Bleak Pop Culture That Is Still Enjoyable - Children of Men, Never Let Me Go and other bleak things

Massive spoilers for Children of Men, The Road, Stephen King's The Stand, Never Let Me Go, Utopia and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Children Of Men is a great film, released in 2006 based on the novel by P.D. James, it is about a near future where no children have been born for nearly twenty years. The world has been ravaged by terrorism, war and disease, leading to huge numbers of refugees who are brutalised by the government, with the end of the human race in sight a terrible and awful sadness had seized the world. Clive Owen played Theo, a former political activist who, like nearly everyone else had given up. Reconnecting with his old activist girlfriend Theo met a young woman, who amazingly turned out to be pregnant, and the film became about safeguarding this woman and her unborn child. Despite having about as an upbeat ending as this story was going to get the film was incredibly bleak. But here's the thing - it was incredibly bleak back in 2006, a world still reeling from 9/11 and the War On Terror but in 2017 with a refugee crisis gripping the world, Brexit and, of course, Donald Trump, it is about the bleakest thing I've ever seen.

Clive Owen's Theo barely missing being killed by a terrorist bomb

Time and politics have made Children Of Men a bleaker film, the previous holder of the title of bleakest film in the world was The Road, and it's odd that it lost it's title to a film I saw before it. The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name was about the apocalypse and focused on a nameless father and son trying to survive in this world. As apocalypses go it's about as bad as it gets and while it's never explained exactly what happened all the animals and plants have died, leaving only scavenging humans, this, of course means, that once there is nothing left to scavenge that will be the end. The other alternative was, to be blunt, cannibalism and there was a fair amount of that going on. Again, the ending of the film was about as happy as it was going to get, after the father died the boy was taken in by another family. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring used to have a joke on one of their shows, about the secret final scenes of films that were cut, such as in Trainspotting where Renton spent all of ten minutes off heroin before buying more and I think The Road was perhaps another such film, where this new family are actually cannibals and kill the son but that was just too much. I should read the book and see how that ended but I can't bring myself to do it. The film was chock-full of bleakness, from what happened to the mother, to the fact that the father had saved his last two bullets to kill his son and then himself before things got too bad and let alone what they find in the basement of a supposedly empty house.

Viggo Mortensen trying to decide whether or not
to use one of his last two bullets on an enemy or save them

Bleak books are harder than bleak films. There's something in the act of reading that you, as the reader, are active in the process, whereas watching a film is more passive. I am currently reading The Stand by Stephen King, another apocalypse scenario, and a foreword by King explained that this was the extra-long version with even more bleakness. It's an odd book in that there's a lot of time spent on boring things, people alone or in small groups, trying to get to other places. Then every so often there is a well-written truly horrific event, getting into the truly awful things that would happen in this scenario. Nothing, from The Walking Dead, The Girl With All The Gifts or Mad Max: Fury Road has come close to The Stand in capturing how bad things could get.

Stephen Kin'gs level of success means his
name gets to be really big on the cover

But for bleakness in books  the winner for me was Never Let Me Go, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, the book was the story of an odd boarding school with children seemingly without parents, where their schoolwork is carefully assessed by visiting dignitaries and there was some awful and huge secret lurking in the background. Slowly, over the course of the book it was revealed that these children were created to serve as living organ donors, once they reach adulthood they are gradually harvested for their organs. The creeping knowledge that these intelligent, thoughtful children, who have the same dramas and worries of any children, exist only to give up their bodies to others is devastating. The final quarter of the book where the characters are aware of what is going to happen to them but don't rebel or try to escape was unbearably sad. What was perhaps worst was that they didn't meekly accept it their fate, it was more that they made a conscious decision that they were okay that this was going to happen, As well as being bleak it made me incredibly angry, with every page I willed them to rebel and try to escape. But they don't.

Made me sad AND angry 

To end with how about two bleak television shows. Utopia was a very weird thriller on Channel 4, where a secret organisation moved forward with their sinister plan. At first the assumption was that their plan was to unleash a plague that would kill most of the population and they are frighteningly effective and ruthless in carrying out this plan. They are happy to murder innocents, including children, undertake horrific torture and corrupt every institution they encounter. And then you find out that their plan isn't to kill most of the population, no instead, they want to make most of the population infertile. Back in the day a few clever scientists realised the problem was that there was simply too many people as one particularly brilliant scientist put it in 1900 there were a billion people on the planet and in 1980 it was up to six billion, how would the world cope with more? They see their plan as the only alternative to the wars, starvation and other destruction that would come as the world's resources ran out. It's pretty bleak when you realise you sort of see their point. It also featured Arby, an emotionally flat assassin who looked a little ridiculous but was so terrifying that even seeing his distinctive bag was enough to induce fear.

I was originally put off by the bright
colour choices used in the adverts

The second tv show an arguably the bleakest of everything mentioned is cult American sitcom It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and the only comedy amongst them. The show is about four friends Mac, Charlie Dennis and Dee (well, four friends and the dad of Dennis and Dee played brilliantly by Danny De Vito) who ran an Irish pub in Philadelphia called Paddy's. Most importantly the five major characters are amongst the most deplorable people ever shown on television. These are the sort of people who decide what side of a protest to join by working which will have more attractive women, or who discover that an old man was in SS and think about how they can profit from this information, or sell watered down overpriced beer to underage children and convince themselves this is them doing a good thing. The show is replete with characters whose lives they've ruined, the recovering alcoholic waitress they push back into alcoholism, the child they bullied who joined the priesthood and they then convinced to leave the priesthood leaving him with nothing, let alone the people who've actually died. Ten seasons of this programme are on Netflix and I used to watch them over breakfast but had to stop because it was just so bleak it was a really bad way to start the day(it is also very funny), Unlike the other films, book and tv shows I've mentioned there is an awful squalor in the bleakness and although the show has regular flights of fancy into unrealness there is something believable in their small-scale schemes.

Arguably the worst characters
ever portrayed on television

So some books, films and tv shows for when you want to feel really bleak.

"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory": Memory in pop culture and fictional famous people

In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a new character is introduced but in a very unusual way. The new character was Buffy's sister, Dawn, and this wasn't a sister who had lived with Buffy's father and had come to visit, or a long lost half-sister, but rather she appeared in an episode and everyone simply acknowledged her as Dawn, Buffy's younger sister, who had always been around. Fans of the show were confused as in the previous seasons Buffy had had no sister. What was even more confusing was that this wasn't cleared up in a single episode where it was revealed that Dawn was a monster who could alter memories, or was a weird ghost, but the storyline of where Dawn came from was the subject for the whole season and for a number of episodes nothing was made of her sudden appearance at all. At the time I had been convinced that they would never explain where Dawn came from and that Buffy had always had a sister but she had just never happened to be present or ever mentioned. I swore to stop watching the show if that was the case. Fortunately Joss Whedon had not elected to do a Stalin-esque style reimagining of history and there was a suitable sci-fi/fantasy reason for everything that had happened and indeed everyone's memories had been altered and Dawn had only started to exist a few months ago.

Michelle Trachtenburg playing Dawn - because of her
character's arrival I nearly stopped watching Buffy

This leads me to a curious and potentially terrifying idea, how do we know any of the people around us are genuine and our memories are correct? This is even more of a problem with celebrities and public figures in that most of us will never meet them. I raise this issue because I feel I have found two such instances of people who did not exist until very recently, two "Dawns" as it were. The first is Amy Schumer, star of Trainwreck, who I had never heard of before the publicity for that film. Now, I am a fan of American comedy, I watch a lot of standup and listen to a number of American podcasts where they discuss pop culture and I had never heard of her. Schumer was not some overnight star and people referenced her successful career to date but the fact that I had never heard of her was very suspicious indeed. Who was this woman who was so funny? YouTube is full of Amy Schumer clips, interviews and more, she has a wikipedia page, a website, twitter, IMDB page and more.

