Okay. Christmas. Now, as I quite famously do not believe in God (or ghosts or anything of that nature, despite my love of the horror genre) how do I approach Christmas? It is after all the most sacred holiday in the Christian calendar. Hell, it's the only day of the year that the newsagents I work at closes. The only day. We don't close for Hannukah or Passover or Ramadan - we don't even acknowledge their existence. In fact, by opening on a Saturday, you could say that we are actually mocking the Jewish faith. The only thing that stops it being a big fuck you to Eddie Moskowicz and all his Rabbi pals is that we defy the Christian church by opening on a Sunday as well, and not just for the state suggested times of six hours. No. The only concession we get to respect God is that we close half an hour earlier than during the week. We still open at five in the morning and close at half ten at night. Seventeen and a half hours of God-mocking business.
Now, as I said before, I don't believe in God. I'm not even agnostic. I'm an atheist, through and though, and it isn't an easy belief to hold (coming soon, a discussion of how atheism is a belief and not just a lack of belief). People of the religious persuasion have all the fun of the afterlife to look forward to. Or reincarnation. Or something, whatever. The point is that pretty much every religion holds that death is not the end. When you shuffle off this mortal coil, there's something beyond that. Be it heaven, hell, reincarnation as a goat, Nirvana, whatever. Not believing in God, we lonely, unloved atheists have no choice to believe that once you die, that's it. Finito. It's not an easy thing to think because as human beings, we're so aware of our own selves and our own minds that it's extremely difficult to consider that one day that's it. No more me. There's this very solid notion that somehow the consciousness muct live on. Well, I call it consciousness, religious folk would probably call it the soul - it amounts to the same thing. It's who you are. The essence of your being. The only real difference is that my view of the consciousness is defined primarily through experiences and emotions - memories, essentially, while I'm sure that some, the Catholic church in particualar, would probably like to think of the soul as something that doesn't really change throughout life, tainted only by sin. I could go off on one about Catholicism and its notions of sin and absolution, but I won't. It's a far bigger can of worms than I am prepared to open today.
Strictly speaking, in a purely scientific term, we do continue on after death. One of the first things we learned in GCSE Science was that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Once you get past the mind-boggling notion that the energy we are now expending has existed since the Big Bang (and before, if you subscribe to the theory that this universe is simply the latest in a long line of universes that explode outward at birth then contract together, creating another huge explosion which births the next universe - but quite frankly, I have enough trouble comprehending the numbers that our own universe generates without adding an infinite number of previous universes into the equation) and that energy will simply be endlessly transferred around until the end of time, you arrive at the epiphany that once you die, your body's energy doesn't simply go 'phht', it is transferred to other things. If you get buried, you become fertiliser, feeding the grass and the trees, which in turn feeds animals and so on and so forth. You get cremated (my own personal choice - I'm not keen on the idea of being buried, even if I am dead by that point and so past caring, it's the notion that what was once me will be just left to rot in the ground and it isn't a fun thought) and you become heat and light and sound. There's a poetry to that which I don't think a religous person would really appreciate.
So where was I? Ah yes. Britain is a Christian country. Forget the ramblings of the right wing fascist papers like the Daily Mail with their Conservative fears that the country is going to be overrun with asylum seekers and racist rants about Johnny Foreigner taking all the hard working white man's jobs (another subject not to get me started on, this) there is no way Britain will ever be anything other than a Christian country. Same with America. There's a reason we have a special Christmas edition of the Radio Times and shops like mine close for Christmas Day and no other. Sure, there are other communities within Britain, but they are in the minority and, like most minorities, generally ignored, left alone to get on with their own business on their own time. A shop which closed for Hannukah would get a lot of comment except in perhaps the orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Gateshead and the like.
And so I celebrate Christmas. Does this make me a hypocrite? Well, strictly speaking, yes. I am one hell of a hypocrite for celebrating Christmas and not actually believing in God or that Jesus Christ was our Saviour. But just as firmly, I am not, because Christmas today as we celebrate it doesn't have much to do with the birth of Christ at all, just as Easter these days is more about chocolate eggs and a giant pink bunny than some guy getting strung up on a cross and having his guts spilled by a Roman Centurion named Longinus. Because, in this day and age, we only want to commemorate happy things. Bad things are generally pushed to one side or remembered only briefly. A one minute silence out of respect for the victims of 9/11, a parade and a one minute silence for Remembrance Day. We had poppies in the shop for Remembrance Day and a whole bunch of kids came in getting them. I don't think they knew what they were for. To them it was probably just some cheap gimmick. Likewise, Christmas isn't about the birth of someone some two thousand years ago in a country halfway round the world. No. Christmas is about toys and snow and time off school if you're a kid. If you're an adult, it's about food and drinking and falling asleep in front of a James Bond movie on Christmas afternoon. All the pledges and homilies that are paraded out at this time of year, all that goodwill to all men crap - well, why don't we be nice to each other all year round? Isn't that what the Bible teaches us? Because, yes, I was brought up in a fairly informally religious community. We got taught Bible stories at school and sangs hymns. At Christmas we went up to the local church and sang carols. It wasn't really until secondary school that we were even explicity told that there were other religions, but even then, there was an implicit implication that they were 'other religions' and Christianity was the default.
So, were I to not celebrate Christmas, I would probably get a lot of strange looks, especially in the shop where I work as lately the big questions seems to have been, "Are you all set for Christmas?" Out of a sense of mischief I really wanted to reply to some people with some witticism along the lines of, "No, actually. I am Jewish and we don't celebrate Christmas." But such is the assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas and the generally low tolerance for sarcasm where I work that such a comment would probably not go over very well.
Ultimately, what it boils down to is tradition and peer pressure. Tradition because Christmas is something that we've always done - my mother is still fairly religious - and peer pressure because it's just what everyone else is doing. But bear this in mind: Next year my sister is getting married. Now, my sister is an atheist like me, although she probably doesn't analyse her belief in the non-existence of God in the way I do. But she's not getting married in a church. I asked her about this when they first chose the place they're getting married and tying the knot in a church never even crossed their minds. It's probably a good thing. Two of my friends got married in a church in June and I felt extremely weird about being in a place of worship. It probably didn't help that it was the same church we used to go to for carol services when we were at school which was somehwere I hadn't been since I was fourteen, so, coupled with the whole non-belief in God, I had a whole bunch of childhood related issues to deal with.
On a sidenote, I recently mentioned my atheism in passing to my boss. I have to stress the 'in passing' part of it because otherwise it makes me look like a nutjob who wanders rounds telling people about my beliefs and people like that really piss me off. Anyway, she (that is, my boss) said she did believe in God and asked me why I didn't. I admitted that I used to, back when I was young and then I had a whole agnostic period in my teens and early twenties and had only recently come to the conclusion that God either doesn't exist or that he's a sadistic son of a bitch and to be honest, as with my own father, I prefer to believe that he doesn't exist than believe that he does but he just doesn't give a shit. Because my life is generally not fun. It's a hard slog and things that seem to come so easily to other people are like getting blood from a stone for me, and if there's anything that all those RE lessons in junior school taught me (and say what you like about the Bible, from a point of view of being a moral guidebook it's fairly solid, just don't get me started on the plot) it's that if you live a decent life and are good to other people then you can't go far wrong and that's just not my life. For no good reason, I was bullied pretty badly for fourteen years of my life, so much so that I still suffer the psychological scars to this day and I used to justify it by thinking that, come adulthood, I would be the success and the bullies would be the ones who were miserable and unhappy. At the time, it seemed like a good deal. But it didn't work out like that. I'm constantly on the lookout for signs that my life is getting better, even just to the point where it doesn't actively suck all the time, but I just can't see them.
Peace out.
Monday 24 December 2007
Thursday 13 December 2007
Michael Myers Lives!
So, yeah, Halloween 5. The true nadir of the franchise. Or that might be Halloween 6, but I really cannot be bothered to dig out my video of it (The Curse Of Michael Myers is the only installment I don't own on DVD) and, hey, it's got Mike off of Friends in it, how bad can it be? It's fairly popular on the Internet Movie Database as well, but then, every film has its fans on the IMDb. Even Jaws 3-D. Yes, that's me.
It's a stupid, stupid film. Even leaving aside the wholesale raping of the finale to Part 4 and the sheer idiocy of the fact that some hermit - a fucking hermit! - looks after him for a year this is a movie where when he's locked up by the police, they don't even take his mask off him. Seriously, the guy is sitting there in a prison cell with his mask on. You have to wonder when they took the pictures if they took it off and then gave him it back.
There is one good bit in the movie when Jamie (having miraculously rediscovered the power of speech just as everyone who could interpret her for the audiences benefit bought the farm) is cornered by Michael (in a coffin he has unearthed from one of his previous victims, although why this is I have no idea) and as he pauses, she asks to see his face. He takes off his mask and we don't really see him. It's all in shadow and Jamie says 'You're like me,' which seems to be a remnant of a better script which dealt with Jamie's own homicidal impulses rather than bringing back Michael for a redundant encore.
Halloween H20, spurred on by the adrenalin shot administered to the genre by Kevin Williamson, is a much better film, mainly because it goes back to the essentials of the franchise. Whereas both Friday The 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street series were both much more about the killer, Halloween is much more about the victims, or the Final Girl. The true star of Halloween is not Michael Myers, but Laurie Strode (well, actually, the true star of Halloween is its cinematography, Dean Cundey is a cinematographer that films like Friday The 13th dream about). And so Laurie returns in H20, twenty years older and wiser. This is a film which attempts to explore the psychological ramifications of being relentlessly hunted by a homicidal maniac. She drinks, she freaks out, she represses her son and manages to fuck up every relationship she's ever had because she's scared. She is, in short, not the star of a slasher movie. She's a survivor of a slasher movie, plunged into another one. The most apposite comparison I can find to make is Ripley in the first two Alien movies. When she chooses to go along with the marines in Aliens, she's facing her fears, conquering them. That's what Laurie does in H20, conquers her fears. Only where Ripley uses a flamethrower and a power loader, Laurie uses an axe.
And while H20 has come in for a lot of criticism from hardcore fans (and where it comes to 'comic relief' security guard LL Cool J, I'm right there with them) it does a lot right, including the contentious decision to ignore the continuity for every Halloween film since Halloween 2. It's a franchise reboot that works, because it strips the concept down to the bone and just lets it play out. There's a very low body count, very little blood and, most of all, it's scary. Unlike Scream and the reboots of Elm Street and Friday The 13th which emphasised the comedy, H20 is as old school as you can get, meaning that it's faithful in spirit to the original, which is not something many films can say. I mean, look at the differences between Dr No and Octopussy, or Friday The 13th and Jason X, both of which are two examples of the same franchise separated by twenty years but which, surface aside, are very different beasts.
Halloween Resurrection makes the same mistakes as Halloween 5, retconning Michael's death in H20, putting Laurie in a nuthouse, despite the clear implication at the end of H20 that she'd conquered her demons and then presenting us with a bog-standard story. No, actually it's worse than bog-standard. It's a story that seems to have been written by someone who's just constructed a melange of slasher movie cliches in their head and then vomited them up on the screen. So the old Myers home, which was never that important an element, is suddenly vastly important in the same way that Camp Crystal Lake was important to Jason or that Elm Street was important to Freddy. And with the unforgivable dispatching of Laurie at the beginning of the film, we're left without a decent heroine. Resurrection descends into something its predecessors (even the abominable Part 5) never were; a faceless slasher movie.
