anger.  In the present, he fights the spider for survival, constantly alert.  But he is constantly diverted by thoughts of the past – regret for what he didn’t value, or didn’t achieve; anger that his future has been stolen from him.

The movie follows a linear course from the encounter with the glittering cloud, through Scott’s perception that he has changed, which no one else shares; and through his ever-diminishing incarnations.  In the movie, we need no prompts, no inward reflections: we see the metaphor in action, unexplained. We understand Scott’s dawning fear, his realisation of sexual inadequacy, his loss of dominance in society and in the home, and his increasing apprehension of further weakness.  The metaphor of shrinkage, simply observed, signifies different meanings at different stages – it is a shifting metaphor, but enormously powerful because of that.

Stripped of the searing intimacy of Scott’s memories, which constantly interrupt his quest for survival, the film becomes an oddly contemplative journey towards accepting fate. It is in all ways a more positive account of Scott’s journey, making the stages of his descent a journey, towards the transcendence of all his previous beliefs. It is dark poetry, a parable, emotionally moving in its embrace of the inexorable, and the inevitable. It strips away from its protagonist all physical limitations, all human relationships, to arrive at spiritual simplicity.

(We can compare THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN with the shifting, unspecified metaphor of Jack Finney / Don Siegel’s magisterial INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS (1956) – a metaphor strong enough to induce cold sweat after dozens of viewings, yet unspecific enough to be justifiably interpretable as both anti-communist and anti-McCarthy).

The differences between the book and film become clearer as both move on to Scott’s encounter with a character common to both versions – the midget girl, Clarice.  In the novel, Scott has a sexual affair with her – he discovers that he has not lost his sexuality with his height – he is still ‘himself’. In the film there is no sexual dimension to their friendship – Scott discovers that he is not a human freak – he finds acceptance.  And just as important as his acceptance as a fully viable person, is where he finds it – in the carnival.

Dark Carnival

In American movies, the carnival is invariably ‘the Other Side’. It is a place of night in a brightly-lit society; it is the violent and unpredictable obverse of a rigidly organised, stable world; it is the world of the impoverished and the dispossessed, outsiders from the ‘overground’ world of wealth and comfort.  When Emil Jannings’ stuffy professor is ruined by his infatuation with Dietrich’s Lola-Lola in von Sternberg’s THE BLUE ANGEL (1929) he ends up in the carnival. Tyrone Power starts as a carnival barker in Edmund Goulding / Jules Furthman’s NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947) – so how can he fall further?  We see how far – he ends up a geek, biting the heads off live chickens.  When psychopathic playboy Rob Walker murders tennis-star Farley Granger’s errant wife in Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), it is at the carnival; to which Granger must return to exorcise his guilt by destroying it.  And it is where Ray Milland’s Dr Xavier finds his home after exercising his hubristic power in Corman’s X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963).

When Scott gets to the carnival, he has fallen beneath the lowest level of American society: he has joined the Underclass.  In the novel, he regains his sexuality – and loses his wife’s love.  In the movie he discovers – as Todd Browning had mapped 20 years previously in his long-suppressed FREAKS (1936) – that ‘freaks’ are human too: more so than many ‘normal’ people. (It is probably significant that in the movie’s more upbeat account of Scott’s encounter with Clarice, he meets her not at the carnival, but in a diner next to it – a lighter, brighter place.)

The midget girl and the carnival mark the end of the metaphor of ‘descent’.  Whatever Scott’s shrinkage means from now on, it is understood relatively.  He is going through stages of understanding his human condition – and of the Human Condition.

The End – And Beyond

And finally – the end of the book and film are different, in significant ways.  Actually, both end their narratives in the same way – there is no end.  There is no arrest of Scott’s shrinkage; certainly no miracle cure, no reversal, no return to former social and personal equilibrium.  Those things are left behind.   Particularly for a film in 1957, this is an astonishingly radical conclusion.  The horror the story elaborates turns out to be never-ending;  but also, when fully embraced, beautiful.

The novel ends with a haunting passage, as Scott recounts his realisation that his journey through change will not end even in death – and that it is a good thing.  Unlike his former existence, his life is an unending process of reinvention and discovery.

‘But to nature there was no zero. Existence went on in endless cycles.  It seemed so simple now. He would never disappear, because there was no point of non-existence in the universe.

‘It frightened him at first. The idea of going on endlessly through one level of dimension after another was alien.

‘Then he thought: If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence.

‘He might not have to be alone.

‘Suddenly he began running towards the light.’

And it is here that the novel, from its cursory beginnings in a ‘scientific’ explanation of Scott’s condition, re-connects with the concept of Science Fiction.  In this, it is more Science Fiction than Stephen King gave it credit for.  As Einstein observed, there are always new worlds to be discovered. (1)

Say Hello to God

The ending of the film is haunting too, in a different way.  In a voice-over passage reportedly added by director Jack Arnold, Scott’s constant transformation is accounted significance by being recognised – by God.  ‘And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears locked away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God there is no zero. I still exist.’

This lurch into religiosity is entirely typical of American movie Science Fiction, and is a hallmark of the genre’s representation in mainstream cinema. It occurs almost identically in the George Pal / Byron Haskin version  of H.G. Wells’  WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), written by Barre Lyndon.  WAR OF THE WORLDS is at the opposite end of the budgetary spectrum to HE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES. Wells’ ‘scientific’ deus ex machina – exposure to the common cold destroys the invading Martian war-machine – is characterised by ‘germs – the littlest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon our planet.’  H. G. Wells wrote the line, almost verbatim; but it was written by a character, it was not Wells’ judgement on the story; and it was not accompanied by a swelling hymn and chorus.

X-Ray Eyes

Roger Corman’s 1963 film X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES is based on a screenplay by Ray Russell and Robert Dillon, from an original idea by Roger Corman. It began as a saleable exploitation title in the imagination of James H. Nicholson, who with his partner Sam Arkoff ran the legendary drive-in studio American International Pictures.  AIP produced many of then finest examples of off-Skid-Row pulp SF movies, many directed by Corman.  Their titles are a cornucopia of ‘must see’. Many don’t live up their monikers, but many do: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS,  I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF,  THE BRAIN EATERS,  HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER,  PANIC IN YEAR ZERO. And Corman and Richard Matheson’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, from HOUSE OF USHER (1960) to THE TOMB OF LIGEIA (1965).

But if THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES (1955) turned out to have rather fewer (no – let’s be honest – it is one of the shabbiest monsters ever seen), at least TEENAGE CAVEMAN (1958) had a spectacular final twist, hijacked to historic effect by Rod Serling for his 1968 adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel PLANET OF THE APES.

And X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES  is a film that dwarfs even its magnificent title.  Ray Milland is Dr Xavier, who experiments on himself with a serum be believes will cure blindness.  Xavier is a driven scientist, whose own blindness is moral – he cannot ‘see himself’.  His punishment for hubris is success; and his ‘success’ will reveal to him ‘What Man Is Not Meant To Know’.

Xavier’s experiments lead to an addiction – he wants to see better, he wants to see more:  soon he discovers that he can see through solid objects and materials.  At first the discovery is the source of illicit fun – the promise of nudity (unfulfilled) the movie was selling to its drive-in audience. Then it puts him further at odds with his medical colleagues when he uses his new powers to contradict their diagnoses.  But Xavier’s addiction leads him accidentally to kill his boss: he flees, confident his newly acquired power will protect him from the law.

This is where Xavier’s ability to ‘see through’ things acquires a metaphorical resonance.  Pursued by the law, rejected by sympathetic friends and fellow scientists he insults and demeans, he is forced, like Scott Carey in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, into the sanctuary of the carnival, where he uses his X-ray powers to diagnose illnesses.  And here he re-discovers his affinity with ordinary people – re-discovering his original vocation as a doctor.  Just as in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, the carnival is a place of re-orientation; but it is also, in more conservative movie terms, a place of damnation.