The potentially fictional Amy Schumer

The second example is even creepier. A few months ago I first heard the name Wilkie Collins, for those who don't know (which until very recently included me) he is a nineteenth century English writer known for such works as The Woman in White and The Moonstone and was a friend of Charles Dickens. I think I first heard about him on Robin Ince and Josie Long's Book Shambles podcast and all of a sudden he was everywhere. He was mentioned in books, articles, other podcasts and here is the really creepy bit...I recently read a book called Canonbridge, which is a novel about a mysterious nineteenth century author named Matthew Canonbridge who never really existed and was only created recently. And who does Canonbridge meet at one point in  the book? Wilkie Collins. That has to mean something very important and is definitely not just a coincidence.

This can't be the real Wilkie Collins - he's what an acting agency
would send to play stereotypical Victorian novelist

What is going on here? One conclusion is that I am not as well read and culturally savvy as I think I am (I think we can safely rule that out), the other is that new and interesting people are being inserted into our collective culture and memory. Look at the evidence, Wilkie Collins is not the name of a Victorian novelist, it's what the frontman of an obscure American indie band is called (probably Grandaddy) and as for Amy Schumer, many people seem to think women are inherently not funny so she must be fake. This could mean that all the other women I've thought were funny are perhaps fictional as well but we'll leave that to one side for now.

Memories are by no means an immutable record of exactly what has happened and are easily influenced.Groundbreaking psychology experiments by Elizabeth Loftus showed just how bad memory could be, in perhaps her most famous study people were shown footage of car crashes and then later on asked questions about what they had seen. Simply by changing one word in the question completely changed people's answers, so they were asked about what they saw when one car "hit" another or "smashed" or "contacted", these small cues had people inventing all sorts of details. If you phrase a question like in certain ways it affects the answers, far more people reported seeing broken glass when asked "did you see any broken glass" than asked to simply recite the things they had seen.
Pop culture is obsessed with memory, whether it's Guy Pearce's anterograde amnesia in Memento, which prevented him from making new memories and made him very vulnerable when trying to investigate his wife's murder, or  Arnold Schwarznegger in Total Recall playing a spy given a false memory of a boring every day existence.

Guy Pearce in Memento - he used tattoos to record important information

One of the most interesting and terrifying uses of memories is in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series of books which contained a truly terrifying villain, Aornis Hades who has the ability to manipulate the memories of her victims, at first she uses her power on the hero, Thursday Next, to try and empty out all her memories, When Thursday Next defeated this attempt Aornis has a new weapon. Instead of erasing memories she gives Thursday new memories, to be exact she gives her the memories of a non-existent daughter; Jenny. From time to time she will ask after Jenny and her family play along, "Oh Jenny is at a friend's house," or whatever but sooner or later Thursday will work it out and every time she goes through the horrible realisation that a daughter she thought she had didn't exist and goes through a unique and devestating mourning. All of Jasper Fforde's work is an absolute treat of quirky ideas, well-written and intensely likeable characters and to those well-read enough to get all the references in the literature themed Thursday Next series there are constant delights - please note that I don't get all the literature references and have to consult my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, to explain reference to Austen, the Brontes and many other classics.

The first of the brilliant Thursday Next series

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features memories as characters, most of what we see of Kate Winslet's character Clem is not the real Clem but the memory of her. The film was about a very niche company who would erase unpleasant memories and their clients are often people who want to forget about past loves, which is what Clem does and in response what Jim Carrey's Joel does in retaliation. The film is genuinely heartbreaking as memories are erased from Joel and inside his mind he tries to fight it as he realises the value of these memories and even if in the end their relationship didn't  work out the memories were too important to lose.

The confusing world of Joel's memory

So as we've established memories can be changed, deleted, or invented so is it really so hard to believe that both Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer are fictional creations the real questions are who has done this and why? Admittedly it gets a little more complicated with Amy Schumer seeing as she is...well, alive, but still not impossible. I suspect it to be a sinister and shadowy government organisation responsible for creating elaborate illusions of famous comedians and writers but unfortunately I am still at a loss for why. I am hoping that there will be a Wilkie Collins-Amy Schumer vehicle, probably an action-comedy buddy cop movie featuring Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer in which not only do they solve time travelling crimes against literature but she learns valuable lesson about motherhood - but perhaps I am reading too much into Schumer's IMDB page.

Mavericks: The Rules Were Not Made To Be Broken

Spoiler Warning - Major spoilers for The Shield, L.A. Confidential
Minor spoilers for House, Hot Fuzz

In one episode of House a mean hospital administrator guy tried to get House kicked out of the hospital. It was made clear with camera angles and emotive music that he was most definitely the bad guy. And before the hospital board he put forward his case - House was a drug addict, House not only broke ethical guidelines he broke the law, he refused to do things that were his job, he insulted other staff and patients and I quickly found myself agreeing with him; House should be fired. There were others on the board who tried to put forward a case for House, stating that he was singularly brilliant and did things no one else could do but they had a pretty weak case. Ultimately though House was impervious to this, because he was a maverick, and television loves mavericks. House is a genius who doesn't play by the rules! As with most jobs, but especially medicine, the rules are there for a very good reason and while people idolise mavericks on television I think most people would be uncomfortable if they had a maverick GP who didn't play by the rules.

Mavericks are a very common trope in films and television, they are exciting, unpredictable characters, who do things their real-life counterparts couldn't do (often this is for very good reasons). Many mavericks are abrasive and rude and have poor people skills, they have substance abuse problems and have problems dealing with authority, despite often working in areas with very rigid authority structures.  The Fast Show played with this trope with adverts for a new programme called Monkfish which constantly showed a tough, uncompromising, belligerent maverick who morphed from police officer to doctor to vet in each new version of the show

Medicine is a curious field to want mavericks, given the years they spend learning the rules and procedures, but it is a fictional phenomenon that extends to many other careers. The most obvious is with the police and just about every fictional police officer from Dirty Harry to DCI John Luther were a law unto themselves and their films and shows make the argument that as they are on the side of righteousness, it's okay to break the law.

• Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry one of the earliest examples and often cited as the classic example of the maverick cop. The careful and considerate Sarah Lund, the main police officer in The Killing who doesn't even carry her gun is a million miles from Callahan, who goaded criminals into using their guns so he could kill them.
• Bud White, L.A. Confidential, uses violence and intimidation to get what he considers justice and is then used by the corrupt police chief to beat up his criminal competitors.
• Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle, The French Connection, was far more dangerous to members of the public than many criminals by his insane car chases.

• Gene Hunt, Life On Mars, the stereotypical 1970s policeman, very happy to frame people he doesn't like and no time for any woolly liberal ideas. Hunt is an odd case as he is only a maverick in  comparison with John Simm's modern Sam Tyler.
• Axel Foley, Beverley Hills Cop, does not take police work at all seriously.
• Martin Riggs, Lethal Weapon, a loose cannon with a deathwish.
• Vic Mackay, The Shield, in the first episode he murdered in cold blood another police officer so his side business of being a drug kingpin wasn't uncovered.

Some of these films and shows do criticise the maverick cops - Vic Mackay in The Shield is shown as absolutely corrupt and every season he seems to get into even murkier water, Gene Hunt is the exemplar throwback to dodgy police officers of the past whose reckless ways lead to innocent people ending up in prison and Bud White's tendency to ignore the rules made him easy prey for  a manipulative superior.

