SF Diplomat

REVIEW - Judex (1963)

My review of Georges Franju's Judex has also gone live over at Videovista.

I requested this film because, on paper, it looks amazing.  It's an adapted remake of a work of French silent genre cinema.  The original Judex was directed by Louis Feuillade and despite being very Frech indeed, it appeared to tap into many of the same ideas as the American pulps of the 1930s.  Judex himself is kind of an early prototype of The Shadow.  Add to this the fact that Franju's Yeux Sans Visage is really quite a weird film and you had, or so I thought, a match made in heaven.

Instead Judex is a weirdly disjointed affair that couples moments of amazing direction with terrible story-telling and a weirdly fantastical and yet deeply mundane representation of reality.  Having watched the film, I have no idea as to whether it is supposed to be set in 'our world'.

 

REVIEW - Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

I have just finished my somewhat discursive piece about Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II.

I definitely enjoyed watching it but it is a film that is beautiful at first and ugly later as the entire film is overshadowed by a multicultural response to The Lord of the Rings than simply never materialises.  If del Toro ever gets to make Hellboy III I suspect that the two films will be amazing together but we're unlikely to see that happen much before 2015.

However, the film did do something I thought was impossible: it made me quite excited about the idea of the film versions of The Hobbit.

Hugo Discussion - Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

You heard it here first folks (or possibly not).  Matthew "Layer Cake" Vaughn's Stardust, based upon a book by Neil Gaiman, beat off the incomprehensibly popular Heroes to pick up the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.

Given that the film was based on something written by Neil Gaiman and that the shortlist was shockingly poor, I think that this was not only a foregone conclusion but it was also the least horrific option.

I enjoyed Stardust, but I think it was ultimately hamstrung by the two fundamental weaknesses of Neil Gaiman as an author : a) it's a tarts and vicars party and b) It's an Escher lithograph.


Tarts and Vicars : The Tarts and Vicars party was evidently a staple of the 1970s cocktail party phenomenon.  Costumes were limited to prostitutes and members of the clergy.  The reason why I think that this applies quite nicely to the work of Gaiman is because it is a shallow deconstruction of the social narratives of the time.  Ever since Sandman, Gaiman has spent his time finding mythologies and reworking them ever so slightly in a knowing, post-modern way.  I say that this is a "shallow" deconstruction as Gaiman more often than not targets recognisable mythologies and he deconstructs them with no greater intellectual agenda than producing something fun and entertaining.  It's postmodernism for the timid.  Stardust, follows very much in this tradition by deconstructing fairy tales.  However, unlike stories such as Margo Lanagan's "The Goosle" there is no real transgression here.  It is still a romantic fairy tale with a little bit of humour and a little bit of action.


Escher Lithograph : Escher's famous lithographs work by essentially tricking your eyes into thinking that an impossible figure is actually possible; for example, stairways that head in different directions, hands drawing themselves and water flowing downhill on a fixed level.  This illusion is created by having the individual elements of his pieces look perfectly normal.  It is only when you slot them together that you realise that something is wrong.  The same is true of Gaiman's writing which is invariably composed of nice little ideas and vignettes strung together into a story that doesn't work but looks as though it does.  In the case of Stardust, Mark Williams' Billy and Robert De Niro's Captain Shakespeare steal every scene they are in and really only serve to clutter up what should be a very simple plot but they are so nicely drawn and well performed that one is tricked into forgetting that Captain Shakespeare is a Deus Ex Machina and that Lamia is quite a traditional and unengaging baddie


Stardust is not a bad film, it's just an unchallenging one that never completely puts all of its ducks in a row.

REVIEW - The Mist (2007)

I have just put up a somewhat meandering review of Frank Darabont's The Mist.

"The Mist - From Gothic Revival to Existential Despair"

I adored the film and my frustration at not being able to see it at the cinema is largely what was responsible for this post.  Having now received the film on DVD and watched it, I am more annoyed than ever at this year's Best Dramatic Long Form Hugo shortlist which, with almost supernatural grace and agility manages to avoid every single interesting genre film released in 2007.  Quite an achievement.

The review itself is more of a critical essay as I use the film's central theme as a jumping off point to talk about the relationship between Gothic fiction, Noir fiction and Existentialism.  I also include some brief discussion of Derek Raymond's He Died With His Eyes Open, one of the best books I have read this year (interesting review of it here by the guy who recommended it to me).