The metaphor of ‘seeing through’ is growing, it cannot be stopped:  Xavier ‘sees through’ people to their psychic pain, and it begins to swamp him. He flees to Las Vegas, enriching himself through his ability to see when slot machines will pay out, and the next card to be dealt; he justifies his acquisitiveness by claiming to ‘see through’ the casino’s system for fleecing ordinary people.

There is a further level of seeing for Xavier to penetrate. He has seen through the physical world, ‘seen through’ its false ideology; ‘seen through’ the masks people create for themselves.  Now he begins to see through ‘reality’ itself – and he has the increasingly inescapable sense of ‘being seen’ himself.  Dimly at first, then in a horrific blast, he sees God.

In their indispensable Overlook Film Encyclopedia Vol 2 – Science Fiction (ed. Phil Hardy), Hardy and/or Paul Willemen have many perceptive things to say about X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES and the metaphor of sight, a theme they first explored in their book Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision (ed. David Will, Paul Willemen). But their final observation that X’s special effects are ‘weak’ is a quite inexplicable judgement.

The visual effects of this very low budget ($250,000 says Corman – probably even that is an exaggeration) are really outstanding.  Cinematographer Floyd Crosby’s prismatic colour separations are simple, but exceptionally strange and disorienting.  They are highly effective throughout the film, and it says a lot that Xavier’s ultimate vision tops them all.  Xavier’s vision is not a benign God.  Abstract colour has rarely been used to such effect in cinema.

Xavier is driven by this vision to his final apocalypse.  It takes place in a fundamentalist religious gathering on the edge of the desert.  It is Old Testament, utterly punitive.  Shocking though it is (and I still remember my jaw dropping and my hair standing on end when I first saw it) there is speculation (by Stephen King, supported to an extent by Corman) that the original ending went even further.

Like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and WAR OF THE WORLDS, X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES begins in the realm of Science Fiction, but unlike them, it is then drawn inexorably into the supernatural.  The film lives in the overlap between Science Fiction and Horror.  It seems fairly easy to reconcile Science Fiction and the Spiritual.  While it is possible for Science Fiction to co-exist with the supernatural, it is not possible for Science Fiction to embrace it.

However, this takes us right back to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (and it is worth remembering that Roger Corman’s final film as director was an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound – a story by a Science Fiction absolutist, directed by a man who could only direct THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE and THE RED BARON (Von Richthoven and Brown) as horror films.

In Science Fiction there is also Horror – but it is horror of the rational and material kind. From Fritz Lang to David Cronenberg, it is a legitimate pedigree.  Yet from the same sources, pushed further than the spiritual into the supernatural, we find the connected but distinct realms of fantasy and horror.

It is important to say that while ‘…that God in his wisdom…’ and  ‘To God there is no zero.’ may invoke the supernatural, neither story relies on it.  It is equivalent, in the development of English philosophy, to Bishop Berkeley’s answer to the question of how we know the world around us actually exists, and it is not merely an imaginative construct of the mind. He concludes that we understand that the world still exists, even if we cannot see any more of it than our own vision reveals, because of the existence of God.  God sees all.  Therefore he sees the World.   Therefore the World exists.

We would say now that Berkeley was mistaken: that there are many other scientific proofs of the existence of the material world, independent of our perceptions of it; and that even if he were unaware of those proofs at the time, his proof is based on unproveable faith, which he could not see beyond.  (Yet if Berkeley were alive today, he could still legitimately argue that ‘scientific proofs’ might equally be the product of imagination.  Just a really good imagination.)

We should also compare the Bishop’s idea of God with the view of Stanton Carlisle, played in Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film by Tyrone Power, in William Lindsay Gresham’s original novel ‘Nightmare Alley’ (1946):  ‘What sort of God would put us here… in this stinking slaughterhouse of a world? Some guy who likes to tear the wings off flies? What use is there in living and starving and fighting the next guy for a full belly?  It’s a nut house.  And the biggest loonies are at the top. (2) ’

Needless to say, that speech did not appear in Jules Furthman’s still searing screenplay of the film.  Gresham’s idea of God is close to Xavier’s vision in X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.  Corman’s film may embrace the supernatural, but it is not conventionally religiose.

Religiose or not, we are still in the world of Science Fiction.  More than being logically possible, it is logically probable that there are new worlds, presently wholly unimaginable, awaiting discovery.  These are not only physical worlds, presently defined, like distant planets, or beneath the oceans.  There are also worlds that may exist within and between the  dimensions we currently believe we know and understand. The worlds waiting for us, in Gene Roddenberry’s immortal split infinitive,  ‘to Boldly Go’…

The Beginning of The End

This blog started out asking whether Science Fiction movies could articulate or develop ideas, and ends up pitting William Lindsay Gresham against Bishop Berkeley.  Who will win?  There’s only one way to find out!  Fight! Fight! Fight! (3)

So – yes, these movies invoke ideas, and trigger new ones.

However, the question of whether movies can develop ideas, in a more complex ‘dialogue’ with the audience, is still open.  In the comparision between the novel the Shrinking Man and the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, we can see that in the movies, action tends to replace reflection.

Except for Bruce Lee, to whom action IS reflection.

This does not mean that ideas are evacuated, replaced by images: it means that ideas are expressed in images, edited together.  Ideas expressed in images tend towards the general: towards big, inclusive statements.  Moving images lead us towards the biggest, the most abstract (and most vague) commonly understood ideas – hence the sudden lunges towards religiosity. This is not a quality that leads to the development of debate or ideas.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Contact: ‘Big, Abstract and Vague’ – we love it.

Yet, while we have seen how long-form movie serials are resolutely uninterested in anything other than thrills and action (pleasurable though they are), TV series have engaged in extended debate with the audience. Most obvious in this respect is LOST, which triggers in the viewer an extended series of speculations on ‘What’s It All About?’  Also BATTLESTAR GALACTICA explores a post-9/11 metaphor of building a New World Order.  HEROES and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, over their many seasons, have developed a complex set of rules and qualifications for teenagers dealing with their supernatural/emotional sides: for their target audience, the equivalent of scanning all the relevant bits of Freud and Salinger.

Finally, The End

And to return to the movies: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES – just because the images are often bold and simple does not mean that they cannot reflect quite complex ideas. The ideas are metaphoric: they conjure ideas in the mind of the viewer, in the memory as much as through direct viewing experience.

Those images become embedded in the reflective consciousness of the viewer, in an effect more akin to the experience of poetry than of prose. We are haunted by them, and they trigger in us unexpected moods.  Chris Marker’s LA JETEE may be only 28 minutes long, but it is as rich in imagery as any feature film, or many novels.

So Scott Carey’s reflection on his continued experience at the end of Matheson’s novel can apply also to the different qualities of ideas expressed by movies and prose.  They are parallel but different; different but connected. Each produces a different quality of meaning, uniquely through its medium.  The proposition is not ‘either/or’, but each alone, and both together, in the expression of the genre Science Fiction.

The Final Question

The Final Question: would you trade the existence in the world of the novel The Shrinking Man for the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN?

Of course not.

And that is why Science Fiction movies shouldn’t be more like the written world.

- Archie Tait, copyright 2009
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(1)   While writing this blog, I came across Zack Handlin’s splendid comparison of Shrinking Man book and film on badmovieplanet.com/duckspeaks.  It was a bit like the American astronauts finding a ragged Union flag on the moon at the beginning of First Men in the Moon (but the other way round).  Of course I think it’s splendid – we say very similar things.  But Zack says them more briefly and wittily.  Which is why I leave my acknowledgement to the end.

(2)   Quoted in Woody Haut’s terrific essay in Eureka Video’s characteristically immaculate Region 2 DVD Nightmare Alley (2005).

(3) A British joke.  Apologies to non-UK readers.

Well actually I can’t manage 3 – I have to stretch to 4.  And in reverse order:

Number 4) is District 9, a wonderfully funny and also terrifically exciting action SF set in South Africa, in which the hero turns into an alien.  Peter Jackson executive produced this gem, and it was directed by Neil Blomkamp and written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell.