Mavericks in the military seem to be rarer and often depictions of soldiers etc. punish the idea of a maverick, you wouldn't want to be the maverick in the training part of Full Metal Jacket. However, in Top Gun Tom Cruise's character had the call-sign of "Maverick" to really emphasis his unpredictable maverick credentials. I definitely don't want a maverick in charge of a multi-million dollar flying killing machine. If we're going to have flying killing machines at all then I want level headed unadventurous types at the controls. That said, virtually the entire cast of Top Gun shouldn't be allowed near weapons, so obsessed with proving their superiority over  others and treating the whole thing like a very fun game.

The completely unreliable pilots of Top Gun

I've never really identified with maverick characters as usually I could see why the rules existed. They are few and far between but I much prefer anti-mavericks, these are people who can follow rules, work in teams, have good manners but are also very good at their jobs. When an anti-maverick appears in fiction there dedication to  doing their job properly is made into an interesting character quirk, rather than what you would expect. There are two perfect examples of these anti-mavericks.  The first is my favourite fictional depiction of a police officer, Nicolas Angel played by Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz and he is the quintessential anti-maverick.

 Angel was a brilliant police officer; intelligent, dedicated, incorruptible, who trained and studied hard, who understood both the letter and the intent of a law. He did his paperwork and he understood the importance of paperwork. He was not a maverick. He didn't break the rules. At one point in the film when giving a speech to schoolchildren he cited the importance of procedural correctness when enforcing the law. Angel was the perfect police officer. Angel's partner, Danny Butterman, was more interested in the over the top antics of maverick police officers in films like Bad Boys where any arrest those two actually made would be challenged by any lawyer for the litany of things they did wrong. In films police officers see themselves as being the one "who cleans the garbage off the streets" whereas Angel is commended for building positive links with the community. Best of all, Angel is a police officer who while trained to use guns, and has used them, does not like them. He is a very un-macho example of a police officer.

The other brilliant example of an anti-maverick is Amy Poehler's character Leslie Knope in Parks & Recreation. She actually had many of the same problems as Hot Fuzz's Nicolas Angel - fantastically good at her job, liked following the rules and struggled to coexist with colleagues who didn't share her level of commitment and brilliance. The idea of making Leslie brilliant at her job, and actually brilliant at most things she set her mind to, wasn't apparent at the beginning of the show and at first she was just weirdly obsessed about her job and her burgeoning greatness made the character make far more sense. It also changed Knope from somebody who could be pitied into someone who was impressive.

Sadly, I don't think my anti-mavericks will take off in quite the same way as their more rule averse colleagues as without the brilliant writers and actors behind Hot Fuzz and Parks and Recreation they could be a little boring.

Review of the Year

Spoiler Warning - Star Wars: The Force Awakens - not really any spoilers but I do mention who plays one character and that might trouble some people.


So it's the end of the year and while I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions I do believe in making arbitrary decisions about what has been the best whatever of the year. By the way, when I say "of the year" I'm referring to stuff I discovered in 2015 as from a philosophical point of view I can't guarantee that any of this stuff actually existed before I experienced it.

Best Thing of the Year - including television, film, books, podcasts etc
Winner: Rick and Morty It has so much in it that would appeal to me; science, time travel, parallel universes, shockingly unsentimental and cynical characters and it is very, very funny. A line of dialogue has become my new personal motto:

"Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV"

This is not as bleak as it sounds and actually came as very welcome advice in the show. I don't believe that people exist on purpose or for a reason, I don't believe the universe has some grand purpose and, yes, we are all going to die and I was really happy to see this idea not presented as a nihilist gloomy philosophy but instead as a way to enjoy life.

Every episode is excellent but particular stand out episodes are Love Potion No. 9  (which explained why love potions are really not cool), Meseeks and Destroys (bringing the brilliant character of Mr. Meseeks into existence) and Total Rickall (featuring memory tampering alien parasites (a lot of episode titles are puns involving Rick's name)).

Left to Right: Morty, Rick, Beth & Summer having some quality family time

Person Who Exceeded Expectations 
Winner: Bob Odenkirk, twice.
Spin-offs and reunions have a bad track record. Spin offs usually have diminishing returns and most reunions are not worth it but Bob Odenkirk has appeared in one spinoff and one reunion and both were better than I thought they would be. The spinoff was Better Call Saul, with Odenkirk taking the Saul Goodman character from Breaking Bad and doing an origins story for him. In Better Call Saul the lawyer is still using his real name, James McGill (that Saul Goodman isn't his real was stated in Breaking Bad). At this point McGill was more or less still on the right side of the law and didn't want to get involved with drug dealers and criminals unless he was defending them in a court of law. Breaking Bad was one of the best tv shows ever made and to be honest I didn't expect much from Better Call Saul but it easily exceeded my expectations. The show has a different tone to Breaking Bad and had moments of real pathos - Mike Ehrmantraut's face-to-face with his daughter in law being particularly affecting.

The reunion was that Netflix had effectively reunited the Mr. Show team. Mr. Show was a HBO sketch show in the nineties starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross - probably best known as Tobias in Arrested Development. Their nineties show was as weird and brilliant as a HBO sketch show should be and who knew if they would be able to recapture the essence of that show. But they did and it was as surreal and great as ever.

Person Who Can Seemingly Do No Wrong
Winner - Oscar Isaac
The winner is Oscar Isaac who in 2015 appeared in gritty crime thriller A Most Violent Year, mind-bending sci-fi film Ex Machina, the critically acclaimed HBO drama Show Me a Hero and topped it off with playing Poe Dameron in the new Star Wars film, so he hasn't had a bad year really.

Oscar Isaac posing for a calendar

Best Live Comedy
Winner: Jo Neary - Faceful of Issues

At the Edinburgh Festival I saw a number of excellent comedy shows but the best was Jo Neary. It's hard to describe Jo Neary's show, I suppose you'd call her a character comedian and in a show she might play numerous characters, like her previous show Jo Neary's Youth Club or just the one character as in this show. I first saw Jo Neary as part of Robin Ince's Nine Lessons and Carols For Godless People show where one time she played an extremely nervous and uncomfortable woman doing a talk on sex toys and another where she played a character who was straight out of Brief Encounter talking on the phone. Both were brilliant. In this show Neary adopted a very similar persona of a well-spoken, perhaps repressed middle-class woman but built up the character so it was far more than just a parody. The show was something like a variety show from a small village fete and of course everyone apart from Jo Neary's character has dropped out. From start to finish it was hilarious and sometimes oddly emotional and Jo Neary's character is surprisingly endearing and was as close to a perfect hour of comedy I have ever seen. Below is a preview of the Edinburgh show she performed which I am fairly sure she is fine with being available online.

Perfectly Tailored For Me Book Award:
Winner: Nick Harkaway - Angelmaker
I read The Gone Away World little while ago and really enjoyed it but it only partly prepared me for how amazing Angelmaker would be. It really does seem like Nick Harkaway scanned my brain to determine what would be the perfect book for me. The book has so many interesting ideas - from the organisation that praised the ideas of John Ruskin so much they devoted their lives to building unique beautiful items like submarines and trains, the spy organisation who during World War II recruited rebellious young women to be spies, to the idea of a doomsday device that relied on increasing the amount of truth in the world. It is wonderfully odd and entirely to my taste.

Surprise of the Year
Winner: American Horror Story

I have never been a huge fan of horror but I have been trying to work in this over the last couple of years watching The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, The Baba Dook and similar. I also tried giving American Horror Story a go. I had initially been intrigued by the way the show works; every season the setting and premise of the show changes, they keep the same actors but people play different parts.The first season is known as "Murder House" and focused on the various deaths and murders that have happened over the decades and the various malicious ghosts who occupy the house. The first time I tried to watch it I couldn't make it through the first episode but for whatever reason I tried again and while I still wasn't too keen on the first episode but the second turned things up to eleven and I really enjoyed it which was quite a surprise. The show  is absolutely bonkers and doesn't make much sense at times but it is very enjoyable and helped me watch more horror things. After much thought I am not going to watch the second season only because it is set in an asylum and I think it might genuinely terrify me.

