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.

Spies and the spying spyers who spy them - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Utterly Reprehensible James Bond and Sterling Archer, and Mark Gatiss' spy novels

Spoiler Warning - spoilers for a couple of episodes of Archer and some minor spoilers for both the book and film Casino Royale

I have just finished the classic British spy drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - and I mean the old tv version with Alec Guinness and not the relatively recent film starring Gary Oldman (which I had seen first) - and I enjoyed it a lot. It is quite a change of pace for someone born after the start of MTV when it is assumed any slowness in the telling or portraying of the story will instantly bore the viewer and flashy editing is needed to hold their attention. TTSS was about the possibility that one of the leading members of the Circus - the term used for the British Secret Service - is actually working for the Russians. George Smiley, played by Alec Guinness, was then recruited by the government to find out who this spy might be. With Smiley having recently retired from the Circus he was the perfect man for the job, he knew everyone involved, had the requisite skills but as the Russian mole was still active was beyond suspicion.   TTSS moved at a snail's pace. It seemed to take an hour for four people to enter a room and sit round a table. The film version is two hours long and I wondered what they had cut out from the seven episode tv show; and the answer seems to be cutting out the scenes of people moving from room to room and the long____pauses____between____people ______asking_____and_____answering______ questions. TTSS even showed people sitting and thinking; just Alec Guinness alone, thinking about things with no voice over to tell you what was going on in his head. Even comparing the set of the film and tv show highlighted the difference in how things are made now - the film set looked period appropriate but it still looked like a cool spy office, whereas the tv show set looked like the dullest civil service office ever. The tv show demanded you pay attention and it will not make it easy for you and a lot of stuff has to be worked out by the viewer. None of these are criticisms of TTSS but it was certainly jarring. The only real problem I had with the series was that I because I had seen the more recent film I knew who the traitor was. I might yet read the book.

Seriously, it feels like it takes an hour for these guys
to enter a room and sit round a table

I've always had quite a fondness for spy films, tv shows and books and it's hard, if not impossible, to approach this topic and not to mention the most famous fictional spy of them all - James Bond. I have watched a lot of Bond films but not all of them and I must admit there are lots of the old ones that blur into one long film where a villain in a volcano lair kills people using golddust while a man with metal teeth fights James Bond on a fanboat on the moon. While I think all the different Bonds have something to offer I think my favourite is probably Daniel Craig followed by Pierce Brosnan and it might only be because those were the new Bond films for me, I see the rest as "classic" Bond films. I have never really had a problem with the constant reinvention with Bond, he started off being a British spy fighting the Cold War but when in reality the Cold War ended the films moved into that new world quite well. Goldeneye made a lot of play out of Bond being a Cold War dinosaur, someone stuck in an old mindset when the world had changed around them. Daniel Craig's Bond is very much the "War on Terror" Bond, where he no longer fights countries but sinister individuals or organisations. For a number of reasons I should hate Bond, in terms of politics (including gender politics) I am a million miles from Bond - I don't think someone should have a licence to kill, I don't think the way to solve problems with other countries is sending in a spy to kill people and I don't think that if you are given a licence to kill you should drink quite as much as he does. There is a scene in Skyfall which bothered me a lot, even though I loved the film overall, at one point Bond meets a woman who can take him to the villain, and it came out that she was essentially a slave, forced to have sex with people. On the journey to see the villain this woman takes a shower and Bond joins her, and they have sex. I can't be the only person who thinks that if you meet someone who has forced to be a sex slave you shouldn't try to have with them hours after having met them. I don't think the filmmakers intended the scene to read in a creepy way but once it had occurred to me it was hard to ignore. But despite all these reasons to hate Bond I usually like the character.

Some of these Bonds seem a little bit
too much in love with their gun

I have only read one Bond book, Casino Royale, which I read after I saw after the Daniel Craig film of the same name. Two things struck me - first, the stakes were much lower and second, Bond doesn't really do any fighting. For the first point, the villain in the film is Le Chiffre a mathematical genius, poker player and banker for terrorists, warlords etc. where he gambled with hundred of millions of dollars of said evil peoples' money. In the book they play for millions of francs (considerably less) and Le Chiffre was a union boss who lost money when brothels were made illegal. You might think that this smaller stakes affair would make it more boring but I enjoyed the book a lot and often find the huge stakes some films (including Bond films) insist on risking predictable and dull. If the stake is the destruction of the whole planet then you can be pretty sure the good guys will win. The second point - Bond doesn't really do any fighting or shooting, the fantastic fight scenes of the film have no place in the book. Again, what could have made it seem boring actually worked in it's favour. Bond is a spy and spies don't get in massive gunfights, they are discrete, quiet, unassuming.


There exists a parody of James Bond so brilliant that I think I like it more than the Bond films. Certainly I like the central character a lot more than James Bond. I'm not talking about Austin Powers or even Dr. Bashir's brilliant turn as a Cold War spy in that episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I am of course talking about the animated tv show Archer, featuring the sort-of superspy Sterling Archer. There is so much of Archer that is lifted straight from James Bond - he is a womanising spy who drinks too much and exists in some nebulous ill defined time period, the genius twist being that the resulting character is what you'd expect a sexist drunk to be- an utterly reprehensible person. Archer literally does not care if a stray bullet he fired hits a colleague and this is just when they're in the office, not on a mission. One of Archer's defining qualities is how he constantly brags about being a spy, how he uses it as a line to impress women, playing on the frankly abysmal efforts Bond goes to to adopt any secret identity.