As of this writing I haven't seen the Rob Zombie remake of the first film. The trailers look good, but what I've heard of it - that it explains why Michael does what he does - doesn't do much for me. Michael's homicidal rampage was all the more terrifying because we didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. Why did he have an overriding impulse to wipe out his own family? It's scarier if we don't know. If we know, then he just becomes another serial killer wearing a stupid mask.
Peace out.
It's a stupid, stupid film. Even leaving aside the wholesale raping of the finale to Part 4 and the sheer idiocy of the fact that some hermit - a fucking hermit! - looks after him for a year this is a movie where when he's locked up by the police, they don't even take his mask off him. Seriously, the guy is sitting there in a prison cell with his mask on. You have to wonder when they took the pictures if they took it off and then gave him it back.
There is one good bit in the movie when Jamie (having miraculously rediscovered the power of speech just as everyone who could interpret her for the audiences benefit bought the farm) is cornered by Michael (in a coffin he has unearthed from one of his previous victims, although why this is I have no idea) and as he pauses, she asks to see his face. He takes off his mask and we don't really see him. It's all in shadow and Jamie says 'You're like me,' which seems to be a remnant of a better script which dealt with Jamie's own homicidal impulses rather than bringing back Michael for a redundant encore.
Halloween H20, spurred on by the adrenalin shot administered to the genre by Kevin Williamson, is a much better film, mainly because it goes back to the essentials of the franchise. Whereas both Friday The 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street series were both much more about the killer, Halloween is much more about the victims, or the Final Girl. The true star of Halloween is not Michael Myers, but Laurie Strode (well, actually, the true star of Halloween is its cinematography, Dean Cundey is a cinematographer that films like Friday The 13th dream about). And so Laurie returns in H20, twenty years older and wiser. This is a film which attempts to explore the psychological ramifications of being relentlessly hunted by a homicidal maniac. She drinks, she freaks out, she represses her son and manages to fuck up every relationship she's ever had because she's scared. She is, in short, not the star of a slasher movie. She's a survivor of a slasher movie, plunged into another one. The most apposite comparison I can find to make is Ripley in the first two Alien movies. When she chooses to go along with the marines in Aliens, she's facing her fears, conquering them. That's what Laurie does in H20, conquers her fears. Only where Ripley uses a flamethrower and a power loader, Laurie uses an axe.
And while H20 has come in for a lot of criticism from hardcore fans (and where it comes to 'comic relief' security guard LL Cool J, I'm right there with them) it does a lot right, including the contentious decision to ignore the continuity for every Halloween film since Halloween 2. It's a franchise reboot that works, because it strips the concept down to the bone and just lets it play out. There's a very low body count, very little blood and, most of all, it's scary. Unlike Scream and the reboots of Elm Street and Friday The 13th which emphasised the comedy, H20 is as old school as you can get, meaning that it's faithful in spirit to the original, which is not something many films can say. I mean, look at the differences between Dr No and Octopussy, or Friday The 13th and Jason X, both of which are two examples of the same franchise separated by twenty years but which, surface aside, are very different beasts.
Halloween Resurrection makes the same mistakes as Halloween 5, retconning Michael's death in H20, putting Laurie in a nuthouse, despite the clear implication at the end of H20 that she'd conquered her demons and then presenting us with a bog-standard story. No, actually it's worse than bog-standard. It's a story that seems to have been written by someone who's just constructed a melange of slasher movie cliches in their head and then vomited them up on the screen. So the old Myers home, which was never that important an element, is suddenly vastly important in the same way that Camp Crystal Lake was important to Jason or that Elm Street was important to Freddy. And with the unforgivable dispatching of Laurie at the beginning of the film, we're left without a decent heroine. Resurrection descends into something its predecessors (even the abominable Part 5) never were; a faceless slasher movie.
As of this writing I haven't seen the Rob Zombie remake of the first film. The trailers look good, but what I've heard of it - that it explains why Michael does what he does - doesn't do much for me. Michael's homicidal rampage was all the more terrifying because we didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. Why did he have an overriding impulse to wipe out his own family? It's scarier if we don't know. If we know, then he just becomes another serial killer wearing a stupid mask.
Peace out.
The Night He Came Home. Again. And Again...
There's conventional wisdom about slasher movies as well. Mainly that the first one is worth watching and then it's a steady rate of decline from then on. Basically, the higher the number after the title, the worse it is, which is probably why after Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan and Halloween 6 - The Curse Of Michael Myers they stopped using numbers and went with just the subtitles so that people wouldn't have any idea about how bad they were intentionally going to be (and, knowing Hollywood, there was probably some debate that if something is a Part 9, then you have to have seen Parts 1 through 8 to have made sense of it all, and in this dubious tactic they might be right, after all, The Golden Compass has just come out at the pictures and half the people I've spoken to have no idea that it's the first part of a trilogy - hell, I know people who went to see The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring and expected it to end).
But, as always, conventional wisdom doesn't have it entirely right. After all, Jason X (or as I like to call it, Friday The 13th Part 10 - Jason In Space!) is the best of the Friday The 13th films, including the first one. In fact, when it comes to Jason and his machete-wielding adventures, in my opinion, the first film is one of the worst (and not just because he's barely in it). In fact, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst (Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the best comedy decapitation ever) and one being the best (Jason X), the original Friday The 13th makes its home around number 7, above The New Blood and Part 3, but below such alleged franchise nadirs as Jason Lives and the non-Jason entry A New Beginning.
The Halloween franchise is slightly different. I'll take anyone outside who offers up the opinion that the first film in this, the most archetypal of slashers, is not a true masterpiece. It's so great they even teach it on Film Studies courses, alongside such recognised classics as The Searchers, Jaws and Casablanca. The sequels, however, are a very different kettle of fish. Just like no one would ever try to squeeze Jaws 3-D onto a degree level Film Theory course, no case could be made for any of the Halloween sequels, despite some of them being far better than their reputation suggests.
Before I start though, I'm going to say that I won't even be going anywhere near the Michael Myers lacking third entry. While John Carpenter and Debra Hill's idea of doing a 'Halloween' film every year with a completely different story/cast like a cinematic version of The Twilight Zone was a good one, it was ultimately scuttled by the gorehounds devotion to Michael Myers and his William Shatner mask wearing antics.
So, Halloween 2. Still scripted by Carpenter and Hill, but directed by Rick Rosenthal (who has since made something of a comeback directing episodes of Buffy, Point Pleasant and Smallville). It follows on directly from the end of the first film, so much so that you could watch both of them in a three hour chunk if you really wanted to. And it works watching them like this as well. While the first film doesn't offer any real sense of closure, Halloween 2 sees Michael dead at the end, burned up, giving Jamie Lee the chance to move on with her life. Except that she doesn't get that chance. Halloween 2 is actually a good film, very much a Moonraker to Halloween's The Spy Who Loved Me and none of the ancillary characters stand out the way that PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis did in the first installment, but all in all, it's a far better film than anyone could have hoped for.
Halloween 4, subtitled The Return Of Michael Myers, to assuage any confusion that it was going to be another Season Of The Witch, is also a far better film than it has any right to be. Starring Jamie, the daughter of Jamie Lee's character (Jamie Lee, seen only in pictures here, has been killed in an off screen car crash, Dr Loomis is inexplicably alive, given the ending of Halloween 2 and Michael is more or less fine, despite spending the last decade in a coma) and her step-sister Rachel are our main points of focus here and while you may question the sense in having a slasher film with an eight year old lead, it all works. Unlike most films of this type, the police are called in early (all the more fodder for Michael to work his way through) with none of the usual disbelief and 'cry wolf' tactics that usually pad out such films. The ending, which sees Michael dead (again), also plays against expectations, showing us little Jamie having been pushed over the edge from witnessing her uncle's reign of terror, killing her stepmother, an event which also almost pushes Loomis over the brink. His reaction to seeing Jamie standing at the top of the stairs - he pulls out his gun and goes to shoot her, only stopped by the Sheriff - is also fantastically demented. It's probably the last time in the series that Pleasence gets to do anything enjoyable.
Because by the time we come to Halloween 5, subtitled The Revenge Of Michael Myers, again most probably to assure people that Michael would be in it, Michael is alive, having survived his fall down a mineshaft, taken a swim in a river and stumbled upon the wooden shack of the local hermit. He promptly tries to kill the hermit but falls into a coma. One year later, he wakes up, still at the shack (obviously it never occured to the hermit to take him to a hospital or call the police or anything else that might actually make sense), kills the hermit (at least he pays for his stupidity) and goes after Jamie again, who has been traumatised by the events of Halloween 4 and so hasn't spoken for a year. Now under the care of Loomis at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, it transpires her step-mother is fine, the kid stabbed her and then, at the end of the fourth entry, she obviously decided it would be best to lay there in the bath quietly as she bled out to provide us with our shock ending. Rachel and her best friend, the annoying peppy Tina, come to visit her and tell her she'll be fine. Jamie uses sign language with them. I vomit.
I have to go to work now, so: To Be Continued...
But, as always, conventional wisdom doesn't have it entirely right. After all, Jason X (or as I like to call it, Friday The 13th Part 10 - Jason In Space!) is the best of the Friday The 13th films, including the first one. In fact, when it comes to Jason and his machete-wielding adventures, in my opinion, the first film is one of the worst (and not just because he's barely in it). In fact, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst (Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the best comedy decapitation ever) and one being the best (Jason X), the original Friday The 13th makes its home around number 7, above The New Blood and Part 3, but below such alleged franchise nadirs as Jason Lives and the non-Jason entry A New Beginning.
The Halloween franchise is slightly different. I'll take anyone outside who offers up the opinion that the first film in this, the most archetypal of slashers, is not a true masterpiece. It's so great they even teach it on Film Studies courses, alongside such recognised classics as The Searchers, Jaws and Casablanca. The sequels, however, are a very different kettle of fish. Just like no one would ever try to squeeze Jaws 3-D onto a degree level Film Theory course, no case could be made for any of the Halloween sequels, despite some of them being far better than their reputation suggests.
Before I start though, I'm going to say that I won't even be going anywhere near the Michael Myers lacking third entry. While John Carpenter and Debra Hill's idea of doing a 'Halloween' film every year with a completely different story/cast like a cinematic version of The Twilight Zone was a good one, it was ultimately scuttled by the gorehounds devotion to Michael Myers and his William Shatner mask wearing antics.
So, Halloween 2. Still scripted by Carpenter and Hill, but directed by Rick Rosenthal (who has since made something of a comeback directing episodes of Buffy, Point Pleasant and Smallville). It follows on directly from the end of the first film, so much so that you could watch both of them in a three hour chunk if you really wanted to. And it works watching them like this as well. While the first film doesn't offer any real sense of closure, Halloween 2 sees Michael dead at the end, burned up, giving Jamie Lee the chance to move on with her life. Except that she doesn't get that chance. Halloween 2 is actually a good film, very much a Moonraker to Halloween's The Spy Who Loved Me and none of the ancillary characters stand out the way that PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis did in the first installment, but all in all, it's a far better film than anyone could have hoped for.