The Thank God It Wasn't Awful Award
Winner: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
It is far too early for me to talk too much about Star Wars and I need to have some time to properly consider the film, but whatever else I enjoyed it immensely. No matter how many good things were appearing in the news and the great trailer part of me couldn't forget the awfulness of The Phantom Menace.

So that was a selection of stuff from 2015, things I'm looking forward to in 2016 include Quentin Tarantino's new film The Hateful Eight, the new West World tv show and Ben Wheatley's film High Rise.

Christmas Pop Culture

WARNING contains spoilers for Miracle on 34th Street and very minor spoilers for one episode of Supernatural in season 3

Many people assume a cynical atheist like myself would hate Christmas but as a matter of fact I actually quite like Christmas. I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes along with Christmas, chief amongst this hatred is the music. I used to work in a supermarket that seemed to have only two Christmas albums, which is fine for the customer who would likely be done before even the first album finished. I found listening to the same twenty songs torturous. Most songs that are released in conjunction with some event are not very good and Christmas is no exception. I don't see why just because it's Christmas we should listen to bad music but that is what most musicians have given us. Over the years a number of reputable artists have released Christmas albums or the odd original song as well as a wide selection of interesting covers. Some of my favourite Christmas songs include Christmas All Over Again by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the wonderfully blasphemous Jesus the Reindeer by Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler, Get Behind Me Santa by Sufjan Stevens and Just Like Christmas by Low and they are all artists that pass my stringent criteria for being real musicians. The undisputed best Christmas song is Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love and there is an excellent cover by Slow Club. Love's original is full of emotion and her voice is absolutely outstanding and say what you like about Phil Spector he knew what he was doing when it came to music.

Matt Berry seems to have inside knowledge about what television and music I like - not content with only appearing in Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box, Toast of London, The IT Crowd and more he is also a brilliant, albeit exceedingly odd, musician. He has released four studio albums and a live album and I recommend them all (Opium is the oddest while Music for Insomniacs is very much what it says it is). In terms of  Christmas a number of year ago he made a half-hour rock opera about the Nativity but from the point of view of the relatively minor character, the innkeeper who had no room. It is thirty minutes of absolute genius and/or madness, perfect Christmas viewing and has one of the best titles of anything and really the only acceptable name for a rock opera about the birth of Jesus, AD/BC.

Julian Barratt playing Tony Iscariot

My go-to film for Christmas is Scrooged, a Christmas story with no Santa Claus or Jesus, but with Bill Murray. Murray is the perfect star for a Christmas film as he shares many of the characteristics of the two main characters associated with Christmas; he is a seemingly legendary or mythic character, known for inexplicable acts of kindness and oddness whose career seemingly died and was then resurrected and unlike them he's not imaginary. And this year Bill Murray has released a Christmas Special on Netflix! It looks like some odd comedy vehicle, rather than a genuine Christmas show (think Knowing Me Knowing Yule with Alan Partridge). Aside from Scrooged other good Christmas films are The Nightmare Before Christmas, Muppets Christmas Carol, Gremlins (but be prepared, that's a much darker film than people remember) and if you only want the mildest hint of Christmas these films are set at, but not about, Christmas; Die Hard, Batman Returns, Trading Places, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and if you're looking for something particularly dark, Terry Gilliam's dystopian masterpiece Brazil was set at Christmas. I do like Miracle on 34th Street but I am of the opinion the judge in that film made the wrong call, if I'd been the director it would have ended very differently.

The much darker than remembered Gremlins

I find myself increasingly annoyed by Russell Brand, his foray into politics was a disaster, and I am not amused by many of his recent antics. However, every so often he will do something brilliant. Sometimes it's a documentary on Jack Kerouac, or the "pound shop Enoch Powell" insult to Nigel Farage which perfectly summed him up, or him discussing what happened to his mind when he was the lead story on every news programme in the country. So he's not someone I can completely write-off and another Christmas tradition Spooky Reading Girl and  have is to watch the Christmas episode of Ponderland. This was a Brand comedy vehicle where he would do standup around a particular topic like Science or Family and it would be interspersed with archive footage of documentaries and similar cultural objects and the Christmas episode might be the best one. It is deliriously funny at times particularly a memo from a department store concerning problems with their in store Santa Claus. The description of the problems they had was funny enough and when Brand revealed the name of the fired Santa was Norbert Cleaverhook, a name for a 1970s movie serial killer and such a name should preclude any employment let alone as a store Santa Claus.

Father Ted gave us one of the best Christmas specials but more recently the Christmas episode of Peep Show has become a tradition in our house. One of the few things that Jez does believe in is Christmas and despite never really trying with anything he tried hard with Christmas; researching the perfect turkey and buying perfect presents. Mark on the other hand bought Jez salad tongs. Although when Mark's family turn up it is understandable why he has less pleasant Christmas memories than Jez. The behaviour and attitude of Mark's father explained an awful lot about Mark's insecurities.

Mark's surprisingly thoughtful Christmas presents from Jez

The final piece of Christmas entertainment is an episode of Supernatural, Season 3's A Very Supernatural Christmas, that at first seemed to be an anti-Santa monster who punished bad people but was actually a pair of jolly Christmas loving pagan demigods who also like sacrificing human beings, and so break into people's houses and carry them away in a big sack. The pair present themselves as a very respectable married couple, wholesome, polite, they even wear Christmas jumpers, which I have always assumed are only worn by the most evil of creatures. It shouldn't come as too much of a spoiler to learn that the heroes of the show killed them both.The show does remind us all that so much of our Christmas tradition has a pagan origin.

The jolly Christmas sacrifice

So here's to a Christmas full of pagan gods, nativity inspired rock operas and most of all Bill Murray.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robotic Overlords - Best and Worst Dystopias and Utopias

Major spoilers for The Matrix, Minority Report, Gattaca, Red Son.

My girlfriend, Spooking Reading Girl, once had an example essay question while she was at university which asked if Sauron and the Ring hadn't come along and spoiled everything would the Shire and the life the hobbits lead be an example of a utopia? When I saw this I thought two things. First, that would be a very boring book, and secondly, for me it would be awful. The pleasant countryside existence of the hobbits would be my idea of Hell. It's all so twee and gentle, everyone has silly names and does silly things. I would find it very tiresome.

The twee horror of The Shire

Utopias and dystopias are a favourite topic of fiction, the word utopia was first used by Sir Thomas More in his book, Utopia, in which he imagined a perfect, or at least much better society. A dystopia is a society that is much worse that ours. The most famous dystopia is probably 1984 in which George Orwell imagined a future society constantly under surveillance by secret police, fighting never-ending wars and where, effectively, facts no longer existed and they could be rewritten to suit the circumstances. Orwell based a lot of this on Stalinist Russia where history books were rewritten to show Stalin as more active in the Russian Revolution than he was and downplaying his enemies contributions. You get far fewer utopias in fiction for the main reason that they are quite boring. A genuine utopia would have no crime, no war, no conflict, what would there be to write about? Aside from perhaps More's own work the most famous utopia I can think of is the Federation in Star Trek. The Federation is a nation of many planets and different alien races working together for the betterment of society. Earth especially is pictured as peaceful, prosperous and happy. Star Trek was created during the Cold War and the idea of a future Earth where we all cooperated instead of fighting each other was the stuff of science fiction. On the bridge of the Enterprise there was mix of races and cultures, Chekov is Russian but aside from the occassional forays into time travel that detail is completely irrelevant. Perhaps most famously the Federation had no money and they have evolved some other way of allocating resources fairly. This is made very clear over the various films and tv shows and in their universe at least is seen as a very good thing.