But for all his faults there are things to really like about Sterling Archer and I think there are two episodes in particular that show his good qualities. First, we learn that Archer's long-suffering Butler Woodhouse is involved in a tontine dating back to World War I and because of this is marked for death. In an episode that saw Archer giving a baby a cut-throat razor it also showed that Archer can actually care about another person when he rushed to save Woodhouse. The second example is in my opinion the best episode of the series. In one episode we learn that Archer has breast cancer - the next episode showed him receiving treatment which he soon learned was bogus - Irish gangsters had been substituting the real medicine for placebos to make money. In revenge Archer goes on a rampage against the Irish mob. Originally it was assumed Archer was angry purely because his health had been jeopardised but over the course of the episode we learned that Archer had become friends with a fellow cancer sufferer, Ruth, an old woman he met at the pharmacy, who recently died, who perhaps would have been saved by having actual medicine. Archer showed more feeling in this one episode than just about the entire back-catalogue of Bond films. Also, I've not really mentioned this, Archer is a comedy, and it is really, really funny. Aside from Sterling Archer there are a group of brilliant characters around him from possibly evil scientist and radioactive pig cloner "Dr." Krieger, to rival spy Barry Dillon who although has a list of very legitimate gripes with Archer we see as the villain even before he became a KGB cyborg killing machine.

There is another fictional British spy who I think is deserving of a mention. This is a creation of Mark Gatiss, who is more famous for the things he's done on television - he is a member of "The League Of Gentlemen" and has written for Doctor Who and Sherlock (although he has appeared in both - just one episode in Doctor Who but in Sherlock he played Mycroft Holmes - a spy himself) this spy is from a novel he wrote - The Vesuvius Club. Lucifer Box was a portrait painter and socialite who lived at 9 Downing street at the turn of the 20th Century but he was also employed by the British secret service. Lucifer was a charming, extremely handsome and thoroughly bisexual hero who appeared in three separate novels.The first - The Vesuvius Club - is a great spy novel  as Lucifer tears around London and then Italy trying to work out a series of murders and a plot against Britain.

The different covers do a good job of showing
 the different time periods of the books

The unusual thing about the series is that the next book took place in 1930s America and the whole tone of the novel changed, this time the enemy were fascists who were trying to raise the Devil and the different enemy and plot are reflected in the style of the book. In the intervening period Lucifer has changed somewhat and it was suggested that the First World War affected Lucifer quite deeply. The third book changed again, this time taking place in the 1950s when a sinister organisation - Scouts - are trying to take over world. As each book took place in a different phase of Lucifer's life - blazing youth, more mature middle-age and finally on the verge of retirement it gave a different version of the character.

So that was a quick run down of some of my favourite spy tv shows, films and books, from a old and slow British drama to the animated ridiculous hyper-reality of Archer.

In Defence Of Sci-Fi - Big Ideas, Oscar Hate, Unbelievable Non-Sci-Fi and What It's Really About

spoiler warning - minor spoilers for Arrival and major spoilers for one episode of The Twilight Zone from 1960


I recently wrote a blog about the best films of the year and another blog about being disappointed by a lot of films this last year. In the second blog I ran through the list of films that I wished I had seen and one of them was Arrival. Well, I managed to see that film the other day and have to say it would certainly change my top ten of the year, right now I'd say number two after Rogue One. It's rather fitting that my two favourite films of the year are both science fiction, but drastically different films. I love science-fiction and when I think of my favourite ever films there are lots of sci-fi - Blade Runner, Alien, The Empire Strikes Back, Dr. Strangelove, Aliens.  This blog is called Ninety Per Cent of Everything which is a reference to a quote defending the quality of science-fiction, basically that ninety per cent of it is shit, but it's equally true that ninety per cent of anything is shit.

Most convoluted rizla game ever

There has been a habit of taking books, films, television shows that are science-fiction and refusing to call them that - many people do not consider 1984 science-fiction, even though it is about how technology effects a future world, the very definition of science-fiction. Dr. Strangelove, I film I've already mentioned as one of my favourites is according to Wikipedia is a "political satire black comedy film" with no mention of science fiction, to IMDB it is only a "comedy". Whilst the film is certainly a satire and comedy the film revolved around two pieces of technology that did not exist so I would argue it's science fiction. To many people it seems that a "classic" by definition cannot be science fiction, and science fiction that spoils that view is quietly re-categorised.

While I am very discerning when it comes to specific films, I love just about every type of science fiction. I love big space operas like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy. I love clever, indie sci-fi like Moon or Ex Machina. I love dystopias from The Hunger Games to Children of Men. I would categorise superhero films as a subgenre of science fiction (which I understand to be a somewhat controversial position) as they usually involve technology that does not exist.

Guardians of the Galaxy - enjoyably over the top

Arrival is very much the clever big idea sort of science fiction film, it's not about space battles or exploding cities. The setup is actually very much like Independence Day (a sci-fi film I don't like), where a number of huge spaceships have arrived, hovering, perhaps menacingly a short distance above the ground.

But that really is where the two films depart - it seems that the aliens wanted to talk. The US government assembled top scientific experts, specifically linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Dr. Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to help them understand what is going on. Why are the aliens here? What do they want? Are they a threat? A lot of characters talk about what happened when the Europeans arrived in North America and Australia, how the more scientifically advanced group drove the other group to near extinction, will the same thing happen with the aliens? The film is about a lot of things and like all good alien films it's more about the nature of human beings as it is aliens. Amy Adams' performance was brilliant and it's very much her film. Not giving anyway any spoilers I am looking forward to seeing it again to better appreciate the clever things that are going on in the film.

