Not Books VII

 

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Movies-

Factotum (2005) 

After not-long finishing Charles Bukowki's second novel, Factotum, I was curious to see how lead actor Matt Dillon would tackle the job of embodying the figure of Henry Chinaski, and of how Norwegian director Bent Hammer would address capturing the tone of Bukowski's writing. Since, in my opinion, Henry Chinkasi is nothing like any typical figure the casual consumer is used to seeing on the big screen, it was very possible that they might have gone in  a different direction to chase viewers. Happily for this grumbling critic, the filmmakers did their best to create a fairly accurate representation of the misery, depression and black comedy of a Bukowski page, and ended up creating a very nice visual and audio intepretation to go alongside the book- though as a context-less film for the non-Bukowski fan, it's probably all a bit mystifying.

Matt Dillon does a very good job with a very difficult task; trying somehow to represent the pure charisma, drunkenness and darkened artistry of the blunt-speaking main character, though honestly I didn't think he had enough of an absorbing persona to quite pull it off. To do the character justice it would've taken a performance reminiscent of Johnny Depp as Raul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with the disadvantage of much less dialogue. I felt that Lili Taylor did a fantastic job as Jan, Chinaski's premier other half for this book, and a probably as complicated as Chinaski with her good and dark moods. The ending, where the pair finally say goodbye for the last time was something I found genuinely touching. almost teary-eyed thanks to the subdued, controlled performances.

Of course this film also has the massive advantage of being adapted from the pen of Charles Bukowski, meaning that Henry Chinaski's musings spoken out loud by Dillon's strong voice sound amazing, especially his voice-over thoughts and poetry readings. Perhaps not surprisingly the film suffers from being adapted from material that simply wasn't at all designed to be adapted in to a modern plot-driven movie, and even though Bent Hammer tries to stamp a more circular conclusion by focusing on Chinaski's unexpected good news of having a short story accepted for publication, I think Bukowski's downbeat, seemingly non-progressive style shines through and gives the whole thing the impression of either an art-house drama, or an extended pilot for a high budget TV show, I'm not sure which.

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Elysium (2014)

There was huge buzz for Elysium during its development, as fans across the Internet hoped for the next great science fiction film with the scope of something like Blade Runner or 2001. Director, writer and producer Neil Blomkamp first feature film District 9 was a surprisingly brilliant film, made on a relatively small budget it looked fantastic, and offered intelligent themes mixed with exciting action; in essence everything you could want from the genre. The concept for Elysium sounded interesting too; set in the year 2154 the Earth is a devastated wasteland, where millions of people live in poverty under the threat of starvation, with not nearly enough jobs or resources to go around. The Earth's rulers, the ones who control the merciless robots who keep the proletariat beaten down under the pretense of policing, live far above the planet in a different world entirely on the space station Elysium. Elysium provides the most gorgeous CGI images in the film, looking every bit the space station heaven it's supposed to be.

When the plot kicks in things unfortunately become more generic, and greatly replicate some of the events of District 9 to a distracting degree. Matt Damon is very good as lead action guy whose name I've already forgotten, who is exposed to deadly levels of radiation early on in the film and is set to die in a week. He contacts his old criminal buddies to arrange an illegal trip to Elysium, and through his efforts ends up discovering some very valuable information that make him a target for the human overlords. Damon's mission to save himself against all odds are very similar to lead character Vikkus from District 9 (and who's also in this film as a crazy mercenary), and this plays out in some of the earlier action scenes on Earth too, where the desolated city of LA looks strikingly similar to the alien slums of Johannesburg.

The movie also fizzles out towards the end, where nothing particularly interesting happens surrounding Damon's mad dash for survival, he just sort of keeps on going like an indestructible force. Blomkamp doesn't attempt to tell any of the history of the world of Elysium, which was a massive shame since the evocative, detailed settings and intriguing social set-up seemed to promise that an origin would be fascinating. Without such an attempt, the surroundings felt pretty, but hollow, in essence summing up the whole film. Far from awful, but very disappointing considering what it might have been.

