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Farewell and adieu

Because of the current residential situation (our solicitors are still talking to their solicitors; exchange of contracts is still frustratingly out of reach) ...

Because of a recent upswing in my already burdensome workload (we've just got rid of a spectacularly inept temp whose week-long series of cock-ups has set me back further than I want to think about) ...

Because of the general exodus from Platform 27 and a dwindling readership ...

And most of all because these factors have demotivated me to the point where I'm not striving to make MovieBuff Redux the blog it could be, but instead posting by-the-numbers entries a couple of times a week ...

... I've decided to call time.

I might set up stall somewhere else (WordPress seems the most appealing) once we've moved into the new house and established ourselves there. I don't know. In the meantime, I'll continue to check out everyone else's blogs (for "everyone else" read "the few P27ers who are still blogging"). But for now ...

Thank you very much, and good night.

Happy Halloween!

For anyone in Nottingham this evening, Cineworld (formerly the UGC) is doing a one-off screening of Terence Fisher's 1958 version of ‘Dracula' (the first and best of the Hammer Dracula productions) starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. I first saw it as a kid and Lee's performance as the eponymous blood-sucker gave me the creeps.

As such, and with the only criteria being that everything in the list had to have given me (or still gives me) a shiver down the spine, please enjoy a fright-filled ghost ride through MovieBuff's Top Ten Scary Movies.

In alphabetical order:

Deep Red. Argento's masterpiece; intense and unsettling with darkly ironic pay-off. Great creepy moment: a life-size wind-up doll scuttling into a room as prelude to a particularly nasty murder.

Dracula. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in their most famous roles. Cheesy in places, but bags of atmosphere. Great creepy moment: Dracula, teeth bared, eyes blazing, bearing down on Mina Harker.

The Exorcist. William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's bestseller delves into the nature of evil; Satan and two priests (one old, one losing his faith) battle it out over the soul of a young girl. Great creepy moment: "Merrrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnn!!!"

The Eye. The Pang Brothers at their best with an often scary but ultimately poignant tale of a woman whose eye operation has unexpected side-effects. Great creepy moment: an agonisingly suspenseful scene in a lift that'll have you taking the stairs for weeks afterwards.

The Fog. The first of two John Carpenter films on the list (and, no, the other one isn't ‘Halloween'), this is a slow-burn, atmospheric take on the ‘urban legend'/campfire tale yarn. The extended finale had me chewing my fingernails first time I saw it. Great creepy moment: the fog rolling in slowly through the silent streets.

Freaks. Tod Browning's controversy-magnet still packs a punch seventy-five years after it was first released (it was banned in Britain for a good many of them). Lust, jealousy and revenge amongst circus folk. Great creepy moment: "One of us, one of us."

Mute Witness. Not a horror film per se, but this taut thriller about a deaf-mute make-up artist stalked by nameless aggressors after she witnesses the filming of a snuff movie plays on some pretty effective primal fears. Saw at the Broadway in Nottingham on its initial release; walked swiftly to my bus stop afterwards, jumping at shadows the whole way. Great creepy moment: the claustrophobically tense cat-and-mouse sequence through a deserted studio.

The Ring. Hideo Nakata's sinister masterpiece spawed a slew of imitators and an okayish remake. Its genius is that it makes objects of horror of the telephone and television, the two items that are a staple fixture of every household. Great creepy moment: Sadako crawling, grey-skinned and lank-haired out of the TV.

A Tale of Two Sisters. One of the best of the cycle of Asian horrors to gain mainstream release after the success of ‘The Ring', this has a denouement that makes you appraise the whole film in a different light. Great creepy moment: the shock revelation two-thirds of the way through.

The Thing. John Carpenter's finest two hours: take a group of men in complete isolation (a polar ice station), let loose a shape-changing, well, thing and watch all hell break loose. Great creepy moment: the defibrillator scene.

Shine on

The tag-line reads "the fairytale that won't behave itself" - good call. The works of Neil Gaiman have never slotted neatly into categories, even when the genre touchstones seem to be present and correct. There are elements of horror, fantasy and mystery throughout his ouevre, but the only way you could accurately categorise Neil Gaiman is by coming up with a new genre - and you'd have to call it Neil Gaiman.

Maybe it's the enigmatic quality to his work, maybe it's because his imagination overarches the mainstream and goes heading off into new territories that are completely his own, but Gaiman adaptations are thin on the ground. In the 90s, he developed Neverwhere for the BBC, then reimagined it as a novel. A couple of years ago, Gaiman's long-standing collaborator, the illustrator Dave McKean, made his directorial debut with the Gaiman-scripted MirrorMask, an offbeat, under-rated, often bizarre but ultimately beautiful film.

Now, however, Neil Gaiman enters the mainstream: a big-budget adaptation of his novel Stardust, its cast balancing out newcomers (Charlie Cox, Kate Magowan) and flavours du jour (Sienna Miller, Ricky Gervais) with Hollywood heavyweights (Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert de Niro). If the cast is oddball, so is the director: Matthew Vaughn following up duties as producer to Guy Ritchie and his decidedly Ritchie-esque debut Layer Cake with something that resolutely does not feature guns, gangsters, swearing and shell suits. The change of direction is quite pleasant.