Number 3) is Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams and written by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman.  I’ve seen some negative comments about this on the web – on the lines of,  it’s ‘just’ a Hollywood blockbuster.  But I thought it was fast and furious and funny and very clever.  I love the fact that Abrams – with his US TV background – has the courage to mix slapstick humour, like Kirk’s balloon hands, in with moments of intense drama. I watched this in a packed cinema, and the audience oohed and aahed just as audiences ought to…This is space opera and it rocks.

Number 2) is The Watchmen, a faithful (thought purists might say otherwise) version of Alan Moore’s comic book which was visually extraordinary, and morally challenging.  Some found it a bit slow-paced and digressive; I thought it was a work of drama that had the courage to take its time.  And it was sexy too – great to see a Hollywood movie that isn’t afraid to admit that humans have bare bodies beneath their lycra.

But up there as number 1), my favourite film of the year, as well as being my favourite SFF film, is Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. 

Despite the dumb spelling of the title (it’s an in joke that is so “in” only Quentin gets it),  this is a serious, intelligent, thought-provoking, exciting, hilarious piece of a work from a film-maker who just gets better and better.  (Death Proof worked perfectly, in my view, as a B movie with real characters and great performances; and Kill Bill is kick-ass action rendered into astonishing visual poetry.)

I read quite a lot of hostile reviews of Basterds, taking exception to the fact that a) Brad Pitt’s men keep scalping Nazis, which is not very nice, and didn’t happen in real life and b) the final sequence has an event (I SHAN’T SPOIL IT!) that also didn’t happen in real life.  Oh, and lots of reviewers seemed to think that Tarantino had lost his mind, and simply shot random scenes from different films then tried to splice them together in a last minute frenzy.

However, I found it to be a very carefully constructed, rich, and utterly entertaining piece  of cinema.  And I loved the fact it is  based on an alternate history scenario in which the course of the Second World War was changed by a bunch of characters out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. (The fact the film uses alternate history means that – like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle - it most emphatically counts as SF, not just ‘war movie.’)

Basterds begins with a shockingly suspenseful sequence in which a Nazi colonel murders a family of  Jews – all bar one, Shosanna, who escapes, and plans a dark revenge.  She is the heroine of the movie, and the best thing in the movie; this is a luminous and wonderous performance from Melanie Laurent, who is even better than Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa.

The story of Brad Pitt and his Apache style guerrilla warriors is woven around Shosanna’s story, skilfully and beguilingly.  But Tarantino – a master of postmodern genre-mashing – is too smart to make a dumb ‘scalping Nazis’ movie.  He makes the dumb scalping Nazis stuff his enjoyable B-movie-style subplot, and THEN builds a structure of complex drama around it. 

I adore Brad Pitt for giving such a selflessly comedic performance; he stomps around like Popeye in an Ingmar Bergman movie. He knows it’s silly, and Tarantino knows it too. That’s the gag; diversity of tone and clashing of genres are the things that light Tarantino’s fire.

So here’s to the Basterds!  And let’s hope next year brings as many great movies.

My Number 4: Beware, spaceship over Jo'burg!

Er, Mum, I have a lobster's hand, is that normal?

Why can't I get my head into this poster?

Space...the final frontier....SO cool.

The Watchmen, in their jim-jams.

He's definitely a basterd.

 

Actually, she's not, but she fights on their side.

 

And this is Shosanna, our feisty Jewish heroine.

The Red Shoes,

by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, an oldie and goldie.

It’s a sweet, colourful, beautiful film with acid in its veins.  It tells the story – the deceptively simple story – of a young composer who writes the music for a ballet based on the Hans Christian Anderson legend of the red shoes.  And it intertwines that with the story of the young ballerina who dances the lead role in that ballet, and is acclaimed.  It’s the classic ‘star is born’  formula which Simon Cowell milks to this day, but which he did not invent.

As always with Powell and Pressburger’s movies, I watched this piece growing amazement.  For the films of these two men – close collaborators who wrote, directed and produced their films jointly in Coen Brothers style – are not structured or conceived in orthodox ways; they don’t fit the template for ‘popular movie’.  They are simple, yet complex; conventional, yet bafflingly weird. In A Canterbury Tale, the main story concerns a man who pours glue on women’s hair in wartime England; but the real story is about England itself, its buildings, its music, its people.  And in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp we are introduced to the old fartiest of old farts – an elderly, bald moustachioed military man (who resembles the period newspaper cartoon caricature known as ‘Colonel Blimp’, a by-word for reactionary military types) and then we flash back in time to see what the old fart was like when he was young, and dashing, and magnificent.

I saw a screening of Colonel Blimp in front of an audience of young screenwriters in Yorkshire – and they were visibly stunned at the strangeness of the approach, and the acidity of the wit.  These Powell and Pressburger films are the most bizarre blend of hokey oldfashionedness and audacious art. 

And so The Red Shoes – which I saw many years ago, and vaguely remembered as being a rather pretty ballet drama – slowly and eerily evolved into a tragedy about the mania of art.  The driving force of the story is Boris Lermontov,  impresario and chief of the Ballet Lermontov, whose genius is such that he can transform other, ordinary mortals, into geniuses.  He’s a talent spotter and a mentor rolled into one; he inspires the young composer Julian Craster into creating a work of shimmering wild brillance; and he has total faith in an untested ballerina who he has discovered, despite the reservations of all his trusted advisors – and his judgement is totally vindicated as she dances with passion and grace and terrifying frenzy.

A long section of the movie consists of an uninterrupted but edited version of the final ballet, merging stage magic and movie magic, and conjuring up poetry and colour in motion of a kind that would give James Cameron’s Avatar a run for its money.

And that, pretty much, for a good hour or so, is the story of the movie!  The ballet company goes about its business. They stage a ballet. It’s successful. And the legend of the red shoes – magic red shoes that dance and dance and dance until the dancer who wears them dies of exhaustion – helps launch the career of two artists.

But then, slowly, the real story unfolds.  I won’t give away the final twist;  but I will say that there’s a reason this is one of Martin Scorsese’s  favourite movies.  For this is a movie about power, and about art. And above all it’s about the mania of art – the belief that nothing, nothing, nothing matters more than creating beauty that will last for eternity.

This, of course, is not true.  Friendship is more important than art; love is more important than art; raising a child is a greater achievement than writing a poem, or making a movie, or writing a novel. 

But it doesn’t always feel that way.  Every time I read a blog or an article about the process of writing, I can smell the heady exhilaration of creation; the supreme conviction that nothing matters more than the white-hot frenzy of creating a work of fiction, or a piece of screen drama.  Often, for much of the time in fact, the process of writing is boring; much of it is sheer hard labour; but every now and then, the work writes itself – the characters come to life – the dancer becomes the dance – and very few things can beat that joy.

That’s why writers write; it’s not for fun, it’s for the opposite of fun. It’s for those moments of exaltation.  Creativity is a dangerous drug; though, fortunately, a legal one.

And this is the real story of The Red Shoes.  It’s about a man – Boris Lermontov – who forsakes his humanity in order to enable others to create great art.  He is of course a madman, and a fool, and a devil.

But sometimes, I have to admit, it seems like a tempting trade…

I’m in love with this show. It’s funny and dark and nasty, and all the main characters are totally unlikeable – and hence, I love them all.  There’s the gobby Irish one, the gobby chav one, the sexy slutty one,  the socially incompetent nerd, and the (actually rather pleasant) black athlete – all of them serving Asbos,  They are the much feared underclass; if they moved up a social tier, they’d be yobs; and they are never ever nice to each other. But I care about them, each and every one.

The brilliant conceit of the show is that they all have superpowers which are useless for fighting crime, and essentially just exaggerate the anxieties and fears these characters have anyway.  The telepathic girl (Kelly) is constantly enraged when she hears people thinking she’s a slag. The nerdy one (Simon) can become invisible – but no one notices him anyway.  And the black athlete (Curtis) can turn back time – and don’t we all wish we could do that, when we see what a mess we’ve made of our lives?

Ep 2 was my favourite so far – so very rude, and shocking, and yet with a big big heart.