I hope to see Arrival getting a lot of nominations for awards but I'm prepared to be disappointed. The Oscars have a long history of snubbing science fiction. Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight in 2009 but the film wasn't nominated for Best Picture despite being hailed by fans and critics as a great success. Looking at the other nominations that year it was certainly much better than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button if nothing else. The following year in what might have been a response to people asking where was The Dark Knight's Oscar nomination the list of nominees was raised to ten with cult sci-fi hit District 9 and sci-fi blockbuster Avatar getting nominations alongside more predictable Oscar fare.

District 9 - One of the films that benefited from wider Oscar nominations 

In my opinion Christoper Nolan is one of the best directors working today but has not received the awards and critical acclaim he should have done because he has largely done sci-fi. A case in point, there is already Oscar buzz around his next film, Dunkirk, a big budget World War Two film about the evacuation of Dunkirk almost as if the moment he moves away from sci-fi people see his films as Oscar-worthy. Looking at Christoper Nolan's back catalogue the majority of his work is either sci-fi or has strong sci-fi elements, before Dunkirk only Memento and Insomnia are not science fiction. The Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films are the high watermark of superhero films, Inception is about using technology to enter dreams and Interstellar is a sci-fi epic of space exploration, time travel and using technology to save mankind. In my opinion Christopher Nolan has not made a bad film, something very few directors can say.

Looking back on the winner for Best Picture Oscar, I went back to 1950 to find a sci-fi winner and couldn't do it. The closest to sci-fi was it's genre cousin, fantasy, when Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won, which was surely an award for the astonishing achievement of the complete trilogy rather than that single film. So why do the Oscars seem to hate science-fiction? Well, I don't think they take it seriously, presumably for the ridiculous reason that it's about stuff that isn't real. The Oscars had no problem rewarding Titantic, which while despite being based on real events was one of the least plausible films I've ever seen, which must be something of a challenge. This is even worse in television - plot devices that the worst sci-fi writer would be ashamed of are trotted out regularly in soaps and dramas with little said about their realness or characters so unbelievable they would make Zaphod Beeblebrox look innocuous, but Doctor Who is dismissed by many because "that couldn't happen in real life".

The comparatively believable Zaphod Beeblebrox

What many people don't appreciate about science fiction is that it's not really about the future or other planets or aliens, it's usually about this time, this place and us. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica had more to say about the War on Terror than any other programme on American television, writing episodes about suicide bombings, foreign occupation, torture, civil rights, religious freedom and religious extremism, topics most non-sci-fi wouldn't dare go near. By setting it in another time or place gives writers a freedom to discuss these issues. One of the most famous examples of this was an episode of The Twilight Zone about aliens infiltrating America and how a small town tore itself apart with accusations and witch-hunts, all the while the aliens watched from outside the town, barely lifting a finger and letting paranoia do their work for them. The episode was clearly about issues closer to home in America, with paranoia against communist infiltrators hitting fever pitch.

Arrival clearly has a message about human cooperation and trust, discussing how almost by default powerful countries don't trust each other, too concerned about losing their own advantage. At a time when the person poised to become the most powerful man in the world seems eager to restart the Cold War arms race it's something to think about and shows the power of science fiction and I suspect there is already a sci-fi film in the works about an insanely arrogant and ignorant politician elected to run the universe.

2016 The Year of Cinema Disappointment

Spoiler Warning - some minor spoilers for Suicide Squad, War On Everyone, Bone Tomahawk, Tale of Tales

The last year has been a very good year for films with diverse gems like Spotlight, High-Rise and The Jungle Book being some of the standouts, however, the emotion I feel most with 2016's films is disappointment. There were a number of films I have had  high expectations for but delivered everything from crushing disappointment to mild let-down-ness. I'll start with the biggest disappointment first.

Suicide Squad

I am a big fan of comic book films; with the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films acting as the high watermark for me and I was really looking forward to this film. My understanding is there are a number of different versions of Suicide Squad in graphic novels and I haven't read any of these but I have watched an animated version on Amazon after I had heard about the upcoming film. In a nutshell a group of supervillains are forced into working on behalf of the government on extremely dangerous missions. Again, the lineup of who the particular villains are seems to change with each version but the two central members of the squad are usually Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie in this film version) who was essentially the Joker's girlfriend/accomplice/sidekick, and while I don't like classifying the identity of a female character by their relationship to a male character it is undeniable that this is what Harley Quinn is in the DC universe (in the same way as Robin would first and foremost be described as Batman's sidekick). To give her a little bit more depth Harley was a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum where she treated the Joker, but the Joker ultimately converted her to his side. The relationship between Joker and Harley Quinn is complicated to an unpleasant degree - is it a portrayal of an abusive relationship? - and to have problems with it doesn't make you some ridiculous politically correct liberal. In the DC universe the Joker often seems indifferent to her fate yet capable of extreme jealousy and in this film it is suggested that to convert Harley he tortured her to break her mind. As to what powers or skills Harley has are limited to being rather good at fighting and in this version she is extremely flexible and agile.