The plot, in a nutshell, involves a quest by young idealist Tristan (Cox) to retrieve a fallen star, as a token of his love for Victoria (Miller), from an enchanted kingdom whose boundary borders his village. Also in pursuit of the star are a band of fratricidal princely brothers (their numbers including Jason Flemyng and Rupert Everett) hell-bent on killing each to secure their ascension to the throne, and narcissistic witch Lamia (Pfeiffer, at her best in ages) who wants to take the heart of the star for its powers of youthful reinvigoration.

Ah yes, the star itself. Upon falling from the heavens, it takes human form, that of Yvaine (Claire Danes), a young woman who vacillates between dreamy romanticism and acidic stroppiness. It's giving nothing away to say that Tristan finds her first and that romance eventually blossoms - it's what happens along the way that counts.

Despite a few contrivances and coincidences, Stardust emerges as a fun, frothy concoction, its occasional moments of the macabre giving the production a bit of weight. It's not quite a masterpiece (maybe one day we'll get a Gaiman adaptation that truly captures the flavour of Gaiman's uncosseted imagination), but it's well worth your time, if for no other reason than de Niro's hilarious, flamboyant turn as a camp, cross-dressing sky pirate.

The 75 Book Challenge: Books 56 & 57

Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster  Rendered in Auster's usual cool, cerebral, emotionally removed prose, this 130-page novella is set a small, spartan room. Its few furnishings - a desk, a lamp, etc. - are labelled DESK, LAMP, etc. There is a typescript and a pile of photographs on the desk. The room's occupant, an old man named Mr. Blank, wakes to no recollection of the room or how he got there; no recollection of his past; only the vaguest notion of who the various people who visit him are. Regular readers of Auster will realise, a few pages in, the T in the S's characters have already made appearances in his previous books. The sense of this slim volume being Auster-by-the-numbers grows stronger as the dully predictable non-conclusion draws closer. There's an interesting concept buried under all the clever-cleverness - and it does seem that Auster is attempting atonement for his often nihilistic treatment of his main characters (Book of Illusions and Oracle Night spring to mind; both have denouements that are almost painful to read) - but he obfuscates rather than engaging with the material; evades when he ought to explore.

Twentieth Century Ghosts by Joe Hill  His novel Heart-Shaped Box is one of the best things I've read this year. So it pleases me greatly to report that Mr Hill is definitely not a one-off. There are sixteen short stories in this collection (including the four-pager hidden in the acknowledgements section) and there's not a dud amongst them. In fact, at least five of them can be considered mini-masterpieces: ‘Best New Horror' is by turns witty and horrific, turning the clichés of the genre on their head; the title story manages to be both creepy and nostalgic in a manner redolent of an old b&w Twlight Zone episode; ‘Pop Art' takes the craziest premise you can imagine and turns it into poetry; ‘Abraham's Boys' re-imagines van Helsing (and you can forget his heroic, valiant persona in Dracula; Hill's take on the character reads like the flipside to Bram Stoker); and ‘Voluntary Committal', the novella which ends the collection, is a brilliant flight of fantasy whose moments of horror are nonetheless firmly rooted in reality. This, I think, is Hill's genius as a writer: he can take the most outrageous concept and slide it so seamlessly into an utterly realistic situation that you simultaneously accept it completely and find yourself reeling from the shock of it. Two books into his career, and Joe Hill is already one of my favourite writers.

The 75 Book Challenge: Book 55

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

My paperback copy is the film tie-in edition, the cover showing Will Smith looking moody in a leather jacket, rows of identical robots lined up behind him. The film's tag line ‘ONE MAN SAW IT COMING' is displayed prominently. All very iconic, but there's little similarity between book and film.

Firstly, I, Robot is a collection of nine loosely connected short stories exploring the development of (and social response to) robotics, rather than a pacy technophobe-cop-vs-rampaging-androids narrative.

Secondly, Will Smith's character isn't even in the book. The closest the anthology gets to a central character is Dr Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan's performance in the film does suggest Calvin's cerebral brittleness quite effectively), and even then she's not in all of the stories.

So: put all thoughts of the film out of your mind. What I, Robot achieves is a well thought-out, often slyly amusing and always intellectually engaging series of meditations on the Three Laws of Robotics (click here for an in-depth Wikipedia article which considers the Three Laws in both their literary and scientific contexts), by which the robots servitude to mankind is guaranteed.

But of course, there are flaws ... such as, in the funniest story ‘Runaround', a robot trapped between conflicting actions in, whirling around in endless circles, singing bits of Gilbert & Sullivan as its circuits burn out. (This story was first published in 1942; it's hard not to see HAL9000's rendition of ‘Daisy Daisy' in 2001: A Space Odyssey as a gleeful homage.)

By the last story, ‘The Evitable Conflict', the robots are beginning to assert a quiet but very focused degree of control over humanity while still remaining in adherence to the First Law (I'll not give anything away: the pay-off is darkly ironic). I must confess I'd never read anything by Asimov before; on the basis of this book - as thought-provoking as it is entertaining - I can't wait to get my hands on his other Robot stories and novels.