Halloween 4, subtitled The Return Of Michael Myers, to assuage any confusion that it was going to be another Season Of The Witch, is also a far better film than it has any right to be. Starring Jamie, the daughter of Jamie Lee's character (Jamie Lee, seen only in pictures here, has been killed in an off screen car crash, Dr Loomis is inexplicably alive, given the ending of Halloween 2 and Michael is more or less fine, despite spending the last decade in a coma) and her step-sister Rachel are our main points of focus here and while you may question the sense in having a slasher film with an eight year old lead, it all works. Unlike most films of this type, the police are called in early (all the more fodder for Michael to work his way through) with none of the usual disbelief and 'cry wolf' tactics that usually pad out such films. The ending, which sees Michael dead (again), also plays against expectations, showing us little Jamie having been pushed over the edge from witnessing her uncle's reign of terror, killing her stepmother, an event which also almost pushes Loomis over the brink. His reaction to seeing Jamie standing at the top of the stairs - he pulls out his gun and goes to shoot her, only stopped by the Sheriff - is also fantastically demented. It's probably the last time in the series that Pleasence gets to do anything enjoyable.
Because by the time we come to Halloween 5, subtitled The Revenge Of Michael Myers, again most probably to assure people that Michael would be in it, Michael is alive, having survived his fall down a mineshaft, taken a swim in a river and stumbled upon the wooden shack of the local hermit. He promptly tries to kill the hermit but falls into a coma. One year later, he wakes up, still at the shack (obviously it never occured to the hermit to take him to a hospital or call the police or anything else that might actually make sense), kills the hermit (at least he pays for his stupidity) and goes after Jamie again, who has been traumatised by the events of Halloween 4 and so hasn't spoken for a year. Now under the care of Loomis at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, it transpires her step-mother is fine, the kid stabbed her and then, at the end of the fourth entry, she obviously decided it would be best to lay there in the bath quietly as she bled out to provide us with our shock ending. Rachel and her best friend, the annoying peppy Tina, come to visit her and tell her she'll be fine. Jamie uses sign language with them. I vomit.
I have to go to work now, so: To Be Continued...
Monday 12 November 2007
Down And Out In Bradford
Traditional wisdom holds that most people, when starting diaries, do well for the first few weeks and then tail off. Ahem.
Not that much has happened in my life. At all. But I thought I should tell you all I'm still alive. Still single, as well, but that's not really a cause for celebration.
And there's not really any potential people out there for me. There're a couple of people I like - there's actually one person who I really like - but the liklihood of anything happening there is slim-to-none.
So I come back to my dilemma which is partially why I stopped writing on here in the first place - is this an online blog of my life, or the criticisms of a caustic critic? I just don't have the energy for writing two blobs (I barely have enough energy to do one). I originally thought that I might be able to combine them, but it looks a bit messy. But maybe that's what this blog is - a bit messy.
So, you'll be hearing from me soon. Hopefully.
Peace out.
Not that much has happened in my life. At all. But I thought I should tell you all I'm still alive. Still single, as well, but that's not really a cause for celebration.
And there's not really any potential people out there for me. There're a couple of people I like - there's actually one person who I really like - but the liklihood of anything happening there is slim-to-none.
So I come back to my dilemma which is partially why I stopped writing on here in the first place - is this an online blog of my life, or the criticisms of a caustic critic? I just don't have the energy for writing two blobs (I barely have enough energy to do one). I originally thought that I might be able to combine them, but it looks a bit messy. But maybe that's what this blog is - a bit messy.
So, you'll be hearing from me soon. Hopefully.
Peace out.
Tuesday 24 July 2007
In Search Of The Human Adventure
There's conventional wisdom in the world of Star Trek, perhaps more so than any other fandom that I am involved in, with the possible exceptioon of James Bond, and even with Bond, you do get the odd rallying cry to the true greatness of Moonraker or Licence To Kill.
Trek, on the other hand, is so rigidly organised that every movie has a set verdict already imposed on it. So here goes:
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Worthy but dull
Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan - Brilliant
Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock - Unworthy
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home - The pinnacle of mainstream Trek
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier - Bobbins, and probably all the fault of Shatner
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country - A worthy final voyage for the original crew
Star Trek: Generations - Two Captains in search of a plot
Star Trek: First Contact - Brilliant
Star Trek: Insurrection - An overlong episode of the TV show
Star Trek: Nemesis - Shite.
Now, by and large I do actually agree with most of the judgements, with two notable exceptions (and I have been known to watch TFF and enjoy it immensely on occasion, but that doesn't render it any less bobbins). They are The Search For Spock and Insurrection. Both of these films, it has been argued, are like overlong episodes of the TV show, with no real cinematic value. Which is kinda true. It's also true that they both follow on from tub-thumpingly balls to the wall action movie entries into the Trek canon and isn't variety the spice of life? If either TWoK or FC had been followed up by a film which had tried to do the same thing but bigger and better, they would have been doomed to failure. Look at the movie franchises which have tried that: Pirates Of The Caribbean, Batman, Terminator - it's a case of diminishing returns because you can only go so far before it just gets ridiculous.
So, TSfS and I turn the heat down a little. It's a good thing. It lets the characters breath. As good as FC was, the only character who got a look in was Picard, with his Moby Dick homaging subplot. Everyone else in that film was simply acting out their plot function. I brings the cast of The Next Generation back for the first time since - arguably, the holodeck sequence at the start of Generations. Because no one would have watched the series for the epic space battles and action. As a weekly syndicated series, TNG was amazingly light on action. It was about character. We fell in love with Star Trek (and The Next Generation in particular) because of the characters, not because we turned in each week to see shit getting blown up. That's not what the TV show was about. It's not what the movies are about either. Both The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are anomalies in the ten-film sequence, much in the way that Tomorrow Never Dies is an anomaly in the Bond canon in that it doesn't feel like a Bond film. It feels like a common or garden action movie that just happens to have James Bond as it's hero. The Trek universe of The Wrath of Khan is subtley different to anything that has gone before in Trek and anything that will come after it. Even TSfS and TVH which follow on from Khan take place in a different universe. Not massively different, but enough to ensure that Khan's militaristic Napoleonic era sea battle transposed to space has a unique place. While First Contact isn't as drastic a departure - by this time the Trek universe was much more defined and rigid as it was when Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett were carving out new territory - it still carries with it a different mood - again, it's a much more militaristic Starfleet we see here (and it's ironic that First Contact, made before the start of the Dominion War over on Deep Space 9 is a much more militaristic film than Insurrection, which takes place during the war), emphasised by the new uniforms and the design of the new Enterprise-E. It also rewrites Trek lore to introduce the Borg Queen (and back in 1991, Peter David, that bastion of quality tie-in fiction had to have a disclaimer in his Borg novel Vendetta as it featured a female Borg and - according to Paramount at the time, such things did not exist). In much the same way that Aliens symbolically castrated the threat of the xenomorphs by having so many of them (and having them suddenly so easy to kill, a far cry from the one indestructable alien in Ridley Scott's entry) having a spokesman (or in this case, spokeswoman) for the Borg - giving an enemy whose facelessness was on of its most appealing factors - removed much of the threat and was an all too easy concession to the apparent need for the film to have an identifiable foe who could go up against Picard. And give Data a blow job in the most literal sense.
The Search For Spock is essentially Part 2 of the Genesis trilogy (although Part 3 - The Voyage Home is less concerned with what happened in the previous two films and more bothered about having a good time and delivering its eco-message). Unlike the films starring Patrick Stewart and co, the original series films more or less follow an arc, an arc which is most apparent between films 2 and 4, continuing on from each other as they do. As such, TSfS has a lot of mopping up to do, although why they felt they had to bring back Spock is beyond me. It is, at it's core, an unnecessary action. I know Spock is the most loved of the Trek characters (although McCoy will always be my favourite - while Kirk is the fist and Spokc the brain, McCoy is the heart of the original crew) but having him brought back, and by such an obvious plot McGuffin cheapens the character and robs us of what could have been an interesting new crew dynamic. Picture this: following the events of Khan, the Enterprise crew stay together, the ship being repaired. Taking Spock's place as Kirk's first officer is Saavik, it's obviously command that she's been groomed for when she takes the Kobayashi Maru test and her inexperience would have created a lot of interesting conflict and taking over at the science station is David Marcus, Kirk's son, who was all but wasted in TSfS, aside from the one short scene where he's talking with Kirk over the intercom and he says 'I knew you'd come'. Now, it's fairly clear from the closeness of Saavik and David in TSfS that they have some sort of relationship bubbling over so you have the chance to do what no Trek series did till DS9 did - you can tell stories about long-term relationships and father-son stories. Obviously, this wouldn't work in the conext of the movies because there wouldn't be enough room to develop those relationships to a sufficient degree, and anyway, I'm not here to regret what might have been. I'm here to defend the third film.
And it is worth defending. There's a lot of good in there, a lot of humour despite the rather grim plot, a beautiful restatement of what Trek is all about when Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Now, you have to remember how Kirk felt about the Enterprise. It wasn't just a ship to him. It was his home, his life, hell, it was almost like his lover. How many women did he fall in love with, only to leave them behind because he was more in love with the Enterprise? Exactly. Losing the Enterprise, and losing it in the way he did (especially so soon after losing his son) is - to me - a greater loss than that of Spock at the end of the previous movie. As Kirk himself says at the end of the movie, when Spock has been returned to him, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." He's not talking about Spock's needs there. He's talking about his own. Having never faced death until losing Spock, he's come to realise that the Enterprise means a lot to him, but it means less than Spock does, than David does, because you can't deny that Kirk's actions are primarily motivated by revenge. He blows the Enterprise up to kill the Klingon bastards that killed his son. It's telling that he doesn't even realise what he's done until he sees the hulk of the Enterprise burning up in the atmosphere of the Genesis planet and it's up to Bones to tell him, or to mollify him, saying that he's done the only thing he could do. In essence, The Search For Spock is all about one man's greed and what it costs other people. And that man is Jim Kirk. Picard goes on a similar emotional journey in First Contact. Having been tortured and dehumanised by the Borg, he is prepared to go to any lengths - even sending his entire crew on a suicidal mission - to defeat them. The main difference between the two captains is that Kirk's greed is motivated by a desire to get his friend back - David's death and the destruction of the Enterprise are simp,y two unfortunate consequences of that desire - while Picard, like Ahab, is driven purely by a desire for revenge, and revenge, in the universe of TNG is not something that is tolerated.