This show is made by Clerkenwell – producers of the John Hannah Rebus, and the supernatural drama Afterlife.  I worked with Clerkenwell ‘head honcho’ (as movie people like to say) Murray Ferguson during my time at Scottish Television – he’s a softly spoken gent with impeccable taste. And my friend Petra Fried is now Head of Drama at Clerkenwell, and Executive Producer of Misfits.

Together with the equally rude True Blood, this is my favourite show on telly at the moment.

This is the only way he could top 2012, a disaster movie which features the end of the world, in astonishing graphic detail.  A supermarket splits in half; cities fall into the sea; the South Pole moves to Minnesota; and Everest looms in the middle of an ocean.

It’s a great spectacle, but it’s also a classic example of a Hollywood movie built by story engineers, not written by real writers. A real writer would have found some pain and pathos in this story of the End of Days.  A real writer would have created characters who you didn’t want to punch because they’re so damned noble. (The evil Russian oligarch with the big lips was the only character I liked – because he was so flawed.)  And a real writer would, quite possibly, have found a place for passion and eroticism and love, amidst all the falling buildings – because if the world’s about to end, wouldn’t you want to find a quiet place, and drink a bottle of wine, and make gentle elegiac love with your partner?  I mean – don’t these people have any emotion other than blind panic?

But story engineers do know how to engineer a good story.  The thrills thrill, the spills spill; all the characters have journeys (from A to A 1/2), and yes, I did have a tear in my eye when Danny Glover did the noble thing half way through the story.

It’s a shame, though, that Emmerich didn’t feel able to call upon the many brilliant screenwriters in Hollywood who can infuse genre material with real truth and wit. 

Oddly, it feels like an oldfashioned movie because it’s not in 3D. After Pixar’s Up, I can’t believe that all blockbuster movies aren’t made that way.

For a fabulous image of Apocalypse, as painted by John Martin, see Paul McAuley’s highly perceptive blog, and scroll down to 4th November.

I’ve recently introduced a new feature on this blog…consisting of longer and more researched pieces on favourite books, movies and TV shows written by me and the co-geeks amongst my acquaintance.  At some point, I hope to create a separate section for these pieces, under the headings Movie Zone, TV Zone, Book Zone etc. But, er, I haven’t done that yet.

So far I’ve written about Outland and The Watchmen, enthused over The Bloody Red Baron, and drafted a short essay on one of my fave SF classics, Orwell’s 1984.  But this is going to be the first guest contribution to the Zones; and it is written by my former screenwriting student, a screenwriter and comic book reviewer of considerable flair.  His name is Stuart Angell McGregor, we all call him Angell, and this is what he has to say about the cult SF show The X-Files:

THE FLASHLIGHT DEPARTMENT (A boy’s own adventure within The X-Files)

from the fair hand of Stuart Angell McGregor

PART ONE – BATTERIES AND BULBS

I was 13, and had snuck lively into mother’s bedroom, when it happened.  Her TV, colour and heavy with channels, has always been far better than my own, with its constant teeth-buzzing hum, the two working channels and strange air of instant destruction about it.  Late night television was a refuge back then, a secret place with secret adult wonders, nudity and swearing, with liberal dashes of saucy violence. More valuable to a newly minted teen than gold. That night’s fresh wonder seemed different, a tall man and compact woman, be-suited and frantic with guns drawn, hunting for lost twins in a dark truck-stop parking lot.  I was hooked, drawn instantly to a world of twisting story, little genetic freaks with super powers, and shadowy government intrigue.  The tall man was Mulder, the fire-haired woman Scully, and this was my induction into The X-Files.

The show premiered in the States a year earlier, and had grown two-headed and strange from the bloated corpse of old mystery favourite Kolchak the Night Stalker, thanks to the fervent mind of Chris Carter, a Californian with the surf and spray of Big Sur salting in his veins, and memories of Watergate, the backward dealings of Tricky Dicky Nixon marked indelibly upon his formative years.

The addiction, for me, came thick and fast. This was new, a stand-out, and drew me back week after week to the secret confines of that after-dark bedroom.  I recorded the show over old home movies, and showed my allegiance by wearing X-Files t-shirts with pride. But only at home. The street was a different matter, my tees worn as they were beneath thick jumpers of geeky shame.  I fell hard in love with those two agents of American weirdness, the rabid believer and the scientific sceptic. It was great to learn just how backward and beautiful the world could be, and, to be honest, it was a relief to discover that there were things out there stranger than me, in the heady flurry of my early teenage years.

I wanted desperately to live in that world, to hunt down bizarre things that defied explanation, to be a high-flyng Fed with his own roguish approach to solving cases that no-one else would teach. But, at 13, where could I go, and what could I possibly do? I decided I was too young and fragile for such frantic field work (I did, also, have to be back home and ready for bed by a modest 9), not quite cut out for a life of constant danger and narrow brushes with extraterrestrial induced death.  No, there were more important things ahead for me, a position of such importance that Mulder, Scully and even the chrome-domed, brick shithouse-built superman A.D. Walter Skinner, would crumble pathetically and weep without my aid.  I would become the head, the number one man, the top dog of the Flashlight Department.

‘I mean,’ I thought to myself as I set about crafting my own winning ID badge from an old passport photo, a bag of crusty felt tips and liberal abuse of the school’s laminator, ‘they would be lost without those bloody flashlights, amount of dark and ominous tunnels that lot wander down.’  I would form part of the integral backbone of the FBI. Stuck in a dank hole?  Whip out the handy dandy flashlight my team had provided and find your way to freedom. Stretchy man-beast slavering at your heels and trying to scarf down your liver? A few hard smacks with a torch from my boys will put that freak down for good.

Yeah…The Flashlight Department. That was totally the way to go.

My completed badge wasn’t so much winning; having looked for the entire world to have been crafted by a gibbering monkey in the final spastic throes of a grand mal seizure…using only his teeth…but it was unique if nothing else. I wore it with as much pride as I could muster, but my desire to hand out replacement bulbs and fresh batteries soon drew its last breath, and turned quietly from rabid geekdom into a simple, but loving, appreciation of the show.

With little more than a muted whimper, the Flashlight Department was closed down.

You there! Writer guy! Come out with your hands up!!

PART TWO – DO YOU THINK I’M SPOOKY?

The X-Files broke a year later, with avid fans in over forty-two countries naming their dogs, rats, goldfish, children after those two daring agents, and urging them to answer the call for romance and resolution that were so deftly avoided on the show itself.  This was a programme that, as I was all too well aware, inspired something deeper, and sometimes darker, in its fan base, and gave that hardcore yet another reason to distrust their shaky governments and turn their wan and hopeful eyes skyward.

The first season reeked of a show finding its feet, and episodes such as ‘Fire’ and ‘Space’ fall flat when compared to later triumphs, but it had enough going for it to warrant the second season starting with a massive 42% jump in the Nielson ratings. The X-Files was an infection, and had spread virus-like throughout our culture, across the new frontiers of the internet, and the front pages of newspapers and magazines across the world.

The second season was savage, with more of a focus on the backward adventures of murdering America than the quaint abductees of the first. The Greys returned, of course, in ‘Little Green Men’ and the ‘Duane Barry/Ascension’ two-parter, but for the most part the screen was daubed unmistakably in the blood of cannibals, demons, and other twisted broken souls.

’3′ remains a stand-out, a dark and overtly sexualised tale of a Scully-free Mulder’s encounter with beautiful vampires living the fanged life in LA.

‘Blood’ and ‘Humbug’, the first story credits for one of the show’s most consistently inventive writers, Darin Morgan, were equally as evocative. The former a grim examination of the horrors of mind control, the latter a wonderful mystery set amongst a community of retired circus freaks and sideshow attractions.

This blood hungry season segued easily into a confident third; The X-Files was no longer a show unwilling or afraid to take overt risks.  Two episodes showed this aplomb, both coming once more from the special mind of Morgan, brother of the show runner/writer/producer Glen Morgan, and the dabbling actor brought on previously to play the shit-dwelling albino flukeman of ‘The Host’.