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The Great Gatsby (2013)

Apparently there's been a fair amount of negative criticism directed towards Baz Luhrmann's $105 million budgeted adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby, and for about the first hour of that film I was firmly in that camp. The Jay-Z soundtrack particularly annoyed me, since it just felt obnoxiously inaccurate and needlessly contemporary, and combined with the force of fast-moving, colourful parties held in Gatsby's mansion it all felt like the film was dangerously close from abandoning the delicacy and timelessness of Fitzgerald's work. To me, The Great Gatsby is the single most important, definitive work in American fiction, and the mix of classic and contemporary design and styles was overwhelming to begin with, and not in a good way.

But, thank god, around an hour in it felt to me as if everything just calmed down a little, giving room for the acting talents of Leonardo Di Caprio and Tobey Maguire to fully embrace the classic characters and script. I felt myself immersed in the story more and more as it progressed, steadily becoming more dramatic until the tragic ending. It was nearer the ending that Tobey Maguire's qualities as Nick Caraway began to come to the forefront. Earlier on in the film his nervous disposition seemed out of place in the Jazz Age, but as events spiraled out of control he became more and more likable as the eventual sole defender of Gatsby, his out-of-place character making far more sense in emphasis of the differences between he and his friend Gatsby, and the old money families who sign Gatsby's death warrant.

Di Caprio was amazing as Gatsby, charismatic, engaging, and most importantly of all very sympathetic. As the events neared the crescendo I knew they would, the tragedy kicked in even before the final gunshot. In its portrayal it reminded me closely of the great tragic endings of Luhrmann's other great films, Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge, but the final scenes of Caraway putting the finishing touches to his novel The Great Gatsby gave a final, necessary uplift. A superb film, despite perhaps requiring a little bit of patience from the viewer for it to really get going.

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Godzilla (2014)

I've never seen an original, 'real' Godzilla film before, only Roland Emmerich's irredeemably awful 1998 Hollywood version, but I was still very excited with the prospect of this new adaptation from Gareth Edwards (the man behind Monsters, which I quite liked). As a twenty-something card-carrying member of the Internet generation, how could I not be? The very well made trailers promised two things; giant monsters beating each other up, and Walter White- sorry, I mean Bryan Cranston- which is really all I need in my onscreen entertainment life. Two hours later, and I finished the film feeling pretty happy with what I'd seen, but a little bit unable to get over the lack of one of the two things mentioned above. Spoiler warning and all that.

For about forty-five minutes, Bryan Cranston dominates the screen with a now-typically fantastic performance, making the most of a fairly stereotypical role, as a paranoid scientist convinced that the death of his wife in Japan dickity-siz years ago was due to some kind of mysterious conspiracy. After we see the sad death of his wife, amidst some smoky shots of a huge power plant somehow being toppled to the ground, the movie pushes forward to the present day where Cranston has ostracized his incredibly generic son and his family. He somehow manages to convince his son to come with him to Japan to investigate the quarantined sight of the original 'accident', and from there the two are thrust into the middle of explosive events as they become witness to the birth of a giant evil insect thing.

Then Bryan Cranston dies, and the movie goes from being awesome to merely being pretty good. I wasn't expecting that to happen at all and was all set to enjoy the sight of Cranston & Son doing their best to harness and direct the power of the mighty Godzilla to protect the world from this new threat of giant monsters. When the former dies, the latter becomes so incredibly generic as the main hero that it almost ruined things for me since I couldn't care less whether he lived or died. It was made worse by the magical narrative that ensured that CranstonSon (who's character name I can't remember, aside from it was stupid) was somehow at the front of every piece of action, no matter how illogical that was. Seriously, the efforts to make him the heroic saviour almost ruined the film.