Insurrection is, in my opinion, probably the second best of the TNG movies. Nemesis obviously brings up the rear, it's poorly thought out plot, flat direction and basic lack of understanding of the characters/concepts that make Star Trek what it is cripple it and the good in it - and there is some; Riker and Troi's wedding, Dina Meyer as the Romulan Commander, the battle between Shinzon's vessel and the Enterprise - is not enough to tip the balance. Generations likewise suffers. The first twenty minutes or so - the portion with Kirk essentially - is wonderful, but the easy rapport between Kirk, Scotty and Chekov casts into sharp relief the cold formality that exists between the crew of the Enterprise D. Only Will Riker comes across as a geniune human being while Patrick Stewart is crippled by a plot which kills off his brother and nephew and then asks him to be a gung-ho hero, which is impossible, even for an actor of Stewart's calibre. Plus the bizarre decision to introduce elements like Data's emotion chip - which, for an audience who hadn't slavishly followed The Next Generation on television would have seemed out of place at best and mawkish at worst - it's clear that Ron Moore and Brannon Braga (G's writers) didn't have much of an idea about the differences between film and TV. Ironically, had it not been so bound up in the mythology of the TV show, All Good Things..., the series finale, has more scope and potential for action than Generations. And they waste Kirk, in more ways than one. And they got it wrong twice. First Kirk dies by getting shot in the back, then in the reshoots, they killed him by having him on a bridge that collapsed. Kirk should have died sacrificing his life, choosing to die, rather than in some stupid accident. It's no wonder Shatner had second thoughts and resurrected Kirk in the novels.
In many ways, the naysayers of Insurrection are right. It's a story which - Generations aping finale excepted - could have been done as a two parter on the TV show. But does it really matter? There's more essential Trekkiness in Insurrection than in all the other TNG films put together. There's more humour... there's more heart. And that is what Trek was all about, in the final analysis. It's just that the fans expected something a little more bombastic after First Contact - a film in which the entire galaxy was at stake - than Insurrection which is a more personal story on every level.
It reminds me of a comment I read somewhere concerning the deaths of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctors. Tom Baker was better, they said, because he died saving the universe while Davison died saving just one person. In my humble opinion, they got it the wrong way round. Davison was a far better hero than Baker because he was willing to sacrifice himself just to save one friend (and it's telling that Eccleston does much the same thing in the rebooted Doctor Who). Insurrection is much the same. It's not hard to try to save the universe. Saving one person? That's much harder. As Kirk himself says at the conclusion of The Search For Spock after Sarek asks him if the sacrifice was worth it, given the cost of his ship and his son: "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."
Trek, on the other hand, is so rigidly organised that every movie has a set verdict already imposed on it. So here goes:
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Worthy but dull
Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan - Brilliant
Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock - Unworthy
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home - The pinnacle of mainstream Trek
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier - Bobbins, and probably all the fault of Shatner
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country - A worthy final voyage for the original crew
Star Trek: Generations - Two Captains in search of a plot
Star Trek: First Contact - Brilliant
Star Trek: Insurrection - An overlong episode of the TV show
Star Trek: Nemesis - Shite.
Now, by and large I do actually agree with most of the judgements, with two notable exceptions (and I have been known to watch TFF and enjoy it immensely on occasion, but that doesn't render it any less bobbins). They are The Search For Spock and Insurrection. Both of these films, it has been argued, are like overlong episodes of the TV show, with no real cinematic value. Which is kinda true. It's also true that they both follow on from tub-thumpingly balls to the wall action movie entries into the Trek canon and isn't variety the spice of life? If either TWoK or FC had been followed up by a film which had tried to do the same thing but bigger and better, they would have been doomed to failure. Look at the movie franchises which have tried that: Pirates Of The Caribbean, Batman, Terminator - it's a case of diminishing returns because you can only go so far before it just gets ridiculous.
So, TSfS and I turn the heat down a little. It's a good thing. It lets the characters breath. As good as FC was, the only character who got a look in was Picard, with his Moby Dick homaging subplot. Everyone else in that film was simply acting out their plot function. I brings the cast of The Next Generation back for the first time since - arguably, the holodeck sequence at the start of Generations. Because no one would have watched the series for the epic space battles and action. As a weekly syndicated series, TNG was amazingly light on action. It was about character. We fell in love with Star Trek (and The Next Generation in particular) because of the characters, not because we turned in each week to see shit getting blown up. That's not what the TV show was about. It's not what the movies are about either. Both The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are anomalies in the ten-film sequence, much in the way that Tomorrow Never Dies is an anomaly in the Bond canon in that it doesn't feel like a Bond film. It feels like a common or garden action movie that just happens to have James Bond as it's hero. The Trek universe of The Wrath of Khan is subtley different to anything that has gone before in Trek and anything that will come after it. Even TSfS and TVH which follow on from Khan take place in a different universe. Not massively different, but enough to ensure that Khan's militaristic Napoleonic era sea battle transposed to space has a unique place. While First Contact isn't as drastic a departure - by this time the Trek universe was much more defined and rigid as it was when Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett were carving out new territory - it still carries with it a different mood - again, it's a much more militaristic Starfleet we see here (and it's ironic that First Contact, made before the start of the Dominion War over on Deep Space 9 is a much more militaristic film than Insurrection, which takes place during the war), emphasised by the new uniforms and the design of the new Enterprise-E. It also rewrites Trek lore to introduce the Borg Queen (and back in 1991, Peter David, that bastion of quality tie-in fiction had to have a disclaimer in his Borg novel Vendetta as it featured a female Borg and - according to Paramount at the time, such things did not exist). In much the same way that Aliens symbolically castrated the threat of the xenomorphs by having so many of them (and having them suddenly so easy to kill, a far cry from the one indestructable alien in Ridley Scott's entry) having a spokesman (or in this case, spokeswoman) for the Borg - giving an enemy whose facelessness was on of its most appealing factors - removed much of the threat and was an all too easy concession to the apparent need for the film to have an identifiable foe who could go up against Picard. And give Data a blow job in the most literal sense.
The Search For Spock is essentially Part 2 of the Genesis trilogy (although Part 3 - The Voyage Home is less concerned with what happened in the previous two films and more bothered about having a good time and delivering its eco-message). Unlike the films starring Patrick Stewart and co, the original series films more or less follow an arc, an arc which is most apparent between films 2 and 4, continuing on from each other as they do. As such, TSfS has a lot of mopping up to do, although why they felt they had to bring back Spock is beyond me. It is, at it's core, an unnecessary action. I know Spock is the most loved of the Trek characters (although McCoy will always be my favourite - while Kirk is the fist and Spokc the brain, McCoy is the heart of the original crew) but having him brought back, and by such an obvious plot McGuffin cheapens the character and robs us of what could have been an interesting new crew dynamic. Picture this: following the events of Khan, the Enterprise crew stay together, the ship being repaired. Taking Spock's place as Kirk's first officer is Saavik, it's obviously command that she's been groomed for when she takes the Kobayashi Maru test and her inexperience would have created a lot of interesting conflict and taking over at the science station is David Marcus, Kirk's son, who was all but wasted in TSfS, aside from the one short scene where he's talking with Kirk over the intercom and he says 'I knew you'd come'. Now, it's fairly clear from the closeness of Saavik and David in TSfS that they have some sort of relationship bubbling over so you have the chance to do what no Trek series did till DS9 did - you can tell stories about long-term relationships and father-son stories. Obviously, this wouldn't work in the conext of the movies because there wouldn't be enough room to develop those relationships to a sufficient degree, and anyway, I'm not here to regret what might have been. I'm here to defend the third film.
And it is worth defending. There's a lot of good in there, a lot of humour despite the rather grim plot, a beautiful restatement of what Trek is all about when Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Now, you have to remember how Kirk felt about the Enterprise. It wasn't just a ship to him. It was his home, his life, hell, it was almost like his lover. How many women did he fall in love with, only to leave them behind because he was more in love with the Enterprise? Exactly. Losing the Enterprise, and losing it in the way he did (especially so soon after losing his son) is - to me - a greater loss than that of Spock at the end of the previous movie. As Kirk himself says at the end of the movie, when Spock has been returned to him, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." He's not talking about Spock's needs there. He's talking about his own. Having never faced death until losing Spock, he's come to realise that the Enterprise means a lot to him, but it means less than Spock does, than David does, because you can't deny that Kirk's actions are primarily motivated by revenge. He blows the Enterprise up to kill the Klingon bastards that killed his son. It's telling that he doesn't even realise what he's done until he sees the hulk of the Enterprise burning up in the atmosphere of the Genesis planet and it's up to Bones to tell him, or to mollify him, saying that he's done the only thing he could do. In essence, The Search For Spock is all about one man's greed and what it costs other people. And that man is Jim Kirk. Picard goes on a similar emotional journey in First Contact. Having been tortured and dehumanised by the Borg, he is prepared to go to any lengths - even sending his entire crew on a suicidal mission - to defeat them. The main difference between the two captains is that Kirk's greed is motivated by a desire to get his friend back - David's death and the destruction of the Enterprise are simp,y two unfortunate consequences of that desire - while Picard, like Ahab, is driven purely by a desire for revenge, and revenge, in the universe of TNG is not something that is tolerated.
Insurrection is, in my opinion, probably the second best of the TNG movies. Nemesis obviously brings up the rear, it's poorly thought out plot, flat direction and basic lack of understanding of the characters/concepts that make Star Trek what it is cripple it and the good in it - and there is some; Riker and Troi's wedding, Dina Meyer as the Romulan Commander, the battle between Shinzon's vessel and the Enterprise - is not enough to tip the balance. Generations likewise suffers. The first twenty minutes or so - the portion with Kirk essentially - is wonderful, but the easy rapport between Kirk, Scotty and Chekov casts into sharp relief the cold formality that exists between the crew of the Enterprise D. Only Will Riker comes across as a geniune human being while Patrick Stewart is crippled by a plot which kills off his brother and nephew and then asks him to be a gung-ho hero, which is impossible, even for an actor of Stewart's calibre. Plus the bizarre decision to introduce elements like Data's emotion chip - which, for an audience who hadn't slavishly followed The Next Generation on television would have seemed out of place at best and mawkish at worst - it's clear that Ron Moore and Brannon Braga (G's writers) didn't have much of an idea about the differences between film and TV. Ironically, had it not been so bound up in the mythology of the TV show, All Good Things..., the series finale, has more scope and potential for action than Generations. And they waste Kirk, in more ways than one. And they got it wrong twice. First Kirk dies by getting shot in the back, then in the reshoots, they killed him by having him on a bridge that collapsed. Kirk should have died sacrificing his life, choosing to die, rather than in some stupid accident. It's no wonder Shatner had second thoughts and resurrected Kirk in the novels.
In many ways, the naysayers of Insurrection are right. It's a story which - Generations aping finale excepted - could have been done as a two parter on the TV show. But does it really matter? There's more essential Trekkiness in Insurrection than in all the other TNG films put together. There's more humour... there's more heart. And that is what Trek was all about, in the final analysis. It's just that the fans expected something a little more bombastic after First Contact - a film in which the entire galaxy was at stake - than Insurrection which is a more personal story on every level.
It reminds me of a comment I read somewhere concerning the deaths of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctors. Tom Baker was better, they said, because he died saving the universe while Davison died saving just one person. In my humble opinion, they got it the wrong way round. Davison was a far better hero than Baker because he was willing to sacrifice himself just to save one friend (and it's telling that Eccleston does much the same thing in the rebooted Doctor Who). Insurrection is much the same. It's not hard to try to save the universe. Saving one person? That's much harder. As Kirk himself says at the conclusion of The Search For Spock after Sarek asks him if the sacrifice was worth it, given the cost of his ship and his son: "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."
