I was a regular contributor of reviews to Kansai Scene magazine — lucky enough to be paid to catch the latest releases in film and print. I have selected just a few here to illustrate my reviewing style.
Against the Day
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1-59420-120-X
Fans of long, difficult novels rejoice! Thomas Pynchon, who defines long and difficult, has given us his longest yet. The work is titled Against the Day, is 1, 089 pages and is his sixth novel in 43 years. It is also everything you would hope and expect from the man who wrote Gravity’s Rainbow.
The novel is set between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the time immediately following World War I — in Pynchon’s own words, “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”
To attempt a synopsis in a short review like this would be folly of, well, Pynchon-esque proportions. In Pynchonland anything can happen and probably already has.
We meet the Chums of Chance who float in and out of the story in the airship Inconvenience; the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tertactys (TWIT), a London-based gang of anarchists fighting power; and diverse capitalist greedheads, misfits, motleys and fools.
Against the Day is fairly comprehensive parody, not just in its vision but in the writing style, which flips between genres, including the Boy’s Own adventure, cowboy fiction, the spy novel, soft porn, and on and on.
Long and difficult, yes, but also unrelentingly humorous, ironic, anarchic, and fun — the work of a huge imagination and enormous intellect.
Hannibal Rising
Author: Thomas Harris
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 0-385-33941-0
Hannibal Lecter, fiction’s favourite cannibal, has been with us for three novels and films-of-the-novels (Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, Hannibal). In 2003 he was voted by the American Film Institute the number one villain of all time. (It must have been a very rainy afternoon when that vote was proposed.)
I wonder, in all the years he has been horrifying us, how many times have we stopped to consider why such a brilliant man and possessor of such immaculate good taste should adopt murder and mayhem as a lifestyle choice.
Well, Hannibal author Thomas Harris has asked himself that question too, and has written us another novel and a screenplay that explains it all.
Yes, to universal surprise, it seems that Hannibal had a troubled upbringing and that is why he is a cannibalistic, murderous sadist. Moreover we find out that his first killings were committed in good causes.
Life started well for young Hannibal. His dad was a Duke or a Count and the family lived in a castle in Lithuania. Unfortunately, war came along. Most of family were killed and the young Hannibal was forced to witness his sister being eaten by some very unpleasant (and hungry) men. This seems to be the root of his misbehaving.
He is eventually taken in by a wealthy and kindly uncle in Paris. He commits his first killing defending the honour of his aunt, the beautiful Lady Murasaki.
And the rest is, as they say, another film adaptation — scheduled for February release.
Mulholland Drive
Director: David Lynch
Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring
Mulholland Drive is essential Lynch, containing all the familiar Lynch memes and themes from dwarves and out-of-focus close ups, to kitsch and incarnated evil.
Betty (Naomi Watts) is a wholesome country girl who comes to Hollywood to start a career in the movies. Once in town she meets up with Rita (Laura Elena Harring), a dark, mysterious amnesiac who hides out from some killers in Betty’s apartment. Betty, who embodies the ‘I can’ in American, sets about recovering Rita’s identity and life. They slip into a lesbian relationship.
Then it is with a jolt that the viewer discovers that none of this may actually be happening at all and we set off on a journey to locate the reality of the movie, a task of piecing together clues that parallels Betty’s on-screen search into Rita’s past.
It is not an easy film: fantasy overlays reality; identity is conditional; the characters are powered by delusion: insight comes in a small blue box; and Satan is equated with self knowledge and lives among the rubbish bins behind Twinkie’s diner.
The acting is of a standard that surpasses previous Lynch films. Naomi Watts is impressive as she slips seamlessly from one incarnation of herself in to the next. This reviewer was wondering at one point whether she was the same woman in the different roles. Justin Theroux who plays the film director Adam Kesher has more than a little of Joseph Fiennes about him, and is a name to watch out for in the future.
There is a solution to the labyrinthine plot, but getting there might drive a literalist to the funny farm. A great part of the challenge of watching Lynch is simply accepting.
The Day after Tomorrow
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum
Director: Roland Emerich
Over the next twenty years climate change will bring Siberian weather to temperate European and US cities, drown coastal conurbations, cause widespread rioting, pitch nations into conflict over dwindling space and resources, displace millions and greatly increase the chances of a nuclear exchange.
This is not the plot of The Day after Tomorrow, these are the findings of a Pentagon national security review leaked earlier this year, that claims global warming is a greater threat to US and world security than terrorism or rogue states.
A pretty scary vision — so why does director/writer/environmentalist Roland Emerich, when he is on an obvious mission to persuade, and when there is so many urgent real world problems, create such a patently absurd vision of climatic calamity?
In Emerich’s version, the process of change is compressed into a matter of days, with mega storms sucking super-cooled air from the troposphere and creating an instant ice age across the northern hemisphere and almost everyone freezing to death.
As is the way with disaster pics, the story hinges on the one man with all the answers, in this case Dennis Quaid, a climatologist who tries to convince a sceptical US government of the dangers in store and then walks through a raging blizzard from Philadelphia to New York to find his son.
His son, being a chip off the old block, is busy keeping a cool head when all around are getting theirs frozen, saving lives and impressing his teenage girlfriend into undying love.
Quaid has a wife too, who exists only to fret about her son and provide an irrelevant sub plot about a cancer-stricken child.
Aside from a call to environmental arms, the film is the ultimate disaster flick and disaster is what Emerich excels at. With the aid of CG we see LA demolished by twisters and New York swamped by a tidal wave and then buried in ice. Along the way he sneaks in some nice jibes at the smugness of the developed world.
In his mission to persuade, Emerich falls out the pulpit. In his mission to thrill, he provides a rollocking good yarn.
Chris Page 