Author / Jonathan M

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Socket (2007)

Videovista has my review of Sean Abley’s Socket.  A film that is not only a work of indie SF, but also of indie gay cinema.

The film itself is not particularly interesting or worthy of note (much like Rocco DeVilliers Pure Race [1995], which I also reviewed) except when you consider how close the film came to being genuinely interesting and how spectacularly it failed.   I am only linking to the review as I think that the failures in Socket point to a rather intriguing cultural battle going on at the heart of gay cinema at the moment.  If you doubt this, bear in mind that Brockas’ last film Boy Culture (2006) was shown at the 2008 London  Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.  Which is a piece of programming on a par with screening Confessions of a Shopaholic at Cannes.

See also my recent review of Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie for a real piece of gay filmmaking.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Videovista have just put up my review of William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.

A couple of notes on this review.  Firstly, Masters of Cinema always include a little booklet with their DVDs containing essays.  These serve as DVD extras by whetting your thematic apetite and filling you in on historical context.  If I don’t mention these booklets in the reviews it is because they do not systematically get sent out with the review copies.  This is something I rather regret as I think that the extras (even in dead tree form) are part of the pleasure of discovering these old films.  Secondly, I recently crossed swords on a forum with an employee of Eureka or Masters of Cinema and he suggested I put on the subtitles if I couldn’t hear the words.  I took this as a suggestion that I needed to clean out my ears but evidently watching films with the subtitles on is  a ‘thing to do’ with DVD releases of old films.  So apologies to said employee if he reads this.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Poe (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow

Strange Horizons have my review of Ellen Datlow’s latest fantasy/horror short fiction anthology Poe.

As might be evident from the increasingly beligerent tone of the review, I did not get on with this book.  The three stories (by Steve Rasnic Tem, Lucius Shepard and John Langan)  that I singled out for praise are genuinely excellent but I found it depressing how many of the other stories misfired or seemed overly familiar.  Looking back at the book now, I suspect that my expectations were shaped by the fact that the only horror short fiction I had read before this anthology were a few bits and pieces in Interzone and collections of stories by Lovecraft, Ligotti and James.  One might argue that, as a result of this, my yardstick was a trifle too long but a) given some of the names associated with the anthology I do not think it is unreasonable to expect fireworks and b) if you’re going to buy a horror anthology I can think of no reason why you’d choose Poe over the recent reprint of Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done (2002).

EDIT 26/02/09 : Evidently my review has generated some discussion over at Ellen Datlow’s Livejournal.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Blindness (2008)

Based upon the 1995 novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (literally Essay on Blindness) by the Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago, Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Blindness serves to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of the allegory as a narrative device.  Where the book was an allegory about allegories, the film aims for the allegorical only to collapse into a film about the relationships between characters who were only ever supposed to be symbols.

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by Jonathan M

Che vs. There Will Be Blood – The Risks of Experimentation

Much like the writers and directors that we poor scorn upon for their predictability, critics are ultimately a lazy breed.  Some critics, thanks to greater levels of insight and more erudition have a larger conceptual toolbox than others, but no matter how loaded down you become with diagnostic tools, you are still going to reach for some more frequently than you reach for others.  If a film is a character study then you write about psychology.  If a film is about the cinematography then you talk about the visual and emotional impact.  If the film is about the plot, you write about pacing and narrative structure.  Write about enough books and films and you start to get a pretty clear idea of how to tackle certain types of work.  However, there are times when you encounter a film or a book that is unlike anything you have encountered before.  A work which, no matter how cynical or lazy you might be, has you repeating Roy Scheider’s line from Jaws (1975) : “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”.

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by Jonathan M

The Value of The Long Take

I have been thinking over the last few days about an interesting post by Andrew Seal over at Bibliographia Literaria about the links between the ‘prestige’ of long take cinema and a similar growth in prestige for authors who use long sentences.