A banquet of delights

Notwithstanding that MovieBuff wasn't overly keen on Finding Nemo, it has to be said, from the outset: Pixar have yet to make a bad movie.

Let me repeat that: Pixar have yet to make a bad movie.

In fact, the only criticism one can make is that a couple of their films haven't been masterpieces. And if Cars raised the bar on The Incredibles in terms of lush visuals, but didn't quite measure up to the former's canny, crafty, witty script, then Ratatouille raises the bar on the both of them on every level. Incredibles helmer Brad Bird is back at the helm, the story is as life-affirming as it is unexpected, and the animation represents a new benchmark in the art form. In short, Ratatouille is as good as it gets.

Unless you've been on another planet for the last six months or so, you can't failed to see a trailer or a poster. The story - a rat dreams of becoming a great chef - needs no introduction. Frankly, it ought to repulse: sewer-dwelling rodents and gastronomy do not make for good bedfellows. Even worse kitchenfellows. But it's one of the many delights of Brad Bird's script that we (pardon the pun) swallow it so easily. Kudos to the film-makers for balancing the slapstick among the pots and pans (there are several extended set pieces than rival Tex Avery for gleeful manic exuberance) with something deeper, something profound and insightful, particularly a subplot involving Remy's family. The pull of filial obligation against the impulse to follow one's own path is explored with a subtlety and poignance that lift Ratatouille way above its kiddie flick contemporaries.

The New York Times has described Ratatouille as "a flawless piece of film art" - if anything, that's an understatement! I could throw superlatives at Ratatouille for another few hundred words, but I'll simply make two safe bets: (i) you won't walk out of the cinema afterwards - you'll float!; and (ii) the only thing that will distract you from the film will be the rumbling from your stomach as Remy creates his culinary delights.

Atonement

My thanks to Viv for the following review: 

I found this film so absorbing and involving that it took me some time to untangle my thoughts about it.  It was certainly beautiful, but was it about class, or love, the pity of war, or the foolishness of youth?  It was all of these and more. The beginning, set in a country house in the 1930s, seemed to exaggerate class attitudes a little too much, but even that became acceptable for the times as the drama took over.  In a key scene the teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a dreamer, looks through a window and sees her sister Cecillia (Keira Knightly) strip off her dress and dive into a fountain watched by Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper's son who has just graduated from Cambridge.  Briony misinterprets the situation, which leads to more complex misunderstandings and eventually to the tragic separation of Robbie and Cecillia just after they have acknowledged their love for each other.

Although the story was made believable by sensitive performances, there were some flaws which could have undermined the whole narrative.  For example, the police investigation which hinged on a young girl's word was glossed over, even though it appeared that Robbie, the accused, was elsewhere when the offence in question was committed.

Fast forward four years, and the rest of the film is set during the second world war. We see the effects of Briony's lie intertwined with her attempts to atone for her behaviour.  I won't spoil the plot by describing any more of its intricacies, but must mention the remarkable Dunkirk scene.  This was a long tracking shot in which Robbie wanders, wounded, through the beach with all the horrors of that time around him.  Hundreds of soldiers, horses, a beached boat with shredded sails, men singing in an old bandstand, all against a background of a Ferris wheel, combined to create a surreal atmosphere reminiscent of  "Oh What a Lovely War".  At first I thought this too unreal and stagy, but then it struck me that it was not meant to be representational.  The effect was highly emotional and, like Picasso's Guernica, the surreal nature of the scene underlined the unimaginable horror of war.

In a final scene, Vanessa Redgrave plays Briony in old age, effectively bringing together loose ends.  Beautifully done, but somewhat marred by a sugary final shot which bordered on cliché.  Had director Joe Wright cut the film by 30 seconds, I would have believed it all.

Yay!

Heard yesterday: our mortgage application has officially been accepted. Paperwork should be with us in the next few days.

Things could start moving pretty quickly now, so please bear with me for a while: I will get MovieBuff back on track once everything has settled down. In the meantime: go see Ratatouille - it's a gem of a movie, flawless, feel-good and beautifully animated; Pixar's best yet.

Paperwork

Two hours with the mortgage advisor after work yesterday, going through the paperwork, examining all the different permutations of repayment (do we take a 25 year mortgage, 30 years, you can even break it down to 26, 27, 28 or 29 years). Certainly don't want it running longer than 30 years - Christ, I'll be 65 in 30 years! - but at the same time we don't want to plumb for a shorter period and find each monthly payment eating up our income.

Eventually we decided on 30 years, but looked at what overpayments of, say, £30 or £40 a month would make in terms of reducing the length of the mortgage as well as reducing overall interest charges.

We're back again tonight to finalise the paperwork. Then it all depends on references from our employers and the results of the survey.

God may have rested on the sabbath ...

... but our mortgage advisor doesn't.

He rang us from his office - he's working seven day weeks! - at 10.15 this morning.

Our mortgage application has been accepted in principle. We've got an appointment after work tomorrow to start signing the paperwork.

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