Videovista has my reviews of the rather disappointing Norwegian slasher Cold Prey (Fritt Vilt) and its vastly more entertaining sequel Cold Prey : Resurrection (Fritt Vilt 2).
I think that the difference between the two films lies in the quality of the direction but…
Drag Me To Hell marks Sam Raimi’s return to the world of Horror from the sunny shores of Summer Blockbuster island. As with his three Evil Dead films, Drag Me To Hell straddles the gap between Horror and Comedy by combining elements of slapstick knockabout humour with the major keys, creeping camera-work and build and release mechanics of the Horror genre. However, for a film that seeks to trade so heavily upon its big visual set-pieces, it is not only poorly written but grossly over-written too.
Futurismic have my fifteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.
It is not only the first of the columns to appear under the new direction the column has taken, it is also my first piece of video game criticism. I had been looking forward to writing this piece for a little while and when I finally got round to writing it, I was surprised at how pleasant and natural an experience it was to play a game and think about it critically. The more I played the more aware I became of where Grand Theft Auto IV fits into the history of game design.
Having filed the column it occured to me that I had left out one very obvious example of the mundane in video games… Shenmue.
The first two adaptations of David Peace’s novels have been characterised by a stylistic dualism. Their foregrounds are both occupied by more of less convincing Crime tropes. Searches for murderers, attempts to ferret out corrupt cops, investigations of conspiracies and doomed love stories. However, the meat of these two films lay not in the foreground, but in the background. Red Riding : 1974 and 1980 were films whose visuals spoke of an encroaching and slowly expanding evil. An evil that slowly becomes systemic before taking on almost mythological proportions. Visually the films gave us an image of the North as a Garden of Eden fallen into the worst kind of sin. Red Riding : 1983 undoes a lot of that work by using words to fill in beautiful cracks and gaps left by powerful images. Its obsession with salvation seems naïve and very much like a cop out. However, the sheer banality of 1983’s evil has a power of its own.
Last night, I went to see Tower Theatre Company’s production of Hamlet and, having never seen Hamlet performed live before, I was appropriately blown away by the sheer complexity of the text; the complex but detailed and intense emotions, the philosophical insights contained within the body of the text and the sheer ontological complexity of plays within plays and madness within madness and how everything mirrors and echoes everything else. However, what really struck me was the fact that you do not get many tragedies these days.
I watched Red Riding : 1983 last night and though initially disappointed with it, I am still processing some of the ideas in it. In the mean time, I thought I would put up a post linking to a couple of interesting pieces that touch upon Red Riding as well as a few other things I have been thinking about of late.
So yes, this is something of a links round-up. Sue me.
On the 8th of March, the West Yorkshire Police Force received a letter purporting to be from the Yorkshire Ripper :
Dear Sir
I am sorry I cannot give my name for obvious reasons. I am the Ripper. I’ve been dubbed a maniac by the Press but not by you, you call me clever and I am. You and your mates haven’t a clue that photo in the paper gave me fits and that bit about killing myself, no chance. I’ve got things to do. My purpose to rid the streets of them sluts. My one regret is that young lassie McDonald, did not know cause changed routine that night. Up to number 8 now you say 7 but remember Preston ’75, get about you know. You were right I travel a bit. You probably look for me in Sunderland, don’t bother, I am not daft, just posted letter there on one of my trips. Not a bad place compared with Chapeltown and Manningham and other places. Warn whores to keep off streets cause I feel it coming on again.
Sorry about young lassie.
Yours respectfully
Jack the Ripper
Might write again later I not sure last one really deserved it. Whores getting younger each time. Old slut next time I hope. Huddersfield never again, too small close call last one.
The letters and tapes that followed were a hoax that sent the struggling West Yorkshire investigation into a tailspin, convincing several senior police officers that the Ripper was from Sunderland. One particular way in which the letter hindered the investigation was by claiming responsibility for a murder in Preston in 1975. A murder, it turned out, the Yorkshire Ripper was not actually responsible for. James Marsh’s Red Riding : 1980, based on a novel by David Peace, considers what might have happened if certainly nefarious elements within the West Yorkshire Police Force had put Wearside Jack’s error to use for their own ends.
If Red Riding : 1974 is a film about the first bite at the apple of original sin then Red Riding : 1980 is the ensuing gag reflex.
Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen raises an interesting point about the “lack of liveliness” in some blogs :
While no one has to do any of the above or more, sometimes I’m reading through a blog and it’s as though the person operating it has largely chosen to remove him/herself from the material being presented. It seems as though for many of the blogs that I’ve read, that the blogger has taken a fairly passive role to the material s/he is presenting. Yes, some will use the first-person on occasion, but it often feels tacked on, as if s/he were writing a plot summary and then decided to use a paragraph or two at the end to interject his/her opinions on the matter. Such things feel bolted-on to me, as if two separate things (description of book, reaction to book) are forcibly combined, rather than an integration of the two taking place. While useful for many as an indicator of how the reviewer reacted to a piece, as a review essay, it is rather wanting to me.
This is rather a timely comment as, over the last week, I have been thinking of fiddling with the format a bit. When I started Ruthless Culture my aim was to write about films in a way that was not possible at the various reviewing gigs I had and which sat uncomfortably with the SF-focus of my old blog. Because of that ‘mission statement’ I also cut out most of the editorialising and linking that I traditionally did in between any substantial pieces I might write. I saw this as cutting out the fluff.
There will almost certainly be more from me about this particular film but, having seen Herzog’s new documentary Encounters at the End of The World (2008) I am, again, floored not only by Herzog’s intelligence but also his incredible gift for self-parody.
This morning I discovered a rather splendid article in the New Statesman by Owen Hatherley about a new collection of Penguin Travelogues. In his piece, Hatherley points out that despite nominally being a series concerned with journeying through England, the series almost completely ignores the towns and cities which the overwhelming majority of British people call home.
“The England we live in is largely uncharted.
As a now mainly rural Conservative Party is likely to win the next election by default, the myths of rural England urgently need debunking, but these English journeys are more about escape from an urban country in deep crisis.
Lie back and think of England.”
The ‘myths of rural England’ that Hatherley rails against are the almost universally accepted beliefs that Britain is a “green and pleasant land” whose true nature lies not in London or the great cities of the Midlands and North but rather the green bits in-between those cities. The vast acres given over to large-scale industrial farming and its ensuing nasal cocktail of nauseating slurry and allergy-provoking pollen. The great spaces one travels through in order to get to something worth visiting. The space into which cities should expand.
So needless to say, I am sympathetic to Hatherley’s frustration with Britain’s countryside fetish and the pseudoscientific ‘cult of the natural’ that comes in its wake. However, Hatherley is not the only person to make this point :
Ruthless Culture 