Monday 9 July 2007
So it's been nearly a week. And, Jesus, what a week. I mean, leaving aside all the Natalie related issues, we've still got the refit going on at work - the entirety of Sunday was spent transferring stock from the shop floor to the Post Office next door where we're now operating from temporarily or the back stockroom - and that's almost enough to occupy anyone's time. But add to that the Natalie stuff, and you'll see that my brain is pretty well fried.
Because, ah, Natalie.
Yes.
She did indeed come into the shop on Wednesday. More than once, in fact. And every time she came in, she was with Jade and laughing her head off. Never even made eye contact with me, let alone spoke. So I text her when I'm on my way home asking her if I embarrass her. No reply. So I talk with Kelly the next afternoon and she says text her once more, be blunt about it and if she doesn't reply, then call it quits.
Which I did. I texted her on Thursday night essentially saying 'do you like me or not?' and she never texted back. She's been into the shop a few times since then, but has never spoken to me yet. It's funny how these things work out, isn't it? Of course, everyone in the Mow now thinks I am seeing Natalie (and, according to Stacy, she's fairly sure Natalie's got the clap, apparently).
But I am determined this is not going to get me down. Well, not as down as I was over Allison. Or Stef. Or Isabella. No. I got a text off Clare saying her and Richie are going to see Potter 5 with Mark and Tracy, so I'm going to ask Bryony if she wants to go with me. Kinda like a date. Ish. It's a pretty much last ditch attempt to get her to like me, you know, in that way, before I give her up as a lost cause.
Because, ah, Natalie.
Yes.
She did indeed come into the shop on Wednesday. More than once, in fact. And every time she came in, she was with Jade and laughing her head off. Never even made eye contact with me, let alone spoke. So I text her when I'm on my way home asking her if I embarrass her. No reply. So I talk with Kelly the next afternoon and she says text her once more, be blunt about it and if she doesn't reply, then call it quits.
Which I did. I texted her on Thursday night essentially saying 'do you like me or not?' and she never texted back. She's been into the shop a few times since then, but has never spoken to me yet. It's funny how these things work out, isn't it? Of course, everyone in the Mow now thinks I am seeing Natalie (and, according to Stacy, she's fairly sure Natalie's got the clap, apparently).
But I am determined this is not going to get me down. Well, not as down as I was over Allison. Or Stef. Or Isabella. No. I got a text off Clare saying her and Richie are going to see Potter 5 with Mark and Tracy, so I'm going to ask Bryony if she wants to go with me. Kinda like a date. Ish. It's a pretty much last ditch attempt to get her to like me, you know, in that way, before I give her up as a lost cause.
Tuesday 3 July 2007
I Say, She Says
So, after an awful lot of deliberation and that fact that Natalie texted me again later on last night, I have discovered that 'tb' is not in fact a misspelling of 'to' or even a reference to tuberculosis. It does, in fact, mean 'text back'. I think.
So I texted her back and I was in Sunderland today looking for David's birthday present and just on my way to the Metro to go to Newcastle when she texts me again asking me what I'm doing. I tell her, she texts back saying she's in Newcastle going for a job interview. Great, I say. You fancy meeting? She says she's with a friend. I say fine, I don't want to get in the way of anything. She says no, I'd love to meet you. She thens tells me where she is and that she's going for something to eat. I text back asking her if she does want to meet up then. And I don't here anything back. I wander round Newcastle for about half an hour and she still hasn't texted back. So I go for the bus. Now, I go for a bus which doesn't take me home. It'll take me to Chester, where I can get a bus home, but it's a lot easier than walking all the way up Northumberland Street to the new bus station for the bus that would take me home. And because of where Natalie lives, she gets that bus home to. Exact same bus. And it's one of those frequent services that run every five minutes so it's a pretty big coincidence.
However. (There's always an however in my life.) However, I see her before her and her mate get to the bus stop. Doubtless she sees me as well. And she doesn't come to stand in the queue. She doesn't even wave hello or anything. Her mate does, but then her mate is a loud mouthed gobby loon. And when the bus comes and we get on it, she walks straight past me without even making eye contact. Then they both get off at Gateshead. I then spend the rest of the journey home and the majority of the afternoon thinking I should send her a text with the general gist of 'what the fuck was that?'. I don't however. And this eveing I get another text from her saying she's been feeling a bit down today because her gran has just died. I text back saying okay, and that I'm at work tomorrow so if she needs to talk that she knows where I am.
I hope I do see her tomorrow. Because until I speak to her, face to face, I just won't be able to shake the suspicion that there's something not right about the whole thing. I don't know. I know Terileigh wouldn't do anything nasty to me, like giving me someone else's number or something. But at the same time there's this queasy uneasiness about the whole thing that I can't shake.
I don't know. Maybe she just doesn't want her relationship with me to be so out in the open, especially not in such early days. Maybe I'm just being blindly optimistic here. Maybe she's shy. She doesn't seem the type, but I don't know, maybe she really does like me a lot and doesn't want to fuck it up. Ah, there's the return of the blind optimism, yeah? I'm trying to avoid the theories that it's all a big joke that's being played on me, or that she thought it was a good idea to give Terileigh my number on Saturday night and changed her mind. Jesus H Christ. All Hail Marky, for he is the Master of Paranoia. This is why I'm so depressed all the time you know, because I always look for the bad shit in everything.
Peace out.
So I texted her back and I was in Sunderland today looking for David's birthday present and just on my way to the Metro to go to Newcastle when she texts me again asking me what I'm doing. I tell her, she texts back saying she's in Newcastle going for a job interview. Great, I say. You fancy meeting? She says she's with a friend. I say fine, I don't want to get in the way of anything. She says no, I'd love to meet you. She thens tells me where she is and that she's going for something to eat. I text back asking her if she does want to meet up then. And I don't here anything back. I wander round Newcastle for about half an hour and she still hasn't texted back. So I go for the bus. Now, I go for a bus which doesn't take me home. It'll take me to Chester, where I can get a bus home, but it's a lot easier than walking all the way up Northumberland Street to the new bus station for the bus that would take me home. And because of where Natalie lives, she gets that bus home to. Exact same bus. And it's one of those frequent services that run every five minutes so it's a pretty big coincidence.
However. (There's always an however in my life.) However, I see her before her and her mate get to the bus stop. Doubtless she sees me as well. And she doesn't come to stand in the queue. She doesn't even wave hello or anything. Her mate does, but then her mate is a loud mouthed gobby loon. And when the bus comes and we get on it, she walks straight past me without even making eye contact. Then they both get off at Gateshead. I then spend the rest of the journey home and the majority of the afternoon thinking I should send her a text with the general gist of 'what the fuck was that?'. I don't however. And this eveing I get another text from her saying she's been feeling a bit down today because her gran has just died. I text back saying okay, and that I'm at work tomorrow so if she needs to talk that she knows where I am.
I hope I do see her tomorrow. Because until I speak to her, face to face, I just won't be able to shake the suspicion that there's something not right about the whole thing. I don't know. I know Terileigh wouldn't do anything nasty to me, like giving me someone else's number or something. But at the same time there's this queasy uneasiness about the whole thing that I can't shake.
I don't know. Maybe she just doesn't want her relationship with me to be so out in the open, especially not in such early days. Maybe I'm just being blindly optimistic here. Maybe she's shy. She doesn't seem the type, but I don't know, maybe she really does like me a lot and doesn't want to fuck it up. Ah, there's the return of the blind optimism, yeah? I'm trying to avoid the theories that it's all a big joke that's being played on me, or that she thought it was a good idea to give Terileigh my number on Saturday night and changed her mind. Jesus H Christ. All Hail Marky, for he is the Master of Paranoia. This is why I'm so depressed all the time you know, because I always look for the bad shit in everything.
Peace out.
Monday 2 July 2007
The Vagaries Of The Txt
So, Natalie did text back, after a day in which she came into work a few times, never said anything and seemed to be laughing her head off every time she saw me. Now, you kow me, I am King of all that is paranoid. So I'm standing there, Natalie's in the shop but she's not talking to me. Instead, she's laughing with her friends. And Jesus H Christ, what does that make me think?
But she's texted back. Unfortunately for me, her text is pretty garbled. The one thing that is clear is that which I already knew; that she doesn't have any money on her phone. So what do I do now? That is the question, whether to bear the slings and arrows and text her back or wait and see if she comes in the shop on Wednesday.
You know, after a couple of million years of evolution you'd think that (A) we'd have the whole dating thing down to a fine art and (B) that we'd have invented a form of communication much more refined than text messaging.
But she's texted back. Unfortunately for me, her text is pretty garbled. The one thing that is clear is that which I already knew; that she doesn't have any money on her phone. So what do I do now? That is the question, whether to bear the slings and arrows and text her back or wait and see if she comes in the shop on Wednesday.
You know, after a couple of million years of evolution you'd think that (A) we'd have the whole dating thing down to a fine art and (B) that we'd have invented a form of communication much more refined than text messaging.
The Science Of Hyperbole
One day maybe I'll get around to even starting to think about just how bad Spider-Man 3 was. I've got the DVD on preorder already. Because despite it's overwhelming badness, there was a lot of good stuff in there. It was just crushed beneath the wight of all the crap. A lot like Star Trek: Nemesis.
But did I only think it was so bad because my expectations were so high? I mean, Spidey 2 is ne of the best movies ever made, never mind one of the best comic books movies. It's almost beat perfect. The only misstep it makes is that the train sequence (the most perfect action sequence of the last ten years, possibly of ever) isn't the finale. Superman Returns makes the same mistake, with the airplane rescue that is so pulse-poundingly brilliant pretty much everything afterward seems like an anti-climax.
So, in the three years since the last film, has my obsession with Spidey grown and grown until nothing could sate it? And if so, is it my fault? In order, possibly and certainly not. You see, I thought Spidey 2 was brilliant, I love Batman Begins more than is entirely healthy and both are movies I was desperate to see. But just because I love a certain comic or hero or Kirsten Dunst (and on a bizarre sidenote, isn't it funny how they get Dunst - a blonde - to play Mary Jane, a redhead, and the lovely Bryce Dallas Howard - a redhead - to play Gwen Stacy, a blonde?) doesn't mean that I'm going to be blind to any faults of the film.
I was perhaps more critical of Spidey 3 than I was of, say Ghost Rider or Hulk (both, in my opinion, massively underrated films) because my expectations were so high. Going in to watch Ghost Rider I didn't have much in the way of preconceptions. Sure, Mark Steven Johnsand on had directed Daredevil (which I adore and which made my sister's fiance loudly proclaim that he wanted to slit his own wrists) but one film does not make a resume. Whereas Spidey 3 had the previous two installments and the combined force of Sam Raimi's back catalogue. Everything from the genius of Evil Dead 2 to the 'Katie Holmes gets her norks out' film The Gift. I think it's fair to say that Raimi has never actually made a truly bad film. He probably doesn't know how to. Most of us have blood running in our viens, he probably has liquid celluloid. And added to that it had Tobey Maguire's back catalogue, and Kirsten Dunst's, and, well, probably not Topher Grace, I mean, I doubt anyone went into the auditorium expecting Eric Foreman to become Venom.