‘Clyde Bruckman’s Finale Repose’ featured Young Frankenstein’s Monster himself, the late Peter Boyle, as the titular Bruckman, a humble and down-at-heel insurance salesman blessed, or blighted, with the ability to look deep into a person’s future and predict with stunning accuracy the way that they will die.  The episode sings not only for its laudable acting, sharp writing, and honest sentimentality, but also for its focus on comedy, arguably one of the show’s first episodes to yet give chuckles any credence (‘Humbug’ being more odd than laugh out loud funny). Here we see the Uri Gellar analogue The Stupendous Yappi ponce wonderfully around a crime scene, and learn that Mulder will die an amazingly filthy death thanks to the marvels of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Or so says Bruckman, whose record, let’s be honest, is pretty damn solid so far.  Such lightness of touch and sweetness of spirit earned Morgan an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series, and the episode itself a none too shabby 10th place in TV Guide’s countdown of the Greatest Ever TV Episodes.

‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’ runs further with the comedic ball, employing a Rashomon-like approach to tell a tale of alien abduction and possibly rape from several highly skewed perspectives. This one has everything, from Harryhausen-esque monsters to aliens smoking fags and weeping.  There were even cameos from greying Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, and the steroidal muscle-bound man mountain cum politician, Jessie ‘The Body’ Ventura (who, as anyone who has ever seen Predator can attest, is a ‘goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus’) as ominous men in black.  Chung is wonderfully mocking, flashing a hairy and uncaring arse to the usualy stuffy conventions of the series, and giggling with impish glee as it does so.

The real meat and potatoes of the infamous ‘mytharc’ episodes – those that served to further the story of the shadowy Syndicate and their attempts to prosper in the face of impending alien invasion – were served lavishly for the first time in season three.  With oodles of black space oil, shape shifting alien bounty hunters, and naughty men in dark rooms.  The X-Files was going from strength to strength to strength, with more people tuning in now than ever before. It was a world rapt, the word conspiracy on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Season four stood up well to the mighty third, with more twisted tales kicking the often laborious mytharc episodes hard and firm in the teeth. Inbred baby killers murdered and merrily humped one another to the languid strains of Johnny Mathis in ‘Home’, while surgeons steeped in icky black magic sliced and diced for jollies and lumbering golems slapped some serious Hasidic bum in ‘Sanguinarium’ and ‘Kaddish’ respectively.

By far my favourite at the time though was ‘The Field Where I Died’, a touching exploration of past lives, notable for a wrought turn from Space: Above and Beyond’s (hands up who remembers that one) pouty sad-face Kristen Cloke.  David Duchovny infuses the normally laconic Fox Mulder with real emotional weight here, and though Gillian Anderson has little more to do than turn Scully’s patented sceptic-o-meter way past 11, and practice her disapproving looks, the episode works well, remaining for me one of the most effective pieces of the show’s entire run.

However, as good as season four could be, it ended badly with ‘Gethsemane’, a mindless and uninteresting wet fart of a thing, that hung Mulder’s apparent suicide in front of the viewers like a limp brown carrot.  Dangle all you want, Mr Carter, no donkey’s going to be nibbling on that monstrosity.

If ‘Gethsemane’ proved anything, it was that The X-Files was never quite infallible.  The finest and most enduring television shows have always been about ideas, pondering strange and imaginative ‘what ifs’. Much like Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek, Kirk maliciously laughing his arse off as he watches the Enterprise’s computer sputter and fizz in an attempt to define love,  The X-Files would sing gloriously when wrapping a

story around a simple but imaginative idea.  As such, the standalone episodes, cut free from the laboured mythology of the show, were where Mulder and Scully soared.  Indeed, it was the irascible rise of the mytharc that would ultimately pummel with such ferocity the final nails into the series’ coffin.

PART THREE – FONZIE’S SPEEDOS

A lot of things happened in 1977.

The press-studs and safety pins of the punk movement pogoed across a unsuspecting world,  a tiny film called Star Wars opened to some acclaim, and James Earl Ray, the pale-eyed assassin of Martin Luther King, spent three days with both freedom and sun on his skin after escaping from his Tennessee prison, soon to be captured once more.

What failed to set the world on fire, however, was the daring jump that King of Cool Arthur ‘Fonzie’ Fonzarelli made over a confused shark while water skiing.

Think about that for a second.

The Fonz had come, through TV wonder Happy Days, to epitomise everything that was winning about 50s cool.  He was a handsome, anti-authoritarian rebel and loyal friend to both hipster and nerd alike.  The man was dripping in sex and awesome haircuts, yet to cram this man-god into garish Speedos (along with trademark leather bomber) and have him turn aquatic tricks over a rubber shark? This was all part of the strange ‘Hollywood’ three-parter, the bastard chlid of the fevered minds that broke Happy Days.  You could virtually hear the hearts of a million teeny boppers shatter.

20 years later, radio personality Jon Hein would coin the term ‘jump the shark’, a nod to that mess of a stunt that went against everything that made Happy Days what it was. and an umbrella term that would come to signify, simply, that point at which a once popular show had taken a sharp right turn off the straight and narrow, and out into the bounding unknown of babbling inanity.  The point at which, when nobody was looking, popular culture would eat itself.

It’s not quite fair to point to the fifth season as the moment where The X-Files bravely leapt across that gaping Great White of TV, but look at the face too closely, and you can clearly see the worrying cracks of decline.  There are some wonderful moments to be sure: Carter’s own ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’, a stylish black and whilte chronicle of a Frankenstein’s Monster-like creature (The Great Mutato) obsessed with Cher and Jerry Springer, is both funny and touching, while ‘Chinga’ and ‘Killswitch’ prove to be strong efforts from King of Horror Stephen King, and Cyberpunk guru William Gibson (actually Gibson’s second dalliance with the show.)

However, much of the season is mired in ongoing mytharc concerns, with more abductions, double crosses, and requisite strangeness galore.  These are solid episodes, well crafted and performed, but they do little to attract new blood, even proving somewhat unforgiving to the faithful who, thanks to abductions and space adventures of their own, may have missed an episode or two. No, stumble along the way for even a moment and you are picked off, The X-Files demanding an unwavering amount of loyalty.

‘Fight the Future’, the feature film that bridges seasons five and six followed, but never quite proved itself the jumping on point for new viewers that the creators had hoped for. Nor did it offer the long sought after resolution that fans clamoured for. It looked great, Mulder and Scully upgraded to natty suits, and the sheen on A.D. Skinner’s head showing extra sparkly polish (see above), but in the end it did little but add an extra layer of murk to the show’s muddy mythological waters.

Season six comes sweeping in like a cool breeze, refreshing and welcome.  To say that The X-Files here reaches the top of its game would be to do such hard work a disservice.  To say it actually dances merrily to the top of its game while whistling Dixie is kind of closer to the mark.

Those mytharc outings are general eschewed here for confident and experimental standalones.  ‘Drive’ is a fabulous Speed-flavoured dash across America to stop Brian Cranston’s head from exploding into sticky bits, ‘Triangle’ is a kooky Nazi time-warp drama, while the two-part ‘Dreamland’ is a fantastically funny look inside Area 51 and the faltering private lives of those pesky men in black (and features a randy turn from David St. Hubbins himself, Michael McKean).  The list goes on too, with ‘How the Ghosts Stole Christmas’, and Duchovny’s (on writing, directing and acting duties) own ‘The Unnatural’ among the very best episodes ever produced.

But for all these positives, and indeed there are many, The X-Files basically kills itself halfway through the season, with the ‘Two Fathers/One Son’ double bill bringing a swift and unsatisfactory end to the ongoing deeper arcs of the show. The members of the deadly Syndicate, that mystery shrouded agency that spearheaded the coming alien apocalypse and confounded Mulder and Scully at each fresh turn, are all unceremoniously offed by scrappy alien rebels from Uranus…or somewhere.  One cannot help but watch and wonder how this happened.  Had Carter and Co. simply become bored with a thread that would seemingly never end? Or were they, as some have suggested, making up this shit as they went along?