10 Reasons why Krull is a better film than Lord of the Rings

Sorry to come over all "io9" but after reading John's sniffy comments about Krull's effects over at SF Signal I felt compelled to respond by pointing out that Krull is, in fact, one of the greatest epic fantasy films ever made, coming as it did out of the same period of low-budget, down and dirty Sword and Sorcery cinema that gave us Hawk the Slayer, Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster.

By contrast, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a product of sanitised Hollywood risk management.  Its numerous faults are papered over by the obscene amounts of money Jackson spent on effects and it was unleashed upon a market-place that was if not well disposed to the books then had at least heard of them.

Krull is not based upon any existing IP and it has a tiny effects budget.  In terms of being a praiseworthy piece of film-making it wipes the floor with Jackson's hideous melodrama.

 

 

So, 10 (more or less tongue-in-cheek) reasons why Krull is a better film than Lord of the Rings :

1. Krull does not have any hobbits in it - Hobbits are representative of the English petite bourgeoisie.  In the real world they vote Tory, complain about gypsies and spend their time wearing brass-buttoned blasers and writing angry, ill-informed letters to the Times.
2. Krull has a better bad guy - The Beast is an inhuman cthuloid creature who hops between worlds in his Black Fortress.  Sauron is a flaming vagina who overly invested in bling.
3. Krull has a better good guy - Aragorn is an emokid who lives in the wilderness until he is called upon to topple a legitimate government and serve as a Noriega-style puppet for Elven and Wizard interests in the Gondor area.  I imagine him aged 50 with a paunch and mirrored sunglasses shaking President Reagan's hand before signing the death warrants of Mordor-friendly revolutionaries.  By contrast Prince Colwyn has a beard, wears bollock-crushingly tight trousers, is quite camp and kills people with an awesome spinny thing.
4. Krull has Bernard Bresslaw in it - Bresslaw was a RADA scholar and was spotted by Lawrence Olivier but is best known for appearing in a large number of Carry-on films.  The Lord of the Rings has the chick from the Aerosmith videos.
5. Krull was originally intended to be an official Dungeons and Dragons film - Watching The Lord of the Rings feels like sitting in on someone's interminable D&D Campaign. In fact, you could probably clean out the Temple of Elemental Evil in the time it takes to watch all of the Lord of the Rings films.
6. Krull's plot-hammer is a lot cooler - When Tolkien writes himself into a corner he has an undead army turn up and vanquish the forces of evil.  In the film Jackson has this happen in about thirty seconds begging the question as to why Aragorn or his forefathers did not just call up the army and wipe Mordor off the map without the need for questing and heroic defences of castles.  Krull, by contrast, has a bunch of Clydesdales who run so quickly that their hooves catch fire and they fly.  The first resolves all plot problems with such force as to render all the sacrifice and suffering needless.  The second gets the characters from one spot to another and leaves them to fight the final battle.
7. Krull's noble sacrifice is far more interesting - At the end of the film, Rell the Cyclops must return home in order to die peacefully.  Failure to make his way home ensures that he will die in terrible pain but, after leaving for home, the Cyclops turns around and holds a door open just long enough for his friends to get into the Beast's castle even though he is squashed in the process.  Gandalf falls off a bridge.  Then he comes back.  Thereby completely negating the sacrificial element.  (See also Jean Grey, Aslan and Jesus as examples of fantasy characters who undermine their own sacrifices because the author doesn't have the wontons to bump off their favourite Mary Sue).
8. Krull's giant Spider has a reason for being there - Frodo and Sam are lured to Shelob's lair  as a transparent set up for a set piece for two characters who essentially spend the last couple of films walking.  Krull's giant spider is the sole guard of a prison where a powerful seer was sent for the crime of loving the doubt-ridden Ynyr.  In order to discover the whereabouts of the Black Fortress, Ynyr (now an old man) has to sneak past the giant spider and confront his past and sacrifice his life in order to get the information out.
9. Krull has fresh ideas - While the book of The Lord of The Rings did a fantastic job of innovation and reimagination of old fantasy tropes, the film version is content with depicting overly familiar ideas.  Krull, by contrast, moves beyond Tolkienian tropes and introduces a number of new ideas such as the world-hopping castle, the Cyclops as  an individually doomed people, the Fire Mares and the glaive, a cinematic weapon as iconic as the disc in Tron.
10. Krull's heroes are social outcasts - The political aspects of The Lord of The Rings revolve around Gandalf effectively convincing the great and the good of Middle Earth to do their jobs.  He's kind of a fantasy version of Winston Churchill.  Colwyn's companions are an incompetent wizard, an eerie cyclops and a band of criminals and murderers.  The Lord of the Rings involves people doing their job, Krull involves people sacrificing themselves for an idea and for friendship.