Some dystopias aren't as bad as all that. The Matrix is a classic dystopian world in that in the film intelligent robots and computers have rebelled against their human masters and eventually use humans as a power source. Humans lie asleep in little pods while various wires and tubes carry away the energy they produce. However instead of just letting the humans scream and cry in their little pods the robots created an artificial reality for the people to live in. This reality was a representation of what the world had been like near the peak of human civilisation, more or less, the late 1990s. Humans spend their entire lives in this artificial reality unaware of what is really going on. I must say, this is very charitable of the robots as that doesn't sound too bad to me. Instead of having to live in a world virtually destroyed by the human-robot war, in which the Sun has been blocked out, they live in a much nicer world. That is far better than humans treat most cattle and livestock and if I had to choose a dystopia to live in I think I'd pick that one. Certainly these robots are far nicer that the ones in Terminator whose tactics are to completely wipe out the human race. Agent Smith in the film even says the first artificial reality they made for people was really nice, where nothing bad ever happened but that people just wouldn't accept it as real. One of the characters even made this argument in the film, he didn't care if it was artificial, it was a better existence than the one he had free of the Matrix. All I can say is that I, for one welcome our new robotic overlords. Incidentally, having watched The Matrix again recently how good is Hugo Weaving in that film? He is clearly the best person in it.

The scene stealing Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith

If we're trying to work out the worst dystopia I would argue it is Brazil. Terry Gilliam's dystopia is similar in many ways to 1984 but the sinister government isn't just evil they are actually rather incompetent. A typing error leads to the arrest of the wrong man and when he died in custody it sends ramifications through their failing system. Bureaucratic inefficiency and indifference is life threatening in this world. Surely the sign that this is the worst of all possible worlds is that Michael Palin - generally acknowledged as the nicest man in the world - played a terrifying government torturer. Any world in which Michael Palin could do these things must be a very bad place indeed.

The horrifyingly nice Michael Palin in Brazil

There are lots of examples of worlds where people think they live in a utopia but are perhaps wrong. Minority Report is a world in which psychic beings can see the future and direct the police to stop murders before they happen. A new crime is invented where the criminal can be punished for a murder they were stopped from committing. But this better future comes at a price, as it always does, and Tom Cruise played the police officer in charge of "pre-crime" who became a suspect himself. Genetic engineering is the tool in Gattaca that has lead to a world populated by beautiful, intelligent, athletic people as virtually every baby is genetically engineered. As one doctor explained at the beginning of the film, the child is still made from the parents genetics but given the best of what they have. Ethan Hawke played one of the few people to be born "naturally" and the heart defect he was born with convinced his parents that their next child should be engineered. Hawke, frustrated by the limited life his "inferior" genetics gave him he adopted the identity of another engineered person, someone whose genetics wouldn't hold them back. The fact that Hawke was not only able to match the talents of his genetic superiors but also outdo them suggested that success wasn't just down to genes. Minority Report and Gattaca both present worlds that for most people are a utopia, a world free of crime and a world of smarter, healthier and just better people but there are those at the sharp end of this utopia. In Minority Report it is the people convicted of crimes they hadn't yet committed and in Gattaca those people left to do all the menial jobs their genetically superiors don't want to do.

It's important to remember as well that not all of have the same idea of a utopia. As I found the idea of living in the Shire distinctly unappealing some people would feel the same way about the arguably communist and atheistic society set up in Star Trek. As a socialist atheist leftie I can get happily get on board with the society in the Federation but I get the feeling Donald Trump would object. I think people are now inherently suspicious of anyone touting a utopian society and in the same way that most sorts of trouble start out as fun most, dystopias start out as an attempt at utopia. There is an episode of Doctor Who called the Happiness Patrol who basically murder anyone not happy but they had good intentions when they started out, trying to make people more happy. Individual freedom is often thought of as more important than anything else. In the fantastic graphic novel Red Son, the spaceship that brought Superman to Earth crash landed in the Soviet Union, not America. So Superman is still a hero, he saves people etc, but instead of having an idea that people should be free to decide for themselves he instead has been brought up in a society where it is okay for someone to intervene and he takes over the Soviet union after Stalin's death. He will actively make the world better. And he was, in a way, successful but many people would object to him forcing a utopia on them.

Notice the Hammer and Sickle on his chest

Perhaps the problem with utopias and dystopias is if you don't agree with their vision of society you're in trouble. Margaret Atwood, an author of several dystopian novels, said that every utopia has a problem, what to do with the people who don't fit in? In Doctor Who's The Happiness Patrol they were killed, in Red Son they were labotomised, and how a society treats people who don't fit in probably defines how close they are to either the utopia or dystopia label.

The Never Ending Story of Putting Things In The Right Order

After having spent a productive morning organising my DVDs (just films, television is in a separate category) I was struck by how this relatively simple task was made far more complicated by my OCD tendencies. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (or as Tobias Funke would call it The OC Disorder) and in the past decade or so has went from a little understood condition to something very familiar in the lexicon. According to OCD-UK 1.2% of the population of the UK has OCD, which works out as around 750,000 people. OCD has become something that many people will say they have when what they probably mean is they have OCD tendencies. OCD can take many forms but is basically suffering from intrusive thoughts; to use myself as an example I can get very concerned about checking doors are locked, that I turned the oven off, that sort of thing. When I am out I will get an intrusive thought that "did I lock the door?" and I will be anxious, worried that I didn't do it and all manner of terrible things will happen because of my mistake. If I don't go back to check I will often become more and more anxious about it.

Often I get two steps from my front door and go back to check I have locked it (incidentally I always have locked it), when I check the door is locked this creates relief from anxiety which reinforces the behaviour of going back and checking so the next time I leave the house I have an even more anxious feeling and will go back and check and this perpetrates a cycle of intrusive thought-anxiety-checking behaviour-relief which constantly gets stronger and stronger I don't say I have OCD because I can get by in my life without this being too much of a problem. If I am at work and I have an intrusive thought about locking the door I don't leave work to go and check, it doesn't really interfere with my life. To people who have OCD having the intrusive thought about the door and not checking is a terrible ordeal and I am fortunate my tendencies are so easy to deal with. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith made a joke about dyslexia, or rather the way comedians portray dyslexia, which would be amusing situations would arise as the sufferer misreads a sign and goes into the wrong set of toilets or whatever. Goldsmith pointed out that this is not what dyslexia is but is often what comedians say dyslexia is because that is funny (but incorrect). This is how I feel about OCD, that there is real and terrible OCD and the more everyday "OCD" desire for things to be neat and orderly often mined for comedy effect.

Anyway, as I was going through my DVDs I was hit by a number of categorising problems and my OCD tendencies kicked in, If I categorise them in the wrong place then my whole collection is wrong. Before we even get to specific problems there is the basic idea of how they should be categorised. In High Fidelity the main character tried to organise his records autobiographically, meaning that he had to remember how he got the record to know where it should go. I have never tried that but I did used to organise my CDs by how much I liked the artist and so any reorganisation became a heartbreaking set of decisions - did I really like The Smiths more than David Bowie? The next step would have to abandon even the idea of grouping the artist's various CDs together and treating each album individually. Thankfully I abandoned that system and adopted one based on the alphabet.

But to specifics, first, I have three James Bond films, should they be sorted alphabetically and independent of each other by title - Casino Royale, Goldeneye and Skyfall, or should they be put together and put under B for Bond. If the answer is together in this little block of Bond films how are they organised? Alphabetically, so Casino Royale, Goldeneye, Skyfall? Or chronologically from the year they were made - Goldeneye, Casino Royale, Skyfall. Or should they be put in the order of the Bond story which could be argued would have Casino Royale first as this was Bond's origins story but I have no idea which would come next. Some filmmakers seem to have been out to intentionally cause problems for example I own X-Men, X-Men 2, X-Men: First Class, X:Men Origins - Wolverine and The Wolvervine. Should The Wolverine which is part of this story be put under X for X-Men, or W for Wolverine?