The X-Files labours from this point on, and becomes an aimless thing with little sense of actual direction, stumbling painfully across our screens sucking its thumb and hoping that someone with more sense will be along soon to tuck it lovingly into bed.  As such, season seven, the media-poking joy of ‘X-Cops’ and ‘Hollywood AD’ aside, doesn’t quite know what to do with itself.  There’s a sense of grouding ties being cut desperately.  The disappearance of Samantha Mulder, Fox’s long lost sister, is resolved in a frankly puzzling mid-season attempt at fan service.  Always thought she was abducted by those little green men? Well, more fool you.  No, she was rescued from a scummy painful fate by spiritual creatures who released her soul into starlight.

Yes, she became a star.

There’s no denying that Mulder’s brief reunion with his sister’s peaceful soul (set to the magical strains of Moby’s ‘My Weakness’) is emotionally affecting, but there’s also no doubt that there’s little justice in such a long running story arc, and such an important motivational factor for a main character, being resolved in such a ham-fisted slipshod manner.

The show was, by this point, heading ever closer to a final end point, with contractual disputes with Duchovny, and many a faltering storyline, seemingly spelling out a sticky end.  Major plot threads continued to be tied off (though the bows weren’t always pretty or neat), and recurring characters, such as grizzled nemesis The Cigarette Smoking Man, were written out or summarily dropped.  ‘Requiem’, the season finale that returned the agents to the lush Oregon woods from their very first case together, was supposed to act as show finale too, with Agent Mulder finally being taken by the beings he had so determinedly chased for seven years.  He was gone.  Scully was alone, and The X-Files were over.

But behind the scenes, the Fox network (never one to let a dead thing stay that way) were offering Carter incentives to bring the show back and keep it running.

Mulder remains missing as season eight wheezes its way to a start, and though Anderson’s Scully carries the focus well there’s something sad and almost pitiful at work in his absence.  The show’s dynamic is reversed as she is paired with Robert Patrick’s John Doggett, she now the believer, and he, every inch the no-nonsense G-Man, the sceptic.  Though her newfound openness makes sense in the greater context of the things she has both seen and experienced, it all sounds so wrong coming out of her mouth.

‘Oh Agent Doggett! It’s obvious that these people were eaten by a scabby old bat monster. Why are you so closed to such a possibility?’

It’s rather unsettling, and somewhat akin to having your mum compliment you on the shapely curve of your arse.

Doggett himself is a worthwhile character, played with a hardness and compassion by Patrick.  He comes to form a quick bond with Scully, caring more than he lets on (see how devastated he seems upon seeing Scully happily comfort the new returned Mulder in ‘Deadalive’), and is actually more open to the influx of super-soldiers and weirdness than the show gives him credit for.

His presence in these later seasons does little to allay a bothersome problem I’ve always had with Mulder’s character. Namely, that for all his suave intelligence and adventuring bravado, he can often come across as eminently unlikeable.  He has a grand and unenviable ability to lapse into moments of petulance and pomposity so severe that one feels simply compelled to punch his mouth shut.  The antagonistic relationship he shares with Agent Doggett, for no good reason, proves how he can be a bloated know-it-all just as easily as he can be an admirable voice of dissension within a corrupt and harmful government system.

So, it’s John Doggett who proves to be the one to watch in those last two bumbling seasons, with Scully sidelined with her miracle baby, William, and Mulder’s relevance slowly dwindling.  It was Dogget’s brief tenure on The X-Files, along with Annabeth Gish’s Monica Reyes, that thankfully threatened to reignite the dull spark of  a show that had long since lost its way.

But that further reinvigoration and promise was scuppered by the show’s ultimate cancellation in 2002.  It ends well enough, with a feature-length finale that finally sees Mulder and Scully escape to some kind of freedom together, but there’s little here in the way of resolution.  The carrot still dangles.

EPILOGUE

I don’t tend to watch TV now, or certainly not as fervently as I once did The X-Files.  The land of terrestrial television is full of easy missteps, the great and the good of modern programming often lost in the late night wastelands of their channels, with few around to watch, except the wide-eyed and sleepless, and the devoted hardcore.

Massive boxsets now bring us the whole thing, from bounding start to whimpering finish, in one go.  So I’m currently revisiting The X-Files, over 200 episodes of savage strangeness and conspiracy, and for the most part it’s a joy.  There’s brightness in the best episodes that few other shows have been able to match since, an enthusiasm and candour that’s all too rare.  I know that as I move on and make my way through we’ll eventually fall out of love again, that caring will turn to bitterness and disappointment, but that doesn’t matter. Right now, the show and I have a flush on our cheeks and a spring in our step.

You know, maybe I’ll head down to the cellar and dig around for my old mess of an ID.  I mean, the amount of tunnels those two go down…someone needs to be in charge of the flaslight, right?

I’m now aiming to post a little more regularly – this year has been a whirlwind for me and my blogging has suffered! And in particular, I want to introduce a new semi-regular feature of movie and TV show reviews and ‘stuff’ about movies and telly.  I’m going to call this MOVIE ZONE and, er, TV ZONE.  (Cue spooky ‘Twilight Zone’ music…)

In previous blogs, I’ve written about science and science fiction and movies and TV shows I like, and also generally about the movie and TV businesses.  I’ve also posted entries on what it’s like to script edit for telly, and my experiences of going to the Cannes Film Festival and the AFM. 

And the Movie Zone blogs are my way of combining my two passions and areas of work – science fiction, and film.  They’re also an excuse for me to watch some old classic genre movies, some for the second or nth time, some for the first time. And what the hell, TV Zone is reason to write about my favourite TV shows – Battlestar Galactica, The 4400, Supernatural, Smallville, and others.

So to launch this new ‘space’ on the Debatable Spaces site, here’s a comparison between two totally different films: Outland and Watchmen, whose only common factor is that they both belong to the movie SF genre, and I love ‘em both. (Watchman is pure genius; Outland is  half great, half crap – but love is love!)

 Outland (1981)

Logline:  High Noon on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons.  An action SF thriller starring Sean Connery as a police marshal pitted against a evil mining corporation whose greedy conspiracy is causing miners to kill themselves, gorily.

Writer/director: Peter Hyams

Cinematographer: Stephen Goldblatt

Composer Jerry Goldsmith (he of Star Trek fame!)

Watchmen (2009)

 Logline: I’m guessing you know the story…retired superheroes kick ass!

Writers: David Hayter (X2, XMen, Scorpion King) and Alex Tse.

Directed by Zack Snyder.

Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons.

Cinematography: Larry Fong

Music by Tyler Bates

Watchmen is cinema as sensory and moral overload; that’s what I love about it.  Alan Moore has disowned it, as is his wont; and most civilian critics found it to be rambling and digressive to an annoying degree.  But anyone who loves Alan Moore’s original graphic novel will find, I hope, little to rage against here; this is Moore’s vision, and Gibbons’ visual anarchy, rendered with love and as much accuracy as is desirable.

It is of course just so damned wicked. Former super-hero Edward Blake aka The Comedian is a rapist, and a monster.  And his fellow superhero Rorschach is a seriously disturbed individual who brutally murders a dwarf convict and exudes sleaze. Even squeaky-clean Nite Owl (Dan Dreiberg) learns to embrace the morality of evil-for-a-greater-good by the story’s shocking end.

Most readers of this blog wil have read the graphic novel, but I won’t take the risk of stumbling into plot spoilers for a film so recent.  Go and see the damned film!  And don’t wait for the DVD or the BluRay; this is a film designed to be seen on the big screen.  It’s full of explosive action and images that pound the retina.  Like Zach Synder’s previous movie 300, and Robert Rodriguez’ Sin City, this is a film which delights in the graphic novel’s exaggerative style and rich visual palette and renders it on to the big screen, with knobs on.  All three of these movies challenge the way films are normally shot – the colours, the framing, the preposterousness of the images – they’re all leached from the comic book artist’s crazed visual cortex.  They simply don’t look real.   They are more than real.