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a hint of vitriol about Andrew’s comments on auteur theory and I for one cannot really blame him.  I think that auteur theory (which analyses films in terms of the explicit wishes and creative histories of the directors) is philosophically extremely wonky partly because of the death of the author but also because film, far more than writing, is a  supremely collaborative activity.  It is also a philosophical school that seems to have been entirely defined by pragmatic forces.

For example, film criticism is a discipline that grew out of film magazines like Les Cahiers du Cinema.  Commercial film magazines benefit from the existence of a star system whereby pictures of certain directors and actors can be put on the cover of said magazines in order to sell more copies.  As a form of discourse developed in these kinds of magazines, it only makes sense for auteur theory to  have grown to mirror these sets of concerns by being about stars rather than abstract theories (though anyone who is familiar with the ‘Maoist years’ of Cahiers will know that this is not a hard and fast rule).  Similarly,  it is worth noting that many of the people who championed auteur theory as critics in the 1950s (people such as Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard and Rohmer) would become, in the 60s, directors who benefited hugely from the independence and awe associated with a conception of the role of the director that emphasises creative accountability and vision rather than mere administrative skill.

So I share Andrew’s scepticism regarding the philosophical foundations of auteur theory.

However, I also think that he is being unfair to the long take…

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Before I Forget (2007)

It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers.  Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain.  However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone.  There are hundreds of films that deal in exactly this kind of bourgeois malaise and many of them leave me completely cold. What makes Nolot’s films so special is that, unlike many dramas that aim for the universality of human emotions while achieving only the generic, Nolot’s films are specific.  They carry the specificity that comes only from the autobiographical and it is the candour with which Nolot describes his life that makes his films so uncomfortable and yet so utterly compelling.

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by Jonathan M

Stuck (2007)

It is difficult for me to write about Stuart Gordon’s Stuck without also ranting about the state of London cinema distribution.  However, I shall curtail my habitual rant on the subject by merely pointing out that Stuck is, much like Durabont’s The Mist (2007) and Friedkin’s Bug (2006), a genuinely impressive piece of genre film-making that was cruelly stripped from cinema screens just as it began to generate some decent word-of-mouth and thereby find its audience.  Although best known for successfully joining up separate Lovecraft stories in order to create Dagon (2001), Stuck shows that Gordon is also adept with contemporary horror.  By ‘contemporary horror’ I mean horror films such as Bug, Wolf Creek (2005) or Eden Lake (2008).  Horror films that are stripped of fantastical elements and which, instead of dealing with their different issues through metaphor, deals with them in a synecdochic manner by having certain characters stand in for trends in human nature or contemporary culture that the director and writers wish to address.  Despite the apparent nihilism of its cynicism and violence, Stuck is actually a deeply moral film.  Beneath the brutal gore-filled images and the (admittedly ill-judged and self-defeating) black comedy, the film speaks not only of the worst in humanity, but also the best.

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by Jonathan M

Some thoughts on Tarkovsky’s Stalker

There’s an excellent article in The Guardian Today about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1980).  Written by Geoff Dyer in preparation for the film’s screening at the BFI Southbank on the 10th of February, Dyer tries to work out what it is that makes Tarkovsky’s film such a powerful work.  The article gives some nice biographical information about the making of the film and trots through a number of different interpretations without any of them sticking but the really interesting part of the article is a particular quote that perfectly encapsulate how I feel about the film.

“The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm for it – “every single frame of the film is burned into my retina” – attests not just to the director’s lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement.”

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by Jonathan M

Blasphemous Geometries 11

My new Blasphemous Geometries column has gone live over at Futurismic.

It is entitled “To a Delightful Weekend in the Country” and it’s an attempt to detect emerging trends in British SF before they happen, it is entirely motivated by my growing sense of frustration with SF and my need to move discussion on from the current generation.  This may or may not have something to do with the fact that I think that some authors are no longer worth the pixels devoted to them.