And what about box sets of stuff? Against my advice my partner of twelve years, Spooky Reading Girl (SRG for short), bought a boxset of Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, the last one of these is considered by many to be the worst film ever made. Spooky Reading Girl is a term the comedian Jackie Keshian came up with to describe her own book-reading obsessed childhood and so is very apt for my partner. SRG and I have a shared DVD collection although interestingly we each insisted on maintaining separate book and CD collections. You may want to guess when I mention the DVDs in this collection which are hers and which are mine. SRG had not seen the last two films in the Batman box set and I had. SRG's position was perfectly sensible that it was cheaper to buy this boxset than it was to buy the two good films - Batman and Batman Returns. I felt this is an example when less is more and would have paid more money to just have the two good films.

I also own Christopher Nolan's trilogy of Batman films as well as the animated films Batman: The Dark Knight Return Parts 1 & 2 (based on the graphic novel which I would highly recommend as The Dark Knight Rises and the upcoming Superman Vs Batman film were hugely influenced by  it). So I have three sets of Batman films, do they all go under B? I settled on the Batman quadrilogy is under B, as is Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Parts 1 & 2 but the Nolan trilogy is under D for Dark Knight as I, and indeed others, call it the Dark Knight trilogy.

I also started imagining my own peculiar film seasons based on the idiosyncrasies of our DVD collection. There is the decidedly uneven "Three Americans Trilogy" - American Beauty, American Dreamz and American Hustle. There is the Numbered Collection that started with Nigel Winterbottom's superb 24 Hour Party People followed by romantic comedy 27 Dresses and to end a double bill of not quite zombie horror 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later.  There is the spectacular Man & Men Season - A Serious Man, A Single Man, The Man Who Would Be King, The Man With Two Brains, The Third Man, The Men Who Stare At Goats and No Country For Old Men. And there is no surer sign of the inherent sexism of Hollywood (or perhaps mine and SRG's sexism) that in Woman & Women series there is just The Women.

Having completed the reorganisation I was hit by the final obstacle of friends returning DVDs they had borrowed that have lost their place in the collection and until I come to do it again will remain frustratingly out of place; showing up whole thing as the doomed to fail enterprise that it is and that I shouldn't let it bother me.

Don't Cross the Online Streaming Services - Netflix vs Amazon

The Man In The High Castle is a novel by sci-fi legend Philip K Dick and I daresay that even if you haven't read his books you are at least familiar with some of the adaptations of his work; the most famous being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adapted into Blade Runner. The Man In The High Castle imagined a world in which the Allies lost World War II and America was invaded and occupied by the Nazis and the Japanese. The Japanese took the western half of the country and the Nazis the East. The book dealt with the "Americans" living under the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes. Amazon Prime have recently adapted this book into a television show with the same name and I recently watched the first episode. I should say that while I am a fan of Philip K Dick I have not read the book.

The first episode was very good and did a great job of setting up this new world, with references to the Nazis dropping an atom bomb on Washington DC and clearly that was one of the reasons the Allies lost the war. I remember reading the comments of a Japanese general saying an invasion of America would never work as while you could perhaps defeat their armies it had a huge population that was heavily armed and any occupation would fail. In the show, especially in the Eastern Nazi half of America, they have done a lot of work imagining how the Nazis have kept the country under their control, for example, the Hitler Youth has been established in America suggesting that children are being brought up under the belief that being a Nazi is a good thing. There is a resistance to both the Nazis and the Japanese but increasingly this seems to be from the older generations, people who lived in the old, free America.

The story in the first episode involved a film that showed the Allies winning World War II, films that are supposedly made by "The Man In The High Castle". Possession of such a film would be considered treasonous. Whether it is a propaganda film made by the resistance or that it is meant that the timeline had been altered so the Nazis won and this film is rare evidence of that change, has not yet been made clear. A thoroughly chilling scene is when a truck driver is pulled over by a police officer and while they are talking ash fell to the ground from the sky, the police officer explained that since it was Tuesday the hospital would have just euthanised anyone considered a burden to the state - the crippled, the old, etc. What is most chilling is that this officer is an American, someone who fought in World War II against the Nazis and Japanese, who doesn't seem appalled at the awful murder of these people, to him it is just a simple fact of life.

This show has been made by Amazon and is available to Amazon Prime subscribers. A few years ago the idea of Amazon making actual shows would have been laughable, they sold stuff, they didn't make it. Certainly no one would have thought that it would be well-made quality drama. Amazon's stable of shows it's made include Hand of God, crime drama Bosch and probably most famously Transparent. Transparent is a sitcom about an elderly man who came out to his family as transgender and would henceforth be living as a woman. The main character is played by the brilliant Jeffrey Tambor who has been in many things but I knew him most from the imprisoned housing developer George Bluth in Arrested Development. Transparent has been a big success for Amazon and they have been lauded for the sensitive handling of this issue and, importantly, being very funny (I have not actually gotten round to watching it but I've heard good things).

Amazon is essentially in a two-horse race with the other online streaming service Netflix and they too have made a host of original shows. I originally subscribed to Netflix as it was the only place to legally watch Breaking Bad, then they were making a new season of Arrested Development and so on and so on. Personally I think Netflix has made much better programmes with House of Cards featuring Kevin Spacey as probably their biggest success. Other great programmes are:

• Bojack Horseman - animated show about an actor who was on a hugely popular sitcom in the 90s but hasn't done much since. And he's a horse, but he's like a person, he talks, he wears clothes etc. It is hysterically funny but also at times very tragic.
• Orange is the New Black - a drama in a women's prison based on the real life story of a middle-class woman arrested for a drug related crime she committed ten years ago, this is someone who would never have expected to be sent to prison. The show is very good at looking at the reasons why these people are in prison and how bizarre the prison system in Amercia is, for example America has the highest percentage of people in prison in the world, around 700 people per 100,000 is in prison, in comparison in England and Wales it is 145 people per 100,000. 
• The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Kimmy has been trapped in an underground bunker for years by an insane cult leader and the show started with their rescue. Kimmy goes out into the world trying to make a life after missing out on so much. This is a very dark premise for a sitcom but it is very funny and the cameo role of the cult leader is one of the best examples of casting ever.
• Daredevil - television series based on the Marvel comic books, very dark and brooding. One of the best decisions of the show is that he doesn't wear the Daredevil costume at first but fights crime dressed in black and a mask pulled over the top half of his face. The fight scenes have a brutal sense of realism to them, Daredevil hits someone and they get back up, that doesn't happen with most superheroes. Also just released is Jessica Jones, another Marvel comic adaptation that exists in the same world as Daredevil.

• They have brought back at least two great shows - the first being Arrested Development but also essentially making new episodes of Mr. Show with Bob and David, the HBO sketch show starring David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, under the new name of With Bob and David. I loved Mr. Show and never thought the show would be brought back, Bob Odenkirk has had recent success playing Saul Goodman/James McGill in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul and David Cross has subsequently played Tobias Funke in Arrested Development.

So far Netflix have made far more shows that Amazon and, in my opinion, better shows. But it is certainly true that both have made programmes that would have perhaps struggled to get aired on normal television channels.

In terms of which is the better service to subscribe to if you can only have one (in our household we subscribe to both) again I prefer Netflix. There is something odd but interesting about Netflix and the way they do business. Until very recently Netflix didn't organise it's programmes and films in the simple categories of Film - Horror or Television - Comedy, no instead they would have categories like Dark Films, Gritty Dramas, Classic Sci-Fi and often these labels seemed to have very little to do with the selection of films and programmes. While they have introdcued a more traditional system they have kept their peculiar categories as well.