Thankfully there was a lot of amazing CGI of Godzilla fighting his monstrous foes, and that made up for it. Obviously it all looked amazing thanks to the sheer amount of money poured into it, but the choreography was exciting too. The animators deserve a ton of credit for showing Godzilla as a character; his pain and aggression as he fought for his life. He was much, much better than any of the non-Cranston characters, and I hope to god they drop all of those for the sequel and just bring back the star. Or have Godzilla resurrect Bryan Cranston through the magic of I don't know what. Anyway, to round these rambling up I really enjoyed Godzilla, but not as much as I could have. The next one should be fabulous though.

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TV Series-

Penny Dreadful- Season One (2014)

For a big Alan Moore fan like myself, it's very tempting to look at the plot set-up for the new Showtime/Sky TV series Penny Dreadful and straight away think of it as a rip-off of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series (and legendarily bad film), since it's about a collection of characters from various pieces of classic literature coming together to deal with a mysterious threat. To be fair, I find it very hard to believe that the creators of this show didn't have LXG in mind, but on the other hand the LXG film was so awful that's most likely guaranteed we'll never see a straight screen adaptation, so I was willing to give Penny Dreadful a chance.

Eight fifty-minute episodes later, and the first series of the show left me feeling optimistic, if not massively impressed. On the surface, Penny Dreadful has a lot going for it, including a large budget affording very nice costumes and sets (though sadly not special effects), a Hollywood-level cast including Josh Hartnett, Eva Green and Timothy Daltan, and above all the positive feeling that writer John Logan (who wrote the whole series alone) was trying very hard to reach a high standard of dialogue to reflect what we expect from classic literature. The cast are all very good, and so it was down to Logan to shape his story into something that felt true to the source material while being darker, sexier, and super-heroic. In my opinion he mostly succeeds, avoiding the risk with this sort of high brow fantasy horror that it'll just come across as really stupid- most of the time, anyway.

Having said all that, there's still a way to go for this show if it's to have a successful second season. The characters have been mostly cool and mysterious, but if the audience is to form a strong emotion attachment to them then I think Logan could do with laying off the constantly uber-intense, serious tone just a little bit to allow the characters to breathe. I felt the 50-minute episode length was 10-minutes too long last season, leading to so much introspective brooding that much of it lost its impact. I do admire Logan for remaining patient with some of the more obvious plot twists, rather than bundling them out their for quick shock value, but if he's going to continue to flirt with the main details of novels like Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, then at some point, to put it bluntly, he's going to have to shit or get off the pot.

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True Blood- Season Seven (2014)

Oh Boy. True Blood. How to sum this show up? I don't think anything I write can do justice to how stupid and crazy True Blood has been over its seven series run, but I'm not exactly recommending people rush to buy and watch it. I first started watching True Blood mainly because my girlfriend really liked it and wanted to try and get me in to it. I wasn't as wary as I should've been, mainly because I knew that the show runner was Alan Ball- the writer behind the classic film American Beauty and the morbidly brilliant TV show Six Feet Under, so I was quite happy to go back to his work. In hindsight, the first season of True Blood did mostly conform to Ball's typical style, focusing on the subtext of the main plot, where vampires have just come out of the closet to the world and mean to integrate their race with the rest of us. It's a very X-Men premise, with Ball somewhat replicating the tone and moral quandaries of Six Feet Under, only in a more mainstream, glamourised style.

So yeah, I enjoyed the first season as a good mix of style and substance. From then on everything went completely insane, as Ball became less and less involved with the creative side of things, and the show instead apparently began to more directly adapt the source material novels. Unfortunately the source material seems to be sub-Twilight bullshit designed for people who want to tell others that they read books but actually don't want to, and from season two onwards there seemed to be a constant battle between that and some genuine quality. Sometimes the writing and acting could be really, really good, but as the show went on and plots became dumber and dumber, I think everybody kind of gave up. As a viewer, the most disappointing aspect personally was the almost complete lack of character development for most of the mains.