The Matrix also played this trick – it’s the greatest graphic novel adaptation that is not in fact based on a graphic novel.  I can still remember with awe the first time I saw that movie – and I still recall jolting foward in my seat when Neo started to fly and karate punch and zoom at superspeed. It felt as if the possibilities of the cinema image had just been expanded.  And when I read the screenplay, I felt it to be a masterpiece of intelligent allegory coupled with knock ‘em dead movie action – though admittedly it’s marred by often ponderous and humourless dialogue that only very great actors can render as credible, natural speech.

And this – the hallucinogenc hyper-reality – is to me is the great triumph of the Watchmen.  It takes a great story – it doesn’t screw it up – it organises the story material with care and  intelligence, unspooling a series of origin stories followed by a stand-out action climax – and along the way it makes images that shine and resonate.  The Nite Owl’s flying ship in erratic, ludicrous flight over the city; Doctor Manhattan, his resplendently blue male organ bobbing (bet he never gets emails inviting him to have his penis enlarged!) on his base on Mars; the shocking revelation that beneath his ink-shimmering bandage mask Rorshach is actually – normal.  All this for me is visual poetry.  I even found the gratutitous sex scenes between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre enchanting. My cineaste friend Archie Tait advises me that this scene is just, urggh, eggy! and over the top; but damn it all Archie! This sex scene is rich in truly beautiful images, in a film which devotes itself to celebrating beautiful and extraordinary images.

Of course, pretty images do not a great movie make. But the story was already great!  And Synder, Hayter and Tse had the courage of Moore’s convictions; they didn’t try to rebuild and sanitse the story, to make it suitable for the target movie demographic.  (As the makers of Wanted, shame on ‘em, did – it’s a fun movie but a pale imitation of Mark Millar’s scurrilous, vicious, amoral graphic novel satire.)  And in three staggering hours, Snyder does more than not screw up a good plot; he makes us live in a land of image.

In 300, he did the same.  It is, at one level, a preposterous erotic fantasy for gay guys (and nothing wrong with that!) And it’s also, for me, a daring movie made up of pure myth, rendered in images that are beyond-real.

And I think films like this mark one of the futures for cinema – even more visual, even more spectacular, even more extraordinary.  As an SF novelist, I’m a lover of amazing heart-stopping images; and it’s movies like Watchmen that inspire me to write words that aim to conjure wondrous images in the reader’s mind.

But compare and contrast that with Outland!  Outland is a really fun movie, but in many ways it’s a relic of an older style of (relatively) lower-budget film-making.  It’s a chamber piece with extras, a studio drama enlivened by a few great images of Io floating above the great red globe of Jupiter.

It’s also a film cursed with dialogue even clunkier than that which clunked through The Matrix.  There are some painful scenes in Outland, especially those in which Sean is declaring his love for his saccharine wife and son.  And Mr Connery has one speech in which he laboriously utters a series of repetitious platitudes, when he visibly struggles to find a way to add vocal variety to lines which are all saying the same thing - sure evidence that the screenwriter doesn’t read his own damned stuff.

But mixed in with the dross is a gem of a story.  It’s an old fashioned, horny handed SF yarn.  Miners on one of the moons of Jupiter are commiting suicide; and only the marshal can find out why, and save the day.  The Western parallels are overt, from the poster image to the naming of Connery’s rank (not ‘Captain’ or ‘Lieutenant’ or any of the other police ranks, but ‘marshal’) And there are two stand-out action sequences.  In one, Connery’s character O’Niel (they sure can’t spell in the far future!) spots someone with a sac of the (fictional) drug that is killing miners (polydichloric euthimal, no less). And he sprints athletically through futuristic corridors and recreation rooms before finally confronting the bad guy in the kitchen – where he has to plunge his own hand in boiling water to retrieve the vital evidence. And then – he winces – just a tiny bit. Now that’s what I call a tough guy…

And in the final setpiece, which I won’t describe for fear of spoiling, Connery fights to the death against assorted bad guys, assisted on by the ship’s cranky female doctor, played superbly by Frances Sternhagen.  The rapport between her and the lean, tanned, older but still shockingly sexy Connery is one of the highlights of the film.  Sternhagen has no glamour, she’s no looker,  she’s rude and irritable; but the two of them together light up the screen!  Screen chemistry like this isn’t about looks; it’s about two vivid personalities interacting.  Who gives a shit about Connery’s pretty but pallid wife, when there’s a wily old bird like this to make him come alive!

The story is genuinely clever, and it’s a really gripping movie.  I’d recommend it strongly. But it’s the contrast between the visuals of this movie and Watchmen that intrigues me.  Outland wasn’t a cheap ‘quota quickie’ film made by an impoverished British company.  It was a Hollywood epic, made with state-of-the-art special effects (it was the first film to use Intro Vision to create credible backdrops.)

And the budget for the film was around $16 million – which was a lot back in 1981! But you got far fewer bangs for your bucks in those days; and the film has that hemmed-in TV studio feel that for me is evocative of Doomwatch and the old Dr Who. So all in all, it’s not visual poetry; it’s just an oldfashioned great yarn.

And yet, though I admire the visual poetry approach, and get wonderfully overexcited at show-off action sequences, I do like this pared-back aesthetic too.  Not every movie can be an X Man or a Watchmen or a Matrix; the eyes can eat too many sweets. So I’m very attracted to the idea of SF films that focus more tightly on character and world-building, rather than going for the phantasmagoria SFX route.  As such, Outland is a template for a whole subgenre – suspense SF that’s about people, not just about action. (Even if the character writing in that particular movie isn’t ALL that it might be.)

We need both sorts of movie of course!  And I’d love, also, to see more special effects visual-smorgasbord movies that ALSO make us care about the characters. Because all too often, action films deliver nothing but action.  In particlar, I found the various X Men movies, which I’d been looking forward to for decades,  to be terrifically enjoyable – but over complicated, and ultimately heartless.  There are so many damned people on screen, it’s hard to root for any of them!  And there was never any time to explore the psychology of each and every X Man, as the comics have done so richly. (So I’m hoping the X Men Origins: Wolverine will redress that balance. On the basis of the trailer the prospects look good.

So let’s live in hope that we get some rich science fictional variety in the movie theatres in the years to come – character-based SF that moves us, and touches us, existing side by side with Snyder-style eye-banquets.

 Hell yes! I loved Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (which as well as directing, he co-wrote with his brother Jonathan).  It’s exciting, exhilarating, it’s richly written, it’s a class act all round. And Heath Ledger’s Joker (apparently modelled on Sid Vicious – how come all the best characters in movies are based on music biz stars? think of Captain Jack Sparrow, based on Keith Richards) is (I’m putting in another section in brackets here, for no good reason, I just love ‘em!) utterly brilliant and compelling.

It’s a weirdly structured movie though.  The genius idea is that the Joker brings anarchy to the city – this isn’t an old-style Batman villain dastardly plan, it’s a subtle strategy to shatter the very fabric of goodness in society.  (I’m not giving any specifics here, and I don’t think that counts as a spoiler.) Harvey Dent, the DA, has a role to play in the Joker’s evil thing; and it’s wonderful stuff.

But before we get to this, the meat and blood of the story, there’s an awful lot of other stuff to get to, involving the Far East and Mob money.  And I have to say, it does make the movie very long.  I loved the whole thing; but my adrenalin would have raced faster if it had been shorter. 

Morgan Freeman is eerily superb in his role as the gadget guy, Lucius Fox.  And Michael Caine clearly had a clause inserted in his contract that this time he would have to have a couple of major scenes and great speeches, to make his role more than incidental.  He does have those scenes, and those speeches; and boy, he’s stunning.  Caine has such composure and stillness, and Christian Bale has the charisma sucked out of him ever time he’s fool enough to stand next to our East End boy. 

Next year’s comic book blockbusters are The Watchmen, and Wolverine: Origins.   Can’t wait…

The movie has a dark political undercurrent, as this comic book character series always did.  Tony Stark is dying of a heart attack, he becomes an alcoholic; and, the killer punch, he made his fortune selling weapons of mass destruction. And this last  element from the original comic books now seems even more shocking and terrible in the context of today’s screwed-up world. 