Ghost Rider had Johnson, Nicolas Cage (a brilliant actor, but one whose quality bounces from one end of the spectrum to the other - on one hand you have Leaving Las Vegas and Wild At Heart and on the other you have Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Wicker Man), Eva Mendes (sure she's pretty, but can she act - the jury is still out) and Wes Bentley (who started out so promisingly in American Beauty and then stumbled down the career path marked "WTF?" with starring roles in, among others, Soul Survivors and the lackadaisal remake of The Four Feathers in which he sprouted a ludicrous moustache, and moustaches are never a good idea unless you're Sam Elliot). So I went into Ghost Rider expecting a mildly enjoyable B-movie starring a guy with a burning skull instead of a head. And you know what, that's why I got. It's never going to win any awards (indeed, SFX gave the DVD two stars out of five, which, if I recall correctly, is worse than what they gave Spidey 3). Whereas with Raimi's effort, I expected a world-changing, orgasmic cinema experience and nothing could reasonably be expected to live up to that.
I used to work with a guy who spent a fortune on pirate DVD's. He said he liked getting them and watching them before the hype. Without the hype, he ruminated, you can enjoy a film on its own merits without having the posters shoved down your face at every opprtunity, every magazine proclaiming it to be the best thing ever. And I agree with his philosophy. Some of my favourite films have been ones that have caught my eye that I'd never really even heard of before.
But can you avoid hype? In this media saturated day and age, no you can't. We get teaser trailers months before the film has even been finished, previews and making ofs on any one of the dozens of channels we get, every time we log on and go to Yahoo or any one of millions of websites we're bombarded with advertising. It's impossible to escape. Even the BBC, once the great bastion of anti-commercialism is whoring itself simply because it has to, in order to survive.
Hype. Like death and taxes, it's something we can't avoid. And damn it, I'm really looking forward to the new Harry Potter film. And the new Harry Potter book. And the Christmas special. And Stephen King's next book. And the next Doctor Who. And the next Indiana Jones. And the Star Wars TV series. Fuck, I'm even looking forward to the inveitable Spider-Man 4.
But did I only think it was so bad because my expectations were so high? I mean, Spidey 2 is ne of the best movies ever made, never mind one of the best comic books movies. It's almost beat perfect. The only misstep it makes is that the train sequence (the most perfect action sequence of the last ten years, possibly of ever) isn't the finale. Superman Returns makes the same mistake, with the airplane rescue that is so pulse-poundingly brilliant pretty much everything afterward seems like an anti-climax.
So, in the three years since the last film, has my obsession with Spidey grown and grown until nothing could sate it? And if so, is it my fault? In order, possibly and certainly not. You see, I thought Spidey 2 was brilliant, I love Batman Begins more than is entirely healthy and both are movies I was desperate to see. But just because I love a certain comic or hero or Kirsten Dunst (and on a bizarre sidenote, isn't it funny how they get Dunst - a blonde - to play Mary Jane, a redhead, and the lovely Bryce Dallas Howard - a redhead - to play Gwen Stacy, a blonde?) doesn't mean that I'm going to be blind to any faults of the film.
I was perhaps more critical of Spidey 3 than I was of, say Ghost Rider or Hulk (both, in my opinion, massively underrated films) because my expectations were so high. Going in to watch Ghost Rider I didn't have much in the way of preconceptions. Sure, Mark Steven Johnsand on had directed Daredevil (which I adore and which made my sister's fiance loudly proclaim that he wanted to slit his own wrists) but one film does not make a resume. Whereas Spidey 3 had the previous two installments and the combined force of Sam Raimi's back catalogue. Everything from the genius of Evil Dead 2 to the 'Katie Holmes gets her norks out' film The Gift. I think it's fair to say that Raimi has never actually made a truly bad film. He probably doesn't know how to. Most of us have blood running in our viens, he probably has liquid celluloid. And added to that it had Tobey Maguire's back catalogue, and Kirsten Dunst's, and, well, probably not Topher Grace, I mean, I doubt anyone went into the auditorium expecting Eric Foreman to become Venom.
Ghost Rider had Johnson, Nicolas Cage (a brilliant actor, but one whose quality bounces from one end of the spectrum to the other - on one hand you have Leaving Las Vegas and Wild At Heart and on the other you have Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Wicker Man), Eva Mendes (sure she's pretty, but can she act - the jury is still out) and Wes Bentley (who started out so promisingly in American Beauty and then stumbled down the career path marked "WTF?" with starring roles in, among others, Soul Survivors and the lackadaisal remake of The Four Feathers in which he sprouted a ludicrous moustache, and moustaches are never a good idea unless you're Sam Elliot). So I went into Ghost Rider expecting a mildly enjoyable B-movie starring a guy with a burning skull instead of a head. And you know what, that's why I got. It's never going to win any awards (indeed, SFX gave the DVD two stars out of five, which, if I recall correctly, is worse than what they gave Spidey 3). Whereas with Raimi's effort, I expected a world-changing, orgasmic cinema experience and nothing could reasonably be expected to live up to that.
I used to work with a guy who spent a fortune on pirate DVD's. He said he liked getting them and watching them before the hype. Without the hype, he ruminated, you can enjoy a film on its own merits without having the posters shoved down your face at every opprtunity, every magazine proclaiming it to be the best thing ever. And I agree with his philosophy. Some of my favourite films have been ones that have caught my eye that I'd never really even heard of before.
But can you avoid hype? In this media saturated day and age, no you can't. We get teaser trailers months before the film has even been finished, previews and making ofs on any one of the dozens of channels we get, every time we log on and go to Yahoo or any one of millions of websites we're bombarded with advertising. It's impossible to escape. Even the BBC, once the great bastion of anti-commercialism is whoring itself simply because it has to, in order to survive.
Hype. Like death and taxes, it's something we can't avoid. And damn it, I'm really looking forward to the new Harry Potter film. And the new Harry Potter book. And the Christmas special. And Stephen King's next book. And the next Doctor Who. And the next Indiana Jones. And the Star Wars TV series. Fuck, I'm even looking forward to the inveitable Spider-Man 4.
Sunday 1 July 2007
A Shrine To Futility
When you lie on my bed and you label me your friend
Don't you know how much that hurts?
You could pretend and I wouldn't know
I could be who you wanted in the dark.
"Girls Who Play Guitars", Maximo Park
Don't you know how much that hurts?
You could pretend and I wouldn't know
I could be who you wanted in the dark.
"Girls Who Play Guitars", Maximo Park
There's this girl.
(As a wise man - actually, it was me - once said, there's always a girl.)
So there's this girl right. She comes into the shop quite often. Always polite to me. Nice looking. Slightly older than my last doomed obsessive crush, which can only be a good thing given Stef's youth. The thing is, I don't really know her and therefore there's not been the time for this whole obsessive crush thing to start like it did with Stef. But maybe that's a good thing, because I ended up going to a very bad place because she rejected me. You know, I'm enough of an amateur shrink to know how fucked up my own head is. All my life I've been getting obsessed over girls and making a tit of myself when they don't turn out to have the same feelings. I mean, god, I spent over a year writing Snowglobe, a novel which, underneath all the death and pornogrpahy, was all about unrequited love and how it reallys kills you.
So I don't really know her. I just happened to comment to one of the girls I work with on Saturday night that I quite fancied her and the next thing I know, she's out on a fag break asking Natalie for her number. Jesus.
This was at about four in the afternoon. I spent till eleven when we shut thinking about what I could text her. Don't text her tonight, Teri said, because she's got no money on her phone (coming soon, my ruminations on how society survived before the mobile phone). So I waited until this afternoon to text her. She's probably still got no money on her phone. I just said, hi, do you fancy doing something sometime. Nothing overly aggressive or (hopefully) definitive. Just a polite asking of whether or not she's interested. That was at five this afternoon. It's now four hours later and she hasn't replied. But it's okay. I'm not going to go into an apopletic fit like I did that time I texted Stef and she never replied so ended up tramping through the woods out the back of Penshaw Monument in the pitch black night. No. She may not have any money on her phone still.
There's always the possibility that she doesn't like me, though. I'm terribly fond of that idea, because I suffer from a terrible case of self-loathing and if I make a move and she doesn't respond, it's out of my hands. There's nothing I can do. It's like the brief but intense relationship I had with Alison. She dictated that relationship. The only input I really had was the first time she called it all off, claiming I was too young for her and Andrea insisting I kept on texting her, which I did, which eventually rekindled the relationship for another couple of weeks.
I think it all stems back to that first relatiosnhip. There was me and this girl, Sarah. She asked me out (again, my reactive rather than active personality). We went out for about a month. In the end I called it off. Why? At the time I thought it was because I didn't love her, which is still kinda true. I only really knew her for the time we were going out, which wasn't enough time for me to fall in love with her, and I was kinda obsessed with someone else at the time. But had we continued going out, I may well have loved her. So it wasn't really that.
No.
I was scared. That's the plain and simple truth of it. Here I was, a seventeen year old with no real clue about real life - I'd just started my first job only to develop and ulcer and quit three days later - and self-esteem so low that it probably stole lollipops from babies. All through the time we were going out I was asking myself, "Why me? Why does she want to be with me of all people?". I simply couldn't comprehend that someone would want to spend time with me - and more importantly do the things with me that we did. I was the same with Alison (eight and a half years of being single will do that to you). She was forever complimenting me and wondered out loud if Stef was gay when I told her that Stef didn't fancy me.
So I ran away from Sarah. I was scared. Of what? Of a thousand things. But mainly, perhaps, that I might actually be happy.
Shit. This was supposed to be slightly less depressing than it's turning out to be.
Okay. Back to Natalie. Well, not Natalie specifically. More like girls in general. Because girls in general don't like me. Not in that way. They think I'm "funny" and "sweet" and, if I ever dare to suggest anything more, they "don't think of me in that way". Which is always nice to hear. It's like being called someone's brother. And the only way that comment could get any worse is if you substitute "sister" for "brother". The end of last year I was told by someone who I really liked that they liked me (but not in that way) but that they weren't ready for another relationship anyway, having just come out of a long term one only a few months previously. Which is fine. Only a couple of weeks later - on Christmas Eve no less - I found out that this other guy she knew who fancied her and who had been given exactly the same speech and I had received was now going out with her. It didn't last long, suffice to say. I think it was more the result of a drunken fumble and a "well, let's see how it goes" than anything else. So she's now single again and like an idiot I once more attempted to fix myself in her affections. For a while it seemed to work. We would go out (with her friends, admittedly, but it was to clubs and stuff) and I would get a little drunk and so would she and I would grope her slightly and she wouldn't complain. (Also coming soon, possibly, a discussion about why I grope people when everyone else just seems to get off with them.) But again, it wasn't to be. And maybe it's not a bad thing. Emma and David are always saying how I need to find someone with the same interests as me. I'm not so sure. Because, aside from music and a few films, what do Emma and David have in common? Not much. Certainly, most of what they tend to enjoy together now are things that are a compromise, things that one of them likes that the other has grown to like. When they first started seeing each other - nearly nine years ago - I doubt they had much in common. As Paula Abdul once sang, opposites attract. Certainly there are qualities in myself that I look for in other people, but an obsessive love of Doctor Who and Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't one of them.
