http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 13 Aug 2004 06:46:15 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/13/064615.php Nick BarrettIt can be rewarding to come to a movie with no knowledge of what it's about and few preconceptions apart from an admiration for previous work by the same director. Especially when the film is far more challenging than you'd expected.Until the opening scene of 'Spider' (2002), though the very promising cast list was a huge clue, I wasn't sure that one of David Cronenberg's finest achievements would be set in England; a story told in a London rarely brought to the screen but immediately recognisable, particularly in the extensive part of the film that takes place in drab streets I often visited in my childhood. For a while, the plot foxed me completely. I found 'Spider' on the science fiction and horror shelves, but the guy of intriguing and eclectic tastes who runs the video store agreed that it belongs among the psychological dramas.A mumbling, shuffling Ralph Fiennes turns in an outstanding performance, from the moment he's the last man off the train, confused and half lost, as a schizophrenic released from a mental institution into a boarding hostel which serves as a halfway house for those who stand a chance of being reintegrated back into society. In the man's flashbacks, which don't take long to begin, Miranda Richardson is equally superb as his beloved mother, as an ageing, loud-mouthed tart in the pub down the corner, and -- sometimes -- as the stern woman who runs the hostel, mainly played by Lynn Redgrave. 'Spider' is a relentlessly grim murder mystery and the childhood (Bradley Hall, as good as the rest of the cast) nickname for the disturbed Dennis Cleg, who sees his father (Gabrielle Byrne) split his mother's skull with a spade when she finds him having sex at the allotments by the railway with Yvonne. The boy's mind is right off the rails when dad then brings home the tart who had drunkenly tormented the timid, quiet and friendless Spider by flashing a bare tit in the boy's face when he was sent to the pub by his mum to fetch his dad back for dinner. "I can't believe she done that!" shrieks one of Yvonne's girlfriends amid raucous laughter. That's an easy bit of the constantly colloquial English that would seem, understandably, to have bewildered a number of the Americans whose reviews I found at the IMDb when I had a look this morning. But why is the released Dennis so obsessed with the monstrous gasworks tank which is about all he can see out of the window from his miserable, crudely furnished room in the hostel? What is the code, if any, to the strange script Spider painstakingly uses with a pencil as he mumbles his memories, slowly and unreliably coming back to him, into his hidden notebook.To spare people who know no more than I did about 'Spider', the helpless voyeur fly on the wall throughout almost every recollected scene in the movie, I'll write nothing else of the character study. Watching this late at night left me telling myself, "Uggh! That was good, but I don't want to see it again." But after lying in the dark for a while and absorbing it, before my mind maybe went to work while I slept on it, I did. Now I knew what happens at the end, a second viewing was the only way fully to appreciate the skill Cronenberg exercised in filming a novelist's revision of his work. In an article at 'eye WEEKLY', without spoilers but with