Deadshot (played by Will Smith in this film version) is a less well known figure from the DC universe and I don't know much about his backstory aside from what was in this film, namely that he was an expert marksman and assassin and has a daughter who he loves. The rest of the Suicide Squad are not terribly important and one seemed to exist purely to die moments after being introduced and as it would take a long time to go through each one I'm not going to bother and I think this is a real problem as there were a few characters I didn't care about. The other major character, who was not actually a member of the squad, is the Joker who in this version does seem to care deeply about Harley Quinn. Anyone portraying the Joker in a film has an almost impossible task of matching up to both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger's performance but I actually thought Jared Leto's portrayal was quite good, it was certainly a different direction. Batman featured only in passing, do not see this film to see Batman.

The real problem with the film is the villain. Part of the reason I hold up the Dark Knight trilogy so highly is that it had really good villains, especially the Joker. The villain in the Suicide Squad is...well I'm still not really sure, one of the squad is a witch and I think it's her brother, who took over a city and made people into black goo zombie monsters. Whoever it was the film completely failed to put across any jeopardy or menace and it succumbed to the curse of comic book blockbusters of CGI scenes of destruction that don't look real. I have no problem with getting behind a group of bad guys, after all, I stayed on Walter White's side in Breaking Bad far longer than most people. Often the bad guys are the most interesting people in a film, look at Darth Vader or Hans Gruber and there is a Dirty Dozen feeling of creating a team of bad people which I liked. No, this film didn't work because it wasn't good enough. So why were my expectations so high? Two brilliant trailers were released for the film which I loved but watching again now it is obvious that the villain is not really in them at all.

Next up was the disappointing War On Everyone, which again, had a couple of excellent trailers. War On Everyone was an action-comedy about a pair of buddy cops. In most buddy cop films you have one "by the book" detective and one "loose cannon", but in this film both cops are loose cannons, so much so that rolling up to work drunk, framing people and just random violence are everyday occurrences for these two. The plot revolved around a heist in which the only person to escape was the getaway driver, with all the money, and our two protagonists go after that money, planning to keep it for themselves naturally.  While the film was funny in parts and had some good scenes I was very disappointed, first, the plot, at some point it was decided that two crooked cops going after stolen money for themselves wasn't enough and a second reason to go after the real bad guy was given that made no sense whatsoever. Secondly, there was no real reason to get behind them, as I have said, I am quite happy with anti-heroes but these two were actually quite annoying. I saw the film with my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, who had a long list of problems with the film, which I largely agreed with, and I tried to put up half-hearted arguments.

Why were my expectations so high? Well, the film was written and directed by John Mcdonagh, who previously made the hilarious film The Guard and the funny and moving Calvary, he is also the brother of Martin McDonagh who made In Bruges, which is one of my favourite films, and the brilliant Seven Psychopaths. All of these  films share a dark sense of humour which I really enjoy but that just didn't work in this film.

The final two disappointments were Bone Tomahawk and Tale of Tales, both films that I missed at the cinema. Bone Tomahawk is a horror western, a completely new genre to me. The plot is that a coupe of bandits walk through a Native American burial ground, thus incurring the wrath of the Native Americans. One of the bandits was killed at the burial ground but the other escaped and made it to a nearby town but the Native Americans are in pursuit. When the Native Americans kidnap the bandit they also take a sheriff's deputy and a woman who was tending to the bandit's injuries (I don't think she was a qualified doctor, but had medical training). Naturally, the sheriff (Kurt Russell) decided to put together a posse and bring back the kidnapped people. A local Native American warned the group that these weren't like the other Native Americans but that these were cannibal cavemen, vicious, perhaps even supernatural.  What followed was an odd story that followed some typical horror and/or western tropes and had a few exceptionally gruesome scenes.

I thought the idea of horror western intriguing (but was concerned from the start about is it okay making a film about a savage group of Native Americans) and really didn't get the original and inventive film I was hoping for.

I had high expectations for Tale of Tales as it had received very positive reviews from critics who I listen to, Mark Kermode, for instance. But not for the first time the good doctor and I disagree - I hold him personally responsible for the debacle of when I saw Berberian Sound Studio on my birthday and that is one of the worst films I've ever seen in a cinema. Tale of Tales is a retelling of a number of common European fairy tales but keeping true to the original, often gruesome, nature of the fairy tales, for example for a queen to have a child her husband must kill a sea monster and for her to eat the heart - which we see in explicit detail. The narrative switched back and forth between these stories and despite some good scenes, such as when the king goes to kill the sea monster, it was quite dull.

Part of the reason of my disappointment with Tales of Tales and Bone Tomahawk is that as I had missed them in the cinema my expectations had been building over time and my expectations were probably too high.

I do not really begrudge the time and money spent watching these films, after all, each of them had some enjoyable qualities. The only way to find new films is to not just go and see the next Coen Brothers film because you know you'll like it. What is really disappointing is that I saw these films over other films that I missed, there have been a lot of films that I wanted to see but didn't such as,-

• Captain Fantastic - The story of an unconventional family starring Viggo Mortensen, one of my favourite actors who makes very interesting choices, i.e. I won't always like them but I never think he just did it for the money.

• Ghostbusters - if I was judging it just from the trailers and the people involved I would have been quite keen on seeing this film, I think Kristen Wiig is really funny and I've not seen any Melissa McCarthy films some of them have looked like films I would like. What made me really want to see it was the absolutely insane response from certain people whose main problem seemed not that a classic film was being remade, but that the main characters were now being played by women, not men.  I don't have the energy or patience to get into the absurd argument "are women funny" or "are women as funny as men". Some men are funny. Some women are funny. The torrent of sexist and racist abuse directed towards the cast was appalling and it now felt it wasn't just going to see a film but choosing a side in a cultural war and I instinctively knew I was on the side of Kristen Wiig et al. But I didn't get round to seeing it, hopefully when I finally do see it I'll be able to judge it on it's own merits and not get caught up in the nonsense that has accompanied it so far.