I think it's because my own fandom has tended to be a solitary pursuit in real life (online is another matter entirely) it has become something that I am very possessive about and, knowing my own obsessive inclinations, I don't expect other people to share my passion. Everything I look for in a partner - intelligence, humour, compassion - are things which anyone can have. And besides, given my unhealthy collection of pornography, I think I'd be hard pressed to find a girl who was as enthusiastic about looking at pictures of naked ladies as I am.
So, here I am, waiting for Natalie to text back. Will she, won't she? It's the same damn question I've been asking myself for the past twelve years. And it hasn't got any easier with time. If anything, it's getting worse. Because I am very painfully aware that I'm not getting any younger. My friends are getting married, having kids, getting mortgages. Being responsible. And here I am, still living with my mother obsessing over the same things I was when I was sixteen. Progress?
Sunday 24 June 2007
Alice In Sunderland (with apologies to Bryan Talbot)
Just a short missive tonight, basically an introduction to me and what I intend to achieve with this blog. I would call it an action plan, but I had enough of that kind of bollocks at school (which, digression aplogies present at the beginning, is very telling about the sort of thing they made us do in school which they say will prepare us for the outisde world. Now, I cannot and have never been able to do long division. I used to have sleepless nights worrying about when I got a job and they found out I couldn't do long division. As it turns out, the only thing I use that I learned in school is... actually, there's nothing. I use my English in my writing and that's about it really. I suppose I could say I use maths in my job, but that is all simple addition and subtraction, which I had mastered long before I went to secondary school).
So, here I am.
My name is Mark and I am a writer. I've had a few short stories published here and there, mainly in small press fanzines. I've won a couple of short story competitions and one day I'd like to be a published novelist.
My novels are generally mainstream contemporary fiction with a little bit of magic realism (remind me on and later - when I'm sober and not knackered - I'll tell you why I hate that term so much) thrown into the mix. My magnum opus, if you can call it that, is a semi-autobiographical series called 'Songs From My Childhood' which follows a group of friends for a little over a decade, starting when they are 16. Well, I say semi-autobiographical, the earliest novels in the sequence are, but after that, they tend to follow their own paths. My current novel, Telling Tales, is about how we fictionalise our own lives to deal with them and features two independent threads, IDST and The Colour Of Deep Water, the lead characters of which are writing the companion story (so the lead in IDST is writing the story of The Colour Of Deep Water and vice versa). It sounds a lot more complicated and wanky than it actually is.
When not pretending to be a serious author, I work in a newsagents and attempt to have a life, which is a lot more complicated than it sounds.
This blog is intended to be a sounding board for my wacky notions and so forth, a place where I can rant about movies, books, comics and whatever else I feel like (see my first posting concerning Fantastic Four - Rise Of The Silver Surfer for what to expect from that) and also where I can wallow in self-pity regarding my own failures as a human being. Which is slightly more fun than it sounds, given my life has of late taken on the facade of a French farce.
Here, for those of you who might be interested, is a timeline of my life and career:
1981 - Born in Sunderland
1985 - Sees Return To Oz and Labyrinth, prediliction towards fantasy and Jennifer Connelly born.
1994 - Reads 1984. The world will never be the same again.
1995 - Becomes a Doctor Who fan despite the show having been off air for six years. Instant infatuation with Mary Tamm ensues. First serious attempts at short story writing lead to the writing of 'Destroyer Of Worlds' in which a dying man takes over the mantle of Death, 'Riverside Nightmares' the first adventure for Conrad Hart, 'Dormant Demons', the first adventure for Kojo Ratheen and also invents SF future history with a projected series of 30 novels.
1997 - While allegedly studying for his GCSE's, Mark writes a novel. Entitled Cold Heart, it later forms the centrepiece to his 'Songs From My Childhood' sequence. Despite not revising, Mark gains acceptance to 6th Form college and wins the Sid Chaplin award for his short story 'My Poem And The Story Of It'.
1998 - Mark's first relationship ends badly. During the relationship he is working on a film script entitled Other People which is all about being suffocated in a relationship. Irony is born. Mark wins the Sid Chaplin again, this time with his story 'Leaving Day' which is all about going to university. At this point in his life, Mark doesn't think that university is for him.
1999 - Mark writes second novel in the 'Songs' sequence, The Truth About Boys (although at this point it is called Bluebottle Wood) and the divorce of his parents prompts him to write a direct sequel to Cold Heart, The Church Of Hollow Love. Mark starts his Freshman year at Sunderland University and discovers the delights in overindulging on alcohol.
2002 - Mark - three novels wiser - leaves university and ends up in a dead end job in a video store.
2005 - Mark writes what will be the capstone to the 'Songs' sequence, Snowglobe, inspired very much by his first visit to London.
2006 - Mark gets a decent job.
2007 - A work in progress...
Peace out.
So, here I am.
My name is Mark and I am a writer. I've had a few short stories published here and there, mainly in small press fanzines. I've won a couple of short story competitions and one day I'd like to be a published novelist.
My novels are generally mainstream contemporary fiction with a little bit of magic realism (remind me on and later - when I'm sober and not knackered - I'll tell you why I hate that term so much) thrown into the mix. My magnum opus, if you can call it that, is a semi-autobiographical series called 'Songs From My Childhood' which follows a group of friends for a little over a decade, starting when they are 16. Well, I say semi-autobiographical, the earliest novels in the sequence are, but after that, they tend to follow their own paths. My current novel, Telling Tales, is about how we fictionalise our own lives to deal with them and features two independent threads, IDST and The Colour Of Deep Water, the lead characters of which are writing the companion story (so the lead in IDST is writing the story of The Colour Of Deep Water and vice versa). It sounds a lot more complicated and wanky than it actually is.
When not pretending to be a serious author, I work in a newsagents and attempt to have a life, which is a lot more complicated than it sounds.
This blog is intended to be a sounding board for my wacky notions and so forth, a place where I can rant about movies, books, comics and whatever else I feel like (see my first posting concerning Fantastic Four - Rise Of The Silver Surfer for what to expect from that) and also where I can wallow in self-pity regarding my own failures as a human being. Which is slightly more fun than it sounds, given my life has of late taken on the facade of a French farce.
Here, for those of you who might be interested, is a timeline of my life and career:
1981 - Born in Sunderland
1985 - Sees Return To Oz and Labyrinth, prediliction towards fantasy and Jennifer Connelly born.
1994 - Reads 1984. The world will never be the same again.
1995 - Becomes a Doctor Who fan despite the show having been off air for six years. Instant infatuation with Mary Tamm ensues. First serious attempts at short story writing lead to the writing of 'Destroyer Of Worlds' in which a dying man takes over the mantle of Death, 'Riverside Nightmares' the first adventure for Conrad Hart, 'Dormant Demons', the first adventure for Kojo Ratheen and also invents SF future history with a projected series of 30 novels.
1997 - While allegedly studying for his GCSE's, Mark writes a novel. Entitled Cold Heart, it later forms the centrepiece to his 'Songs From My Childhood' sequence. Despite not revising, Mark gains acceptance to 6th Form college and wins the Sid Chaplin award for his short story 'My Poem And The Story Of It'.
1998 - Mark's first relationship ends badly. During the relationship he is working on a film script entitled Other People which is all about being suffocated in a relationship. Irony is born. Mark wins the Sid Chaplin again, this time with his story 'Leaving Day' which is all about going to university. At this point in his life, Mark doesn't think that university is for him.
1999 - Mark writes second novel in the 'Songs' sequence, The Truth About Boys (although at this point it is called Bluebottle Wood) and the divorce of his parents prompts him to write a direct sequel to Cold Heart, The Church Of Hollow Love. Mark starts his Freshman year at Sunderland University and discovers the delights in overindulging on alcohol.
2002 - Mark - three novels wiser - leaves university and ends up in a dead end job in a video store.
2005 - Mark writes what will be the capstone to the 'Songs' sequence, Snowglobe, inspired very much by his first visit to London.
2006 - Mark gets a decent job.
2007 - A work in progress...
Peace out.
Thursday 21 June 2007
The Rise And Fall Of Doctor Doom
I love comics, I really do. Money matters however mean that I generally don't get to read as many of them as I like because a weekly visit to Forbidden Planet is far too much of a strain on my already strained wallet. I generally stick to graphic novels because they are (A) Cheaper and (B) You get the whole story in one chunk without worry that your wages have ran out for another month so you can't get #232 and so you'll miss the conclusion to one story arc or another. Comics are kinda like soaps in a way. You miss a couple of issues and suddenly you're sitting there thinking "WHo is this guy?" and "Why's he doing that?".
But films are a different matter. I somewhat shamefully admit to owning pretty much every comic book movie ever made (except for Road To Perdition - that movie was so depressing it made me want to slit my wrists, and I generally like depressing movies) and some of them I own more than once. I have the original theatrical versions of Spiderman 2, Daredevil (now there's an underrated movie) and The Fantastic Four as well as the extended editions. I made my sister buy me the limited edition 3 disc Hulk special edition one Christmas, like I made my mam get the director's cut Hellboy from America. I even own Howard The Duck on DVD for God's sake. And I tend to get a little... intense about them.
Which is why Rise Of The Silver Surfer pissed me off to such a degree. The first film is no great shakes, I'll admit that from the off. But there's a lot of good stuff in it (mainly Michael Chiklis and the unfortunately named Chris Evans) which gives me cause to cut it a lot of slack. It's certainly better than the Roger Corman effort, which I mainly remember for the fact that Harmony off of Buffy and Angel plays the young Sue Storm and well, wouldn't she make a better Sue now than Jessica 'I swear I'm too hot!' Alba? But it's lacking a third act. Basically, imagine Superman 2 ending at the point where Supes and General (Kneel Before!) Zod have their big duff up in the city street, the bit where Supes gets chucked into a bus (a bizarrely similar thing occurs in Fantastic Four, but I'll chalk that one up to coincidence). So, in the film as finished, Supes then leads Zod and his cronies off to the Fortress Of Solitude where he defeats them. This is what Fantastic Four needs. But no. They defeat Cole of off Charmed there and then and that's it. The end. But we kind of let them off with that because it's a freshman movie and they're never perfect. Even the beauty that is Spider-Man has it's faults. At least they don't kill off Doom. If there's one thing which annoys me about superhero movies it's that they often needlessly kill off the villain. Look at Burton's Batman, a true piece of art, and, where it not for Nolan's Batman Begins, the definitive Dark Knight on screen. But they kill off the Joker. Which is just wrong on so many levels. It would be like Superman killing off Lex Luthor. (Now, minor digression here in that while I am slightly pissed at Sipder-Man 2 for killing off Doc Ock, I have no such qualms about the first film killing off the Green Goblin because, and my sister was incredulous when I told her this, his death happens almost exactly the same way in the comic - well, it did until they royally fucked continuity up with the Clone Saga.) So, we've seen in recent movies that they have become much less cavalier about killing people off. The Scarecrow survives Batman Begins, Magneto manages to get through all three X-Men movies with barely a scratch on him and so on.