The moral of this story is that Big Budgets and Zeitgeist-dominating torrents of hype do not necessarily make for a great film.  As we saw in my alternative Hugos list, sometimes the films that slip in and out of cinemas are more worthy of your attention.  While a lot of these reasons are facetious, I would honestly rewatch Krull in a heartbeat whereas I can think of nothing worse than spending 12 hours sitting through the interminable melodrama of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

REVIEW - I'm a Cyborg, but That's Okay (2006)

My review of Park Chan-wook's I'm a Cyborg, but That's Okay has gone up at Videovista.

I really enjoyed the Vengeance trilogy and so this frothy, style-over-substance romcom came as something of a disappointment though it did chime quite nicely with some of the things that I have been hearing from the festival circuit.  Apparently, buoyed up by the success of films such as The Host and Old Boy, South Korean producers now expect all Korean films to be successful over seas because they're Korean.  However, there are signs that the influx of money has not been entirely positive as budgets have exploded at the same rate as the willingness of producers to take risks has declined.  I'm a Cyborg, but That's Okay is a desperately conventional and commercial film as are the legions of horror films and war movies that seem to make up the totality of South Korean's cultural exports.

Any link between the increasing dullness of Korean film and the bankruptcy of Tartan films (who distribute most of the Korean films that get released over here), I leave entirely up to the speculations of the reader.

REVIEW - Alone With Her (2006)

My review of Eric Nicholas' Alone With Her has gone up at Videovista.

Alone With Her is a great example of a psychological thriller that is much much more than its writers intended it to be.  Clearly written as a 'moral panic' piece about the accessibility of surveillance equipment, the film turns out to be a hugely transgressive and hugely uncomfortable watch.  What is also nice is that the values it seems to transgress are not those traditionally associated with the genre (i.e. the victim status of women) but rather the values that are widely accepted in society today.

Though I have to say that the cover of the UK DVD is really ugly.  It looks like an 80s ghost story.



The psychological thriller is one of my favourite genres.  I have reviewed a number of them :

• The Skeleton Key (2005) for Revolution SF
  
• Next Door (2005) for Videovista
• The Jacket (2005) for THE ZONE

REVIEW - The Orphanage (2007)

My review of Juan Antonia Bayona's The Orphanage (El Orfanato) has gone live over at Strange Horizons.  Well... I say "my" review but you'll note that I share a by-line with Niall Harrison.

The reason for this is that I wrote up my review and, moments before dispatching it,
I was struck by the urge to write it up as a psychiatric case study.  Case studies turn out to be one of our Niall's professional areas of expertise and after a couple of back-and-forths, Niall had transformed my crude attempt at pastiche into something altogether more impressive.  So it was clear that Niall should share the creative credits.

Were this a book review, doubtless Jeff Vandermeer would now be coming up with a manner of hunting Niall for sport over the internet :-) (pardon the cache-link but David Moles' site is currently down).

REVIEW - I Am Legend (2007)

My review of the Will Smith version of I Am Legend has just gone up HERE.

Unfortunately you need to be a member of the British Science Fiction Association in order to read it properly, you'll also need to be registered with their new forums, which I have already been causing trouble on.  Oh dear.

The review is appearing in issue 187 of Matrix, which is the first online issue of a magazine that, up until recently, was published in dead tree form and mailed to BSFA members.

Since I wrote the review, the film's original ending has surfaced online.  I won't link to it as they're being shut down almost as fast as they can pop up, but I feel rather vindicated in that the original ending not only draws on the themes I identified in my review, but it also completely fails to mention God, thereby adding weight to my uncharitable speculation that the film-makers chickened out and drafted in Jee-sus in order to sell the film better in the Bible Belt.

The Golden Compass - Why the critics are wrong, wrong wrong

I went to see The Golden Compass on sunday night and was pleasantly surprised.  I've been to see the last two Harry Potter movies, I saw the Lion, The witch and the Wardrobe and I saw all three Lord of the Rings movies and with the possible exception of the first Lord of the Rings film (which is based on the only decent book of the three anyway), The Golden Compass is better than all of them.  Sadly this is not a fact that is reflected in either the reviews or the film's box-office.

Rotten Tomatoes : 44% fresh (compared with 62% fresh from users)
Metacritic : 51% positive (compared with 6.0 out of 10 from users)

As far as I can see, the criticisms of the film break down into two separate categories.  Firstly, that the film is toothless and secondly that it's too slow.  I think both criticisms are unfounded.  The second one in particular.