• Doctor Strange - my skeptical and scientific heckles were raised by the vague mysticism mentioned in the trailer but a mindbending comic book film starring Benedict Cumberbatch is surely worth watching.

• Edge of Seventeen - good reviews and a funny trailer starring Hailee Steinfeld (probably best known for her starring role in the Coen Brothers' True Grit) and Woody Harrelson, who I am a big fan of.

• Arrival - Still hoping against hope to see this in the cinema and still can't believe I managed to let it pass my be. I loved Sicario, this director's previous film, and I always want to see intelligent thought-provoking sci-fi, that isn't just giant CGI robots punching each other.

• Welcome To Me - never even saw this advertised at the cinema,a Kristen Wiig comedy about a woman who won the lottery and decided to make her own television show. As the woman is self-funding it she has no need to care about ratings or what producers might think she makes a bizarrely idiosyncratic tv show.

• Kubo And The Two Strings - this looked amazing, an animation about the son of a great warrior who told stories about his father- which he thought he had made up - and entertained the locals, he then has to flee when his father's enemies come looking for him. It looked really funny and exactly like the sort of thing I would like.

• Joy - I'm a huge fan of Jennifer Lawrence and have enjoyed a lot of  David O'Russel's previous films (Silver Lining Playbook, American Hustle), the story of a woman who invented a map, but you know, a really, really good mop. I don't think the subject matter of a film is what makes it entertaining - for example, I don't think you need to be interested in formula one to enjoy Senna, so with this film I don't think the fact that mops are quite boring doesn't mean the story around the mop is going to be boring.

• Anthropoid - a World War 2 spy film about a theatre of the war I don't much about with Cillian Murphy? Certainly sounds like the sort of thing I'd like.

• 10 Cloverfield Lane - despite a terrible name the trailer for this film intrigued me, and had the original version of I Think We're Alone Now by Tommy James and The Shondells from 1967 in it.

• The Infiltrator - Bryan Cranston played an undercover DEA agent infiltrating cocaine drug cartel, as a huge fan of Breaking Bad (and a smaller fan of Malcolm in the Middle) I'm eager to see what Bryan Cranston does next. Also having loved the two seasons of Narcos on Netflix this is a subject I want to find out more about.

• The Girl With All The Gifts - a British zombie film that seemed a bit different to the millions of other zombie films out there. I'm a big fan of zombies and zombie-like films (such as 28 Days Later, which technically aren't zombies. I do think people get a bit bogged down in the classification for zombies, after George A Romero never thought of the monsters in his films as zombies, as to him a zombie film was about  people put under voodoo curse. I think the legendary filmmaker John Landis said it best, when he paraphrased a Supreme Court Justice's remarks on pornography - I can't define a zombie but I know it when I see it) but I do think that it might be time to leave the genre alone for a little while.

• My Scientology Movie - I'm a big fan of Louis Theroux and find Scientology fascinating, in  the way a person might find a deeply sinister organisation fascinating. I recently watched the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief which was great and is held up as the definitive Scientology documentary as well as listening to the Scientology episodes of the podcast Oh No, It's Ross and Carrie (who sign up to cults, bizarre religions, etc. to see what actually goes on) which I thought were very even handed and gave an insightful look at Scientology. So I was a bit scientologied out when Louis Theroux's film came out.

• Train to Busan - another zombie movie (as I said, I like zombie movies) but this one was from South Korea and was mainly set on a packed commuter train which seemed like a fun premise. In recent years I've tried to work on some of the areas of cinema I've overlooked and while I do watch foreign films certainly compared to British and American films they're in the minority. 

All these films I wanted to see but didn't and while I didn't explicitly choose Suicide Squad over any of these I can't help but think I should be able to swap out Suicide Squad for one of these other films.  After this year of disappointments I felt very wary about Rogue One : A Star Wars Story. I enjoyed The Force Awakens so I was quietly confident I would like this prequel. I had a slight moment of horror when I realised there was no crawling text setting the film, as there has been in every other Star Wars but ended up absolutely loving the film. I am huge Star Wars fan and am exactly the sort of person who would pick out every flaw, every mistake, but overall the film was a huge success (okay, they did seem to send and receive messages when in hyperspace but I am willing to let that go). Certainly in my opinion compared to the reboot of Star Trek the Star Wars films have been a huge success.

So, while I had a lot of film disappointed me this year, the one that really mattered, the Star Wars, one really came through right at the end of the year.

Top 10 films of 2016

Spoiler warning - very minor spoilers for films ahead, nothing you wouldn't get from a normal review or the trailer

 1. Rogue One : A Star Wars Story

 

Ben Mendelsohn walking around being evil

I have just seen this movie at the weekend so the primacy effect might be going on here but I absolutely loved this film. There is so much to enjoy in this. The first two thirds are interesting and fun but the last part of the movie is genuinely amazing. Great cast from Felicity Jones down but I’ve got to single out the go-to guy for dirtbag villains – Ben Mendelsohn, someone I’ve liked since Animal Kingdom. The director handled any number of Easter eggs for fans with surprising lightness of touch and this can really annoy me, for example the great Bond film Skyfall is marred by the inclusion of a Bond spy car.  Two fashion points – someone high up on this film really wanted to bring mustaches back into fashion and Ben Mendelson rocks a cape.