Gwyneth Paltrow gives excellent support as Tony’s female sidekick – there’s a wonderful scene where she has to insert the electromagnet that is keeping him alive into a  HUGE GREAT HOLE in his chest. 

And Tony Stark kicks the whole superhero ethos on its big fat backside in one delightful moment, which I won’t spoil. 

The movie was preceded by a trailer for a spoof superhero movie in which a Tobey Maguire lookalike has the powers of a dragonfly. But the joy of Marvel is that you can’t spoof them – the humour is already there. 

Stan Lee makes his customary appearance, as Hugh Hefner, unless my ears deceived me.  What a great life that guy is having. He’s now surely one of the most powerful men in Hollywood (after sueing the studios to ensure he got his fair share of the gross – no one ever called Stan a sucker.) 

The Hulk is the next one out of the blocks – after the (for me) staggeringly disappointing Ang Lee version, it’ll be nice to see how Ed Norton shapes up.  I still yearn for a movie about the Hulk series (scripted by Peter David? who has an encyclopedic knowledge of these things?) in which the Hulk works as a Mob enforcer in Las Vegas, squeezed into a pin-striped suit.   

I saw this on the same night as the new Indiana Jones movie, which I also enjoyed, though a little less.  The queues for these movies, plus Sex and the City, were amazing.  And it’s a joy to see how many people enjoy their movies these days.

And yet…

It would be nice to see a couple of highly commerical movies that AREN’T based on old comic books or TV series.  Get Smart is coming soon – which I remember fondly, but was probably crap.  Hollywood is generating great movies; but they are getting timid.

A possible exception to this rule may be the movie of Wanted, based on Mark Millar’s daring and iconoclastic graphic novel of the same name.  I just hope they haven’t de-fanged it, or toned down its scatalogical and hilarious humour.

I recently attended the last in this year’s SPARKS workshops up in Yorkshire.  It’s been six months of intensive work with 3 bunches of writers.  My lot were developing TV series, and a damned good job they did too. And the other groups were working on feature projects, creating a wonderfully diverse range of projects.

I did a brief talk on one of my favourite shows, Heroes. Not everyone loves this show (Jeff Somers is agin it, and he’s someone whose opinions I very much respect) but I find it exhilarating and fresh and, damn it all, wonderful.  But, as is always the way, when you have to teach a movie or a TV series,  you look at it with fresh eyes.

And what I discovered about Heroes, on a second viewing with notepad in hand, is how much of it is not great; and how little that matters. 

The stuff that’s not great is, really, all the voiceover narration by the Mohinder character. On first hearing, it seems fine; but when you listen again, and focus in on the content – well, it’s so much tripe really. It’s all platitudes and generalisations, and doesn’t advance the story. (And of course, almost all the of the ‘science’ that Mohinder spouts in his actual dialogue scenes is, um, pretty dodgy.)

And yet, this doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter because Mohinder’s voiceover is there for a complex and subtle reason, and not because the narration is needed to move the story.  It was added, in fact, in post-production, always a sign of a panic last measure; and what it does is add style. 

There’s a scene in Ep 3, which I screened, in which the Nikki character is burying some bodies in the desert.  (If you want to know why, you need to watch it.) It’s classic thriller stuff, well shot admittedly, but very much the kind of scene you might get in any crime show.  So it could easily look, well, B movieish, or cheap tellyish.

But when the scene is played out with actor Sendhil Ramamurthy’s beautifully spoken voiceover on top of it, it becomes special, and evocative, and stylised.  It’s more than a woman burying bodies; it’s a scene of sublimity and pathos.

This is one of the great tricks of the show; everything is stylised,  enhanced, ‘more so.’  The colours are richer than life, with yellows and oranges and browns and fabulous set designs, and Indian streets stalls selling brightly coloured fruit, and shockingly bold shirts, and vividly rich lighting.  And the angles are cleverly chosen, bold and striking and disorienting, the shots develop swiftly and in a complex way, and every single shot has a three dimensional quality (something in the foreground, something in the background, something in the mid-ground, so the eye is constantly tantalised and entertained.) 

And the voiceover adds a whole level of stylisation on to this; it makes us aware that what we are watching is meant to be thought provoking and idea provoking and assumption provoking.  The voiceover teaches us how to ‘read’ what we are watching, in other words.

But Mohinder’s prose, as I say, is painted on with a very broad brush; I have a feeling, really, that it was written in a hurry.  But I’m not carping, just observing; and the narration is spoken so beautifully that it’s a pleasure to hear it, even if I often don’t bother listening to it.

And I came away once more confirmed in my belief that American TV series are better than their British counterparts because they really really care about style, as much as they care about content.  Every great American show has its own visual aesthetic, its own style rules – from the jerky camera movements of NYPD Blue to the staccato explorations of urban New Jersey in The Sopranos, to the lush malice implicit in the cinematography of Desperate Housewives. Whereas British shows tend to be shot in one of two ways; cinematically (if it’s high budget telly) and cheaply (if it’s factory telly.)  But there’s no real attempt to do what movie directors to – to create a unique visual look.  (Compare Spielberg’s Minority Report, with Spielberg’s ET, and compare them both to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List – they represent three totally different directorial ‘looks’.)

After my brief talk to the SPARKS group,  we did a question and answer session, and it quickly emerged that Heroes  is a show which has really captured the imagination of almost all the writers present.  It’s Marvel comics merged with prime-time US TV storytelling skills (Stan Lee even has a cameo as a coach driver.)  And it is, I would argue, one of the most visually beautiful TV shows ever made.

Later in the course of this residential weekend, we had a screening of the classic British film The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, one of Powell and Pressburger’s most outrageous, and funny, and satirical, and thought-provoking films. It features a very different type of hero – a moustachio’d Colonel Blimp who appears in the first scene as a figure of fun, and emerges after the film has told his story, as a man of romance, passion, and integrity, and heroism.  It’s a homage to an old fashioned kind of British hero.

There are plans for another SPARKS workshop next year; I hope very much to be involved in it.

Imagine if you could travel anywhere, whenever you wanted.

It’s that simple really. A science fiction extrapolation of the back-packer’s wanderlust.  You can travel to London, Rome, and Egypt – and still be home in time to watch your favourite show on telly.

There are villains, rather good ones, if dubiously motivated; and Samuel L. Jackson plays a bad guy with a scary haircut. But the real conflict is between two Jumpers, who bicker and end up having a fist fight that zaps exhilaratingly from location to location.

It’s a film that has no resonance, and leaves no lasting insights or profundities in the mind. It’s just – zap – zap – zap – great fun.

Pretty much, I’d say. Cloverfield is great scary action, and has one nail-biting sequence that had my vertigo working overtime. I once walked up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and was appalled at how nauseous it made me feel – because of the lean, up and down didn’t feel right and I was convinced I was falling.  The Rescue Scene in  Cloverfield had a similar effect on me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie - it’s brief, exciting, and exceptionally well shot.  But I found in the end I resisted the central conceit – the idea that the whole movie we’re watching is actual footage from a DV camera held by one of the characters.  I’m not normally slow to withold my suspension of disbelief; but this was a step too far for me.  A monster (no plot spoiler here, we all know this is a monster movie) is approaching, and you’re running for your life – and you take time to pan the camera around to take in the view? 

There was several points where only an utter lunatic would have carried on filming, and each of those moments kicked me out of the film.

I think the movie would have been stronger if it had just allowed us to imagine there really was a monster.  The Bourne Supremacy has a similar, jittery hand-held camera feel throughout – but we never query that.  It just feels natural, part of the movie’s style.

And the restricted POV of the movie – we only see what our main characters see – was used to equally good effect in Spielberg’s  War of the Worlds without any need for explanation.  The most chilling moment is when the Tom Cruise character sees bodies floating down the river; far more powerful visually than seeing the people being killed and becoming bodies…

But I did love the film’s complete absence of exposition and narrative information.  There’s a great big monster – that’s all we know. Is it an alien? Did it have a spaceship? We don’t know; and we don’t care.

Because it’s coming for us and it’s time to run…