Going into the final season, I was hoping for a dramatic, bombastic conclusion at least. Since... well, all of it, True Blood has made it a mission to rip-off Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (two of my all-time favourite shows) as much and as badly as possible, to the extent where lead vampires Bill and Eric basically just play rotating versions of Angel and Spike, going back and forth over which one is which depending on the season and situation. During this final season, curiously Eric is Angel from Angel-Season Five while Bill is Angel from Buffy- Season Three, which was an interesting way to do it. Oh yeah, the plot of this season; there isn't much of one. Basically there's a big new blood disease created by some old villains that's gotten out into the world and is killing a whole bunch of vampires. That's not a bad idea, but they go almost nowhere interesting with it. To put it into perspective how lazy the writing is, the main villains of this series are the fucking Yakuza. Seriously.

In fairness, the theme of the final series seemed to be to round off most of the characters unresolved emotional journeys and such, and it kind of achieved that albeit mostly in an incredibly boring manner. I won't spoil anything but the final episode was possibly the worst final episode of any show I've seen. It's a shame, because there was a point mid-way through the season where it looked like things might be heating up, but  it decidedly did not. Instead viewers were subjected to a drawn-out series of whining and moaning, where the actors desperately tried to look like they cared about the nonsense going on though they obviously didn't. It was kind of a shame that everything ended so badly, but to be honest, I probably should've seen it coming. I'm going to stop writing about True Blood now.

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Video Games-

Monkey Island 2- LeChuck's Revenge- Special Edition (1991/2010)

Looking back at Not Books II it seems that I was quite harsh on The Secret of Monkey Island- Special Edition, the 2009 remake of Ron Gilbert & LucasArt's 1990 adventure game classic, entirely because of the updated graphical style. Aside from the oddly coloured and slightly uncomfortable visuals, the game was a a delight as I knew it would be, since the gameplay is exactly the same as it was aside from the addition of a full voice cast. It was for those same reasons I knew I'd enjoy they sequel remake to Monkey Island 2 nevertheless, but thankfully the developers slightly redesigned the updated look and the result is much improved. Guybrush and the other characters look like the animations they should do, rather than slightly blurry clay models that kind of creeped me out. The colour pallet is way improved, stepping away from the ill-advised decision to try and remake Amiga graphics for the sake of a nicer individual look.

So, the game. I must have played it a dozen times over the years, such was my obsession with adventure games as a teenager, but there was still enough great humour in the script and plot for it to be worth it, perhaps for the last ever time. The voice cast, who all return from past voiced Monkey games, do a pretty good job, and crucially the music is absolutely fantastic throughout. The puzzles are difficult and absorbing, but not overly so, and overall I think this is a slightly better game than the original- although that's all completely subjective. I had a huge amount of fun reliving Monkey 2, but the absolute best news is that I finally managed to figure out how to get the third game, The Curse of Monkey Island to work on my laptop- by far my favourite of the series.

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Music- New segment here, a very quick look at albums I've listened to the most recently, not comprehensive or anything;

Alestorm- Sunset on the Golden Age (2014)

Pirate metal band Alestorm don't mess with their formula one bit for their new fourth album. They've never been one of my absolute favourite bands since trying to listen to a whole album can easily become grating, but they're very fun to listen to in short bursts. While initially they might come across as very loud and aggressive power metal band, like most bands of that genre they tend to rely on as many catchy hooks as they can muster. This album, while nothing earth-shattering, it their most consistent collection of songs yet.

Acrimony- Tumuli Shroomaroom (1997)
Regretfully I only just recently recently found about Acrimony, a real shame since they have exactly the kind of sound I was incredibly into just a few years ago. Taking most of their cues from one of my favourite bands of all time, Kyuss, Acrimony avoid becoming just another of a thousand boring doom metal bands by keeping a steady balance between their doom and stoner metal leanings, taking just enough from the latter to satisfy my curiously specific doom and stoner metal tastes.

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