2.   2. The Nice Guys

Seeing Ryan Gosling being hilarious in a film is a genuine treat for me (much like when Jon Hamm was funny in 30 Rock) as it adds another string to his already nearly perfect bow. Another crime-comedy caper from Shane Black of Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fame and I really enjoyed it. I already essentially love Ryan Gosling, and Russell Crowe was quite likeable in this, which felt like something of a triumph in of itself. The criminal conspiracy at the heart of the film is refreshingly small stakes and is vaguely plausible within the characters' powers to solve.

3.    3,  Spotlight

Budget cuts in decorating for Sterling Cooper

Going back right to the beginning of the year a film that made looking in old books dramatic and tense. Fantastic ensemble cast but nice to see John Slattery  not playing a bastard for once. This film took a topic that is very difficult to talk about and made it into a film that engrossed people.

4.   4. Hail Caesar!

You know, I used to really dislike Channing Tatum, I had him pegged as someone with no acting talent and perhaps some dancing talent, but after enjoying his performance in Haywire and his part in Hail, Caesar! I’ve come round to him. The film is collection of stories set in the golden age of Hollywood, from a communist kidnap plot to a star actress’s unexpected pregnancy with lots of people putting in good performances – all tied together by Josh Brolin’s studio fixer character-  but Channing Tatum as the star of a new musical is what I’ve remembered most. Oh and "Would that it were so simple".

5.   5. High Rise

Note to rich people - if you throw parties where you dress like 18th Century French
aristocrats you've really only got yourself to blame for what happens next

I’m not sure if “liked” or “enjoyed” are the right words to use with this film but it had a profound effect on me. It’s one of the most unsettling films I have ever seen and the rising sense of tension and just an awful feeling that something terrible was going to happen was almost unbearable.  The film set it’s stall out in it’s first minute (apparently the book does this as well, the same awful act is the first line of the book) and then it showed you these civilised people ended up like this.

6   6.The Neon Demon

Another film that is hard to say I liked but really stuck with me. I am a big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn (best known for Drive) and didn’t even let the subject matter of the film – it’s about the fashion industry – put me off. It’s a good film that is made brilliant in the last twenty minutes which completely change everything about the film.

7.  7. Deadpool

The one good thing about the Wolverine origins film was Ryan Reynolds playing Deadpool and since then a Deadpool film has been in the works. Ryan Reynolds was well suited to the constantly talking, constantly joking, fourth wall breaking anti-hero and while the film was very funny with some good action scenes what I really liked was the relationship between Wade Wilson and his girlfriend played by Firefly alumnus Morena Baccarin, which was like nothing I'd seen before.

8.   8. The Jungle Book

I was very surprised by how good this film was. Not only were comparisons to the Disney classic inevitable (the first film I remember seeing in the cinema) but virtually everything in the movie apart from Mowgli is CGI and that seemed like a recipe for disaster. Nevertheless the film was hugely entertaining and the realism of the CGI animals is outstanding and they look completely, absolutely real. 

9.    9. Triple 9

This thriller didn’t do terribly well but I enjoyed it. There are three great scenes, the first, the one most apparent in the trailer, is the getaway from a bank heist were red dye packs hidden amongst the stolen loot exploded, the third not exactly a police car chase but a police race to the scene of a crime where cop Woody Harrelson broke just about every traffic law going. The second is the best and most tense – a terrifying police raid that upset the carefully laid plans set up by the protagonists. The basic plot is crooked cops are forced to do an impossible heist, the only way to succeed is do a “Triple 9” the police code for when a police officer is shot. The film was directed by John Hillcoat who has previously made The Proposition, The Road and Lawless and as I liked all of them and was impressed with the cast I was well-disposed to like the film.

  

1     10.  The Revenant

      Again, a film from early in the year, I’ll probably never watch this again but it was quite something. I’ve been a big fan of Leonardo Di Caprio for a long time – since The Man In The Iron Mask – and so was very glad he finally got his Oscar. Sometimes when you’re watching a film based on real events, as this one is, you might sit and reflect about how you couldn’t have gone through what the character did, you’re not tough enough, not strong enough. Well I’m happy to admit that not only could I not have gone through what the character went through but I couldn’t have gone through what the actor went through for the film, which sounded very unpleasant. I don’t like the theme in Oscars in rewarding roles that required a lot of endurance on the part of the actor, rather than acting ability, but it’s undeniable Di Capio went through a lot to finally get his Oscar.

Films That Aren't Always Easy To Watch - Starting With Neon Demon

Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers for Neon Demon, High-Rise and A Field In England

My girlfriend (Spooky Reading Girl) and I had recently decided to go to the cinema, I wanted to see the new Nicolas Winding Refn film, Neon Demon, and Spooky Reading Girl wanted to see indie rom-com Maggie's Plan with the amazing cast of Julianne Moore, Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig. As both films were playing at the same cinema at more or less the same time we decided that we would go out to the cinema, split up to watch our respective films and then meet up for something to eat. This worked out very well for both of us. One of Spooky Reading Girl's concerns about Neon Demon was that a review had stated "not for the faint of heart" and she can sometimes be quite faint of heart. I enjoyed Neon Demon a lot. I am big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn, I loved both Drive and Only God Forgives and would have wanted to see his next film whatever it had been about. When I heard the film was going to be about models and the fashion industry I still wanted to see it despite having no interest in either. While I enjoyed it the film  it was not an easy watch with some brutal moments and unlike Drive was not a film I could watch again and again, and that's not just because Neon Demon lacked the very easy-on-the-eyes Ryan Gosling who starred in both Drive and Only God Forgives.