So Dr Doom survives the first Fantastic Four film, unlike Ben Grimm's relationship with his fiance Debbie who can't cope with that fact that her husband to be has turned into a lump of orange rock. Her loss I say. The Thing is the best thing (oh God, was that an intentional pun?) in these movies. And, true to form, he's back in the sequel, attempting to twoc the Silver Surfer's board for his own nefarious ends. Never mind the fact that somehow the Surfer's energies transform him back into a human so that Julian McMahon doesn't have to wear make-up/his mask the entire time, never mind that somehow his murderous rampage in the first film has been forgotten and never mind the fact that somehow Jessica Alba's eyes are now blue (maybe she witnessed an exploding Rutan ship?). What does matter however is how abominably Doom is treated in this movie.
I'm not talking about the fact that he gets the crap kicked out of him again. No. I'm talking about the fact that Dr Doom is one of the greatest villains in the Marvel pantheon. There's a fantastic X-Men story starting in #145 of The Uncanny X-Men (and reprinted for us cheapskates in The Essential X-Men Volume 3 which sees Chris Claremont at the height of his powers following the Phoenix Saga (another beloved comic story fucked up by cinema)). Like Magneto, he's a hardy perennial and yet his inclusion in Rise Of The Silver Surfer smacks of contractual obligation, or desperate screenwriters looking to put a more concrete threat into the movie than the (literally and figuratively) nebulous menace of Galactus. His entire arc can be laid out as follows: Gets revived by Surfer, teams up with the military to steal Surfer's board, steals Surfers board, get crap kicked out of him. That's it. He doesn't even warrant an exit. He simply gets smacked down (into some conveniant water) and vanishes from the plot. But isn't this the guy who couldn't even be stopped by the power of a supernova in the first film? And now you're telling me that a bit of a duffing up (even by a multi-powered Johnny Storm) is enough to finish him off? Give me a break.
The problem with both F4 movies is the finale. They both clock in at something like an hour and a half (the extended edition adds on twenty minutes or so, but it's all character stuff, unlike the director's cut of Daredevil which added an entire subplot to the story) which just isn't enough time. Spider-Man tells a fairly simple story (Boy wants girl, boy becomes superhuman spider mutant, boy's best friend's father goes insane, boy kills him, boy gets girl but rejects her because it's not a safe life) and it takes two hours to do it. That extra half hour is vital in building up the plot (and notice I said plot there and not characters - despite what Hollywood's current thinking may be, if the plot sucks you can have the best characters in the world being played by the best actors but the movie will still suck). Rise Of The Silver Surfer attempts to do a globe-hopping world threatening adventure story with six lead roles. It falls down for the same reasons that X-Men - The Last Stand did. It rushes from one set piece to the next with little rhyme or reason, only concerned with giving people enough bangs for their buck.
It's not a complete disaster (it's certainly nowhere near the train wreck that was X - Men - The Last Stand). The plot does hold together. Kind of. But it's no surprise that the best part of the film is the beginning, where the threat of Galactus has not yet risen it's ugly head and our main concerns are whether or not Reed and Sue's wedding is going to go ahead. This sort of sequence could only appear in a F4 movie, the Four are unique among the Marvel heroes in that they are very much in the media spotlight. Were Spider-Man 4 to feature Peter and Mary-Jane's wedding, it would be very different from the media circus we see here. The Silver Surfer, despite his entire backstory being reduced to two lines of dialogue (and doesn't Norrin sound like a duff name when Alba says it?) fairs amazingly well, as a CG character, he's far more successful than Venom in Spidey 3. In fact, he's possibly the best realised effect of its kind since Gollum. I'm not sure how much work went into the creation of the Surfer, but he's good to start with and when he loses his board, he becomes even better. A tarnished vision. I don't think the character would ever be able to sustain his own movie (like I have doubts about the Young Magneto movie that keeps on cropping up in conversation). As a supporting lead, however, he's good. In fact, he may be a little too good, seeing as how he's the one who saves the day at the end. Where it not for Doom's questionable presence in the movie, the Four's entire purpose in the story would simply be to convince the Surfer that Earth was too good to be Galactus' mid morning snack.
Overall, I'd give it 3 out of 5. But I'll still buy the DVD when it comes out. I'm weak like that.
But films are a different matter. I somewhat shamefully admit to owning pretty much every comic book movie ever made (except for Road To Perdition - that movie was so depressing it made me want to slit my wrists, and I generally like depressing movies) and some of them I own more than once. I have the original theatrical versions of Spiderman 2, Daredevil (now there's an underrated movie) and The Fantastic Four as well as the extended editions. I made my sister buy me the limited edition 3 disc Hulk special edition one Christmas, like I made my mam get the director's cut Hellboy from America. I even own Howard The Duck on DVD for God's sake. And I tend to get a little... intense about them.
Which is why Rise Of The Silver Surfer pissed me off to such a degree. The first film is no great shakes, I'll admit that from the off. But there's a lot of good stuff in it (mainly Michael Chiklis and the unfortunately named Chris Evans) which gives me cause to cut it a lot of slack. It's certainly better than the Roger Corman effort, which I mainly remember for the fact that Harmony off of Buffy and Angel plays the young Sue Storm and well, wouldn't she make a better Sue now than Jessica 'I swear I'm too hot!' Alba? But it's lacking a third act. Basically, imagine Superman 2 ending at the point where Supes and General (Kneel Before!) Zod have their big duff up in the city street, the bit where Supes gets chucked into a bus (a bizarrely similar thing occurs in Fantastic Four, but I'll chalk that one up to coincidence). So, in the film as finished, Supes then leads Zod and his cronies off to the Fortress Of Solitude where he defeats them. This is what Fantastic Four needs. But no. They defeat Cole of off Charmed there and then and that's it. The end. But we kind of let them off with that because it's a freshman movie and they're never perfect. Even the beauty that is Spider-Man has it's faults. At least they don't kill off Doom. If there's one thing which annoys me about superhero movies it's that they often needlessly kill off the villain. Look at Burton's Batman, a true piece of art, and, where it not for Nolan's Batman Begins, the definitive Dark Knight on screen. But they kill off the Joker. Which is just wrong on so many levels. It would be like Superman killing off Lex Luthor. (Now, minor digression here in that while I am slightly pissed at Sipder-Man 2 for killing off Doc Ock, I have no such qualms about the first film killing off the Green Goblin because, and my sister was incredulous when I told her this, his death happens almost exactly the same way in the comic - well, it did until they royally fucked continuity up with the Clone Saga.) So, we've seen in recent movies that they have become much less cavalier about killing people off. The Scarecrow survives Batman Begins, Magneto manages to get through all three X-Men movies with barely a scratch on him and so on.
So Dr Doom survives the first Fantastic Four film, unlike Ben Grimm's relationship with his fiance Debbie who can't cope with that fact that her husband to be has turned into a lump of orange rock. Her loss I say. The Thing is the best thing (oh God, was that an intentional pun?) in these movies. And, true to form, he's back in the sequel, attempting to twoc the Silver Surfer's board for his own nefarious ends. Never mind the fact that somehow the Surfer's energies transform him back into a human so that Julian McMahon doesn't have to wear make-up/his mask the entire time, never mind that somehow his murderous rampage in the first film has been forgotten and never mind the fact that somehow Jessica Alba's eyes are now blue (maybe she witnessed an exploding Rutan ship?). What does matter however is how abominably Doom is treated in this movie.
I'm not talking about the fact that he gets the crap kicked out of him again. No. I'm talking about the fact that Dr Doom is one of the greatest villains in the Marvel pantheon. There's a fantastic X-Men story starting in #145 of The Uncanny X-Men (and reprinted for us cheapskates in The Essential X-Men Volume 3 which sees Chris Claremont at the height of his powers following the Phoenix Saga (another beloved comic story fucked up by cinema)). Like Magneto, he's a hardy perennial and yet his inclusion in Rise Of The Silver Surfer smacks of contractual obligation, or desperate screenwriters looking to put a more concrete threat into the movie than the (literally and figuratively) nebulous menace of Galactus. His entire arc can be laid out as follows: Gets revived by Surfer, teams up with the military to steal Surfer's board, steals Surfers board, get crap kicked out of him. That's it. He doesn't even warrant an exit. He simply gets smacked down (into some conveniant water) and vanishes from the plot. But isn't this the guy who couldn't even be stopped by the power of a supernova in the first film? And now you're telling me that a bit of a duffing up (even by a multi-powered Johnny Storm) is enough to finish him off? Give me a break.
The problem with both F4 movies is the finale. They both clock in at something like an hour and a half (the extended edition adds on twenty minutes or so, but it's all character stuff, unlike the director's cut of Daredevil which added an entire subplot to the story) which just isn't enough time. Spider-Man tells a fairly simple story (Boy wants girl, boy becomes superhuman spider mutant, boy's best friend's father goes insane, boy kills him, boy gets girl but rejects her because it's not a safe life) and it takes two hours to do it. That extra half hour is vital in building up the plot (and notice I said plot there and not characters - despite what Hollywood's current thinking may be, if the plot sucks you can have the best characters in the world being played by the best actors but the movie will still suck). Rise Of The Silver Surfer attempts to do a globe-hopping world threatening adventure story with six lead roles. It falls down for the same reasons that X-Men - The Last Stand did. It rushes from one set piece to the next with little rhyme or reason, only concerned with giving people enough bangs for their buck.
It's not a complete disaster (it's certainly nowhere near the train wreck that was X - Men - The Last Stand). The plot does hold together. Kind of. But it's no surprise that the best part of the film is the beginning, where the threat of Galactus has not yet risen it's ugly head and our main concerns are whether or not Reed and Sue's wedding is going to go ahead. This sort of sequence could only appear in a F4 movie, the Four are unique among the Marvel heroes in that they are very much in the media spotlight. Were Spider-Man 4 to feature Peter and Mary-Jane's wedding, it would be very different from the media circus we see here. The Silver Surfer, despite his entire backstory being reduced to two lines of dialogue (and doesn't Norrin sound like a duff name when Alba says it?) fairs amazingly well, as a CG character, he's far more successful than Venom in Spidey 3. In fact, he's possibly the best realised effect of its kind since Gollum. I'm not sure how much work went into the creation of the Surfer, but he's good to start with and when he loses his board, he becomes even better. A tarnished vision. I don't think the character would ever be able to sustain his own movie (like I have doubts about the Young Magneto movie that keeps on cropping up in conversation). As a supporting lead, however, he's good. In fact, he may be a little too good, seeing as how he's the one who saves the day at the end. Where it not for Doom's questionable presence in the movie, the Four's entire purpose in the story would simply be to convince the Surfer that Earth was too good to be Galactus' mid morning snack.
Overall, I'd give it 3 out of 5. But I'll still buy the DVD when it comes out. I'm weak like that.
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