Netflix also seemed to have more unusual one-off programmes and documentaries. It has the outstanding Ragnarok, the bizarre stand up from John Hodgman about the end of the world (who is my own personal hero and fake internet judge), old documentaries about the American Civil War, a lot of stand up comedy from American comedians not known well in the UK such as Mike Birbiglia, Nick Offerman and more.

If we must have a VHS-Betamax style showdown between these two online services I would definitely support Netflix - the weirder, more original one of the two and as inaccurate as this may be Netflix does feel more like the underdog against the giant corporation that is Amazon.

My History Of Horror - An Overlooked Genre Of Cinema

Spoiler Warning - some spoilers for The Exorcist, The Babadook, Rosemary's Baby and The Ring

I've previously written a blog about how I consider musicals the worst genre of cinema (and I stand by that) but horror is also an area of cinema that I don't know much about. I was given a very poor introduction to horror through films like Halloween and Child's Play and I maintain that they are awful films. I've never really cared for any of the "slasher" films and I don't like Scream - although that might be more because I was less aware of the conventions they were playing with. A few years ago I watched a very interesting series A History of Horror made and presented by Mark Gatiss. I'm a big fan of Mark Gatiss and despite not knowing much about horror it was very interesting and it did kindle my enthusiasm for getting better acquainted with horror.

I don't like having such gaps in my cinematic knowledge so I sought out horror films that might be worth watching. One of the first was Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's classic horror film about satanists trying to bring forth the birth of the antichrist. I loved the film and the creeping sense of terror and paranoia that took over Rosemary as she slowly became aware of the plot to make her child the antichrist. It is another film that told the viewer don't trust anyone and the closer they were to you just meant they could hurt you more. For a large part of  the film it is unclear whether the satanists are really in touch with the Devil or just think they are. The behaviour of Rosemary's husband was typical not just of being involved a satanic cult but also an abusive husband; belittling Rosemary's opinions, keeping her from seeing friends and family, and trying to control more and more of her life. The shocking conclusion to the film is that Rosemary does give birth and the baby is indeed the child of satan and as the film ends it seemed that Rosemary had agreed to raise the child.

Halloween is a good opportunity to seek out horror films and I picked three- The Exorcist, The Ring and The Babadook and I felt this represented a good range of horror films, a classic Hollywood film, a more modern example in The Ring and absolutely bang up to date with The Babadook. As with Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist is a classic film that I had wanted to watch for some time. I was a little disappointed with the film but bits of it were excellent. Essentially it is the story of a demonic possession and is one of those films that is stitched into culture and parts are so familiar from parodies and other films it has influenced. It also had an excellent soundtrack which turned a rather innocuous tune into something deeply sinister.

 The stand out performance was of the mother of the possessed child and she excellently portrayed the exhaustion and panic that someone going through such a process would have. To the film's credit they spent a long time with doctors pursuing a medical or psychological explanation and it was only in desperation that they turned to an exorcism. Another brilliant move was to have Father Karras be a trained psychiatrist and was as skeptical as anyone about demonic possession.

Next up was The Babadook.This film dealt with some very dangerous territory; what if a parent hated and/or resented their child? The film is about a mother and her young son. the son was going through a difficult time in that he had a lot of nightmares about monsters and so would be unable to sleep, meaning the mother couldn't sleep either. The mother relied on the tested method of reading to her child to get him back to sleep and on one occasion the child picked a book neither of them recognised - The Babadook. It started off being very jolly and the sort of thing for children before completely changing tone and scaring the child senseless. What followed was the Babadook, a sort of ghost and/or monster terrorising the family, who has been seemingly summoned by the reading of the book. At one point the monster seemed to even possess the mother and the possibility of her killing her child is raised. The issue of resenting and or hating the child is skilfully dealt with. The mother's husband died in a car accident driving them to the hospital so she could give birth to the child. Even before the terror of the babadook the mother seemed to be close to some sort of breakdown. When the Babadook possessed her this tension is ramped up and at some points seemed to be on the verge of trying to kill the child. The film dealt with issues of mental illness and depression very well and some people have suggested all the bad things are only happening in the mother's mind.


And so to The Ring. This is the original Japanese version which everybody seemed to agree was far superior to the American remake. I was on the understanding this it was a very scary film and while I enjoyed it I didn't find it particularly scary. I think many of the things I found odd about the film are probably just conventions of Japanese cinema. For example out of the blue one character stated he was psychic and that was never explored or questioned it was just accepted. One character, an elderly Japanese man, is one of the worst actors I've ever seen and whatever he tried to do seemed completely unreal and staged; at times reminded me of the Richard Ayoade's brilliant comedy performance of Dean Lerner/Thornton Reed.

Thornton Reed Bad Actor

There were also some moments that felt more comedic than horrific. Some time ago I watched the recent Japanese film 13 Assassins and while for most of the time it was a very serious, sometimes brutal, samurai film there were odd comedic moments that didn't match the tone of the rest of the film. The initial idea of watching a cursed tape that will lead to your death was very good, especially if like me you're watching it on dvd, but I was surprised at how quickly the characters accepted the curse was happening. Something the four horror films I've mentioned all have in common is children. Obviously in Rosemary's Baby there is a baby, in the Exorcist it is a young girl who is being possessed, in The Babadook the child is one of the two central characters and in The Ring the fact that the main character's son watched the tape has raised the stakes considerably. It is no surprise that anything where children are going to be harmed makes everything a bit more dramatic.


Bringing it back to Mark Gatiss I suppose I did watch some horror on television; namely The League of Gentlemen. Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson formed the bizarre sketch troupe in the mid nineties (and won the Perrier award at the Edinburgh Fringe) and although it was first and foremost a comedy it had plenty of horror. There was the mysterious butcher selling an unknown and addictive "meat", the odd family of toad enthusiasts with their twin daughters who act like the sisters in The Shining, the gypsy circus ringmaster who kidnaps women (who apparently many do find terrifying) and, of course, the proprietors of the local shop who only serve local people. I didn't like the show at first as I think I expected a normal comedy and found it all very weird but I stuck with it and found it to be one of the funniest programmes on television. Mark Gatiss is probably better known now for his contributions to Doctor Who and Sherlock but I still think of him as one of the League of Gentlemen. Shearsmith and Pemberton continued to work together and produced the even weirder Psychoville where horror is far more part of the show and the brilliant Inside Number Nine which at times forgoes comedy altogether and episodes will just be horror (and sometimes oddly emotional as well). Each episode of Inside Number 9 is it's own story with new characters, the hook being they all take place in a place denoted by the number '9'. The first series had an episode almost set entirely in a cupboard with people playing 'sardines', whereas the next episode had virtually no dialogue and relied on silent comedy. The second series has continued in this vein with all kinds of different settings.

 The assorted League of Gentlemen team have always worn their references and influences on their sleeve and I think I must have missed many of the horror references in their work (I did catch the episode of Psychoville which was a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in which the story took place in realtime and is about people hiding the body of someone they've murdered).

A less funny example of horror television is American Horror Story. I am years behind with this show and only just watching the first season but was intrigued when I learned about how each season works. The first season is very much focused on a particular house that the lead characters move into to. But each new season keeps the cast of actors but has them play completely new characters in a new location and a different theme. So the first season is mainly about this house, Season 2 an asylum, season 3 a coven of witches and so on. Again it took me a little while to get into the show but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wouldn't say it has been scary as yet but I am considering skipping season 2 completely as anything set in an asylum really freaks me out, whether it be One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest which is a brilliant film that I own but have only watched once or the episode of Peep Show where they keep trying to get each other sectioned under the mental health act.  I do feel that not watching a horror show because it might potentially be too scary can only be a strong recommendation.

So far getting more into horror has only been a good thing but I am sure there are plenty of bad horror films waiting to be watched.

Repetition Is The Death of Magic: Covers, Remakes and Reboots

Major spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road and minor spoilers for Battlestar Galactica

Ryans Adams is a very talented singer-songwriter from America. Bryan Adams is a very successful singer-songwriter who Canada has apologised for on several occasions. I am a big fan of Ryan Adams. On many occasions when I have expressed my admiration for his music someone has said how much they like Summer of 69 as well and that is very annoying. I hold a particular dislike of Bryan Adams who I put in arguably the worst category of musician: "someone who should know better" which is reserved for those people who do have talent but have used it very poorly, As you can imagine Ryan Adams hates this situation even more and has been known to throw people out of gigs if they shout out requests for Bryan Adams songs.

For years Ryan Adams has played with the dangerous flame of covering relatively recent songs, for example he covered Wonderwall by Oasis and so good was his interpretation that Noel Gallagher said it's better than the original. Even more recently Ryan Adams has covered Taylor Swift's album 1989 in entirety. I cannot stress enough that Ryan Adams isn't doing this in an ironic way and as far as I can tell he is a big fan of the album. My sarcasm and cynicism has become such a problem that I can't always convey sincerity convincingly but Ryan Adams genuinely meant this as a tribute to Swift. Covering a whole album certainly puts an artist on dangerous ground it reminds me of what John Cusack's character Rob in High Fidelity said about making a mix tape, you're using someone else's words to express yourself.

I am not a fan of Taylor Swift and I have become very isolated from what is popular and from what most people watch and listen to. That's not bragging - it's just a consequence of the way pop culture works now and anyone could do it. With the death of appointment television and the rise of Netflix et al I have very easily managed to avoid watching television in the manner it was originally broadcast so very few adverts, no reality television, just stuff I really want to watch. With music it's even worse as for years the only two radio stations I listen to are 6 Music and Radio 4 (Radio 5 Live does get an honourable mention for Kermode And Mayo's Film Review as I listen to the podcast version of that show) and I don't watch MTV so I am in something of an echo chamber of musical taste. just getting back more of what I like.

In terms of real pop music the only people I know about are Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift and I don't care for any of their music and I am dimly aware that Beyonce and Lady Gaga aren't exactly new acts. I had heard the song Shake It Off but it was only at a recent wedding that someone pointed out that it was Taylor Swift (and the fact that it took my attendance at a wedding to hear pop music says a lot about my cultural isolation). I do think the lyrics to that song are terrible and practically gibberish and seemed to be about explaining to children how verbs work "haters gonna hate, players gonna play" and the B-side might just be her reciting "I before E except after C". Now as much as I don't like Taylor Swift's music I really like the Ryan Adams version of it. Why is this? Well, Adams' covers are done in a different style, they're slower, more mournful, it is far sadder in tone and far less pop but the inescapable truth is that, Shake It Off aside, there must be more to Taylor Swift's music than I had first appreciated.

 I think when talking of covers it is important to mention Me First and The Gimme Gimmes who are a covers band and play pop songs in very interesting ways. They sometimes veer too close to just being comedy but when they get it right they make a great song. This is their version of Nothing Compares To You

In cinema and television covers are remakes or reboots. Hollywood is very keen on these as they have been running low on ideas for decades. Not to say they don't have new good ideas, or that they aren't good scripts being written, but remakes are just so much easier and every so often rumour of a new remake will be reported like the first stages of a hurricane. Normally I'm suspicious of remakes or reboots but there have been two recent examples that are great - Mad Max:Fury Road and Battlestar Galactica.

The original Battlestar Galactica existed purely because some television executive saw how much money Star Wars was making and wanted to make a television rip-off of it. It was not a good programme. I hadn't expected much of the remake until I one of the best ad campaigns for a television show ever. Sky ran a series of adverts that started with a quote about BSG and it was things like "the most intelligent drama on television" and "the only show talking about the war on terror" and then it would say "Battlestar Galactica". And this was all true, BSG was doing episodes essentially about the War on Terror. It's not an original observation but good science fiction is a way to talk about what's going on now - Twilight Zone episodes about paranoia of alien invasion were discussing communist witch-hunts and Battlestar Galactica had a clash of religious/cultures, suicide bombings, occupation of foreign lands and trying to impose order, the moral arguments for and against torture.

Something it had in common with the Mad Max reboot was the presence of strong female characters, the acknowledged best fighter pilot was Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the President was Laura Roslin who would stare down admirals and killer robots. And so we get to Mad Max: Fury Road and what may be the best reboot ever. The original Mad Max trilogy is an odd collection of films and each could essentially stand alone and the same goes for MM:FR.

In this new film Max isn't even the central character instead it is Charlize Theron playing Furiosa (I'm a big fan of Charlize Theron especially her guest appearance in Arrested Development). The film is essentially a long chase - Furiosa drove the "war-rig" for the insane warlord Immortan Joe but it turned out on this drive Immortan's slave-wives had begged Furiousa to help them escape. When Immorten Joe realised this he goes off in pursuit. It's telling that Max isn't even mentioned in that plot summary and a good editor could probably completely cut him out. Max just happened to be present and he helped Furiosa and the other women. There is a lot of feminism in Mad Max, the wives show bravery and self-determination in risking their lives to try and escape and, to put it simply, Furiousa is a bad-ass. She's also a bad-ass with just one arm who probably would have beaten Max in a fist fight if it wasn't for outside interference. In one scene Max is trying to use their sniper rifle and kept missing so he gives the rifle to Furiosa and she rested in one his shoulder and made the shot. That is a lot of it right there, Max is there to offer support to Furiosa. So thorough was George Miller in wanting to portray women who had been the victim of such terrible abuse  accurately the author of The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler was hired as a consultant.

It would be a mistake to think the film is "just" a feminist action film (which would be great already) whichever way you look at it it's spectacular. The special effects are amazing and aside from a storm are largely practical effects driven rather than computer generated. When a car flipped over it  had really flipped over. This does matter as a single car crash in MM:FR has more impact than two hours of Michael Bay's weightless Transformers smashing into each other. The script is cut to the bone but still full of great lines. It makes you care about the characters and you want them to escape. It is a brilliant film.

 So far I think it's the film of the year and Theron should win Best Actress at the Oscars but I don't think that will happen. A quick word on George Miller is the director for all four Mad Max films, Miller is seventy years old and has just made a film so thrilling that I'm not sure a seventy year old should watch, let alone direct. In between the last Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and MM:FR Miller has worked on Babe and Babe: Pig In The City as well as the dancing penguin movies Happy Feet. To put it mildly he has had an odd career.

Podcast Recommendation

As it has been mentioned I will recommend the Kermode and Mayo's Film Review on Radio 5 Live. It is a cliche to say about any BBC show that "it is worth the licence fee alone" but I will say however much it costs to run Radio 5 Live so they can report on sport and whatever else it is they do is worth it as it also produces this show. At first I did not care for Mark Kermode. I had seen him doing bits on the Culture Show, Newsnight Review and introducing films on channel 4 and I had him marked down as an intellectual snob and a bit pretentious. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem as I am an intellectual snob and a bit pretentious but I also knew he had given a Kermode award to High School Musical. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term for the stress caused by holding two contradictory opinions and that was how I felt about Kermode - was he a cultural snob or did he like cultural trash like High School Musical. How could he genuinely like something as weird and brilliant as Pan's Labrinyth and vacuous as High School Musical? And I assumed he was being disingenuous. After being badgered by lots of people to listen to his actual show I found out that, in fact, he does like both. The show is worth listening to just for Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's conversations and in-jokes but Kermode is an articulate and intelligent critic who really loves films. He is one of the very few critics who is as interesting and entertaining when praising a film as he is damning one. That said, here he is talking about the Sex and the City film (he doesn't like it):

Hello to Jason Isaacs.