Ryan Gosling in Drive

It is an odd thing liking a film but also not particularly wanting to watch it again because of the unpleasant content. Neon Demon reminded me a lot of Black Swan (which I enjoyed but have only watched once) both occasional shocking moments of horror combined with a slow growing feeling that the story was heading somewhere very bad. Both films had a female lead cast where the male characters were only there to advance the plot or as useful props for the women. Usually cinema is seen as escapism and is meant to be enjoyable, however much I admired Neon Demon did I actually enjoy it? And Neon Demon is far from the only film where I have these conflicted feelings.

Perhaps the most famous example of a great film with very unpleasant content is A Clockwork Orange which caused such an uproar and supposed copy-cat violence that Stanley Kubrick had it pulled from release himself. The thing that I find so disturbing in A Clockwork Orange is the violence, which is odd, because often the violence is not very realistic. Near the beginning of the film a fight between two gangs is so ridiculously, and intentionally, over the top as to eliminate any sense of menace. But later, the violence meted out to defenceless innocents is very unsettling, a viciousness and horribleness no other film has matched. I have seen far bloodier, far more gruesome and violent films but the violence has never bothered me. It might be that it is the twisted pleasure that the droogs take in their violence that is conveyed so clearly and it is the intent behind the violence that is shocking and rarely seen. It might just be what happens when a director of Kubrick's quality is given such source material to work with.

A Slightly Less Unsettling Version Of The Droogs
 From A Clockwork Orange

There are two directors and almost everything they have done consists of films that I appreciate as brilliant but not something I would watch for an enjoyable evening; Ben Wheatley and Mike Leigh. To start with Ben Wheatley he is a relatively new British film director and I have seen nearly all of his films, the one exception being Down Terrace, his first film. The first that I saw was Kill List a peculiar horror thriller with a few intense scenes of extreme violence and amongst others features Michael Smiley who will always be Tyres from Spaced as far as I am concerned. A Field In England was his fourth film and is a very trippy film essentially filmed in a single field which is fine in terms of unpleasantness apart from one scene. In this scene the viewer doesn't even see what happened to poor Reece Shearsmith and the violence or torture he went through was implied by what was heard, but it is not this implied violence rather the deliriously happy expression that is on Shearsmith's face as he comes back on screen.

Michael Smiley in Kill List (left)
and A Field In England (right)

Wheatley's most recent film High-Rise is another film where most of it is fine and only a few scenes shock. At one point Hiddlestone's character explains how he ate a dog for food, which is apparently the first line of the book, a bold opening if nothing else. High-Rise is brilliant and probably my favourite of Wheatley's films. It is a film that at times is sickening by the awful decadence and brutal violence that quickly breaks out amongst normally perfectly civilised people who live in what is supposed to be the perfect tower block. Two side notes for High-Rise, if you're rich and throw a party where the theme is to dress as eighteenth century French aristocrats you've only yourself to blame if the poorer people revolt against you and secondly there is an amazing cover of Abba's SOS by Portishead, an incredibly spooky rendition it suits the film perfectly.

Wheatley's third film was the one that was easiest to watch, perhaps because it was, broadly speaking, a comedy; Sightseers. The film was about a geeky couple going on a caravan holiday who ended up committing a string of violent murders. In this film it was not the violence that was hard to deal with it was the tragic quality of the lives of the two central characters, the sadness they endured, and this was before all the murdering started. And that is what bothers me about Mike Leigh films. Many people would probably wonder why I would include Mike Leigh with directors like Ben Wheatley, Nicolas Winding Refn and Darren Aronofsky, known for their violence and unusual subject matter. Leigh makes realistic down to earth comedies not thrillers or horror films. With Leigh it is not the violence, of which there is essentially none, but the tragedy. To be clear, Mike Leigh's films are usually masterpieces and always worth watching but he taps into the tragedy of everyday lives like no one else. The best two examples are Abigail's Party and Nuts In May, both comedies that I think are hilarious and will probably never ever watch again. Abigail's Party was part of Play For Today on the BBC and I think it was criminally irresponsible of them to of a public service broadcaster to put something so life crushing on television. Abigail's Party the story of a dinner party of middle-aged sort of middle-class people brimmed with unhappiness, bitterness and the horrible feelings people who supposedly love each other can have for one another.

Abigail's Party - a terrifying glimpse of England in the 1970s

As for Nuts In May I don't think there is a character in all of film and literature that compares to Roger Sloman's Keith for utter patheticness - a man constantly heaped with failure, frustration and humiliation. Ben Wheatley's Sightseers has been called Nuts In May with murders which is a good analogy. Nuts In May is about a couple going on a camping holiday and their weird middle-class pretensions, getting into arguments with farmers about pasteurised milk and debating how many times you should chew food. While Keith was the pathetic figure his partner was the irritatingly naive Candice Marie advocating the complete disbandment of the British army as an example to the rest of the world. Leigh's great skill is bringing such pathos and sadness to what are typically normal lives. Even Leigh's 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky about an eternally upbeat woman had moments of terrible sadness showing how no life, no matter how happy it is, is free of tragedy.

Candice Marie and Keith in Nuts In May

Ultimately I am happy that I watched all of these films and even if I don't watch them again they were brilliant enough the first time.

One Hit Wonders, Good Songs by Bands I Don't Like and Great Scenes In Not Great Movies

Spoiler Warning - spoilers for The Men Who Stare At Goats, As Good As It Gets, Superman Returns and X-Men: First Class


I've never understood people mocking one-hit wonders. I'm not talking about novelty songs or awful cash-in songs but genuinely good songs, but where the artist creating them had no other hits. Often artists referred to as one hit wonders have had long and successful careers and that one "hit" was their commercial high point, for example I've heard The Wannadies referred to as one-hit wonders, a band with a lot of really good albums but many people only know them for "The You and Me Song", a song that in my opinion is not even their best. But even if a one-hit wonder is the only good song a band has that is nothing to be ashamed of - hardly anyone at all has written a good song, most of the songs that have been written aren't good. It is incredibly hard to write a good song and there is no shame in that a person has only one song in them.

Big Fan by The Wannadies - better than You and Me Song

There are bands that I have complicated feelings for because undeniably they have one good song and I hate everything else they've ever done so they are very much one hit wonders individual to me. The two that immediately spring to mind are Courtney Love and My Chemical Romance. I've never liked Courtney Love's music, and have never liked her much as a person from my admittedly third hand information on her, but "Mono" is a great song and it is hard to admit that. I have listened to the whole album and don't like it and I never liked the stuff she did with her former band Hole.

I hate all of My Chemical Romance's songs, I hate the way they act, the way they present themselves but there is one song I like and I think that if I had known it was by them when I heard it my mind would have rejected it. When I was in university I went to a rock-punk-ska night at the student union called Get Your Skates On and while a lot of the music wasn't to my taste it was always fun. There was this one song called "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" and I found it quite catchy and I was stunned when I later learned who it was by. In my Stalinist history revisionism of my own cultural life I would very much like to throw that down the memory hole but I can't...it is a good song. I have broken some stuff down so much that I would say there is a five second part of a Kaiser Chiefs song I like but I don't like the whole song.

The frustratingly good Mono by Courtney Love

The term one-hit wonder is usually just used for songs, but you get one-hit wonder novelists or filmmakers, people who make one "good" thing and never manage it again. But as I think songs that are one hit wonders are often only the high point of a good career there are films that are good but have a single flash of brilliance. The Men Who Stare At Goats was a great book by Jon Ronson that was adapted into a good film starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. I enjoyed the film but there is one scene which is one of my favourite ever scenes. To explain; the film is about the US army trying to tap into special powers people might have - the ability to be invisible, to read minds, that sort of thing. When they look through their soldiers, however, they find few people who have minds open enough to explore these ideas, when they manage to find some candidates they are put under the charge of a genuine hippy soldier whose first order is for them to dance. One soldier, played by Clooney, explained how he didn't like to dance and the hippy soldier challenged him about this and well -

I love this scene, I think the director managed to capture something that is true for just about everyone - we don't allow ourselves to do the stuff we want to do because someone in the past told us it was wrong, for Clooney's character it's dancing and later in the film Clooney's character expressed his love for dancing. The film is good but flawed but this one scene made the entire film worthwhile.

As Good As It Gets is certainly an uneven film - although it did win Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress - but it has a couple of scenes that are very, very good. The first is when Greg Kinnear called Jack Nicholson an "absolute horror of a human being" which is one of my favourite insults ever, how do you come back from that? The second and better scene is the odd compliment that Jack Nicholson's character gave Helen Hunt's after he insulted how she is dressed. She insisted he compliment her upon which he started telling a long story about his OCD and what this meant for his life, culminating in him telling her, "You make me want to be a better man". It's hard to think of a better compliment to give someone.

There have been a lot of films about Superman, some are very good and some are terrible, and Superman Returns is generally lumped in with the bad ones. And I can see why, the film has a lot of problems, as my girlfriend Spooky Reading Girl pointed out there is hardly any time devoted to "Clark Kent" it''s all Superman, and Kevin Spacey is a bit over the top as Lex Luthor, but anyway I rather liked it. But that was all based on one scene. There is a point in the film when Lois Lane is covering a story about a space shuttle being launched off the back of a plane, the plane flies into the sky, the shuttle detaches and then fires it's rocket. Anyway, something goes wrong with the launch and the shuttle isn't disconnected from the plane meaning they're both going to crash. Superman shows up and surprisingly saves the day. That scene is brilliantly shot, for something not being real it actually looked real. I have never heard anyone else talk positively about this film or even just this scene.

Superman Returns - great scene bad film

Perhaps the most frustrating film for this is X-Men: First Class. On the whole I have enjoyed the X-Men series of films but there have been some bad ones. X-Men: First Class is half of a great film and half a very bad film. It's really easy to split it into the good and bad parts, the bits about Magneto are good and the bits not about Magneto are bad. The film was at first intended to be a Magneto origins story but was instead folded into a larger story about Charles Xavier starting his school and how he and Magento fell out. It helped that Magneto was played by one of the best actors going, Michael Fassbender but his story of vengeance across decades and what he would do to get that vengeance was very interesting. I couldn't care less about the largely boring group of students - the exception of course being Jennifer Lawrence - and their adventures. The idea of bringing in real historical events, the film is very much centred around the Cuban Missile Crisis worked as well and it could have been a great film.

Creating anything good is really hard and people should be proud of anything good they've made even if it's just a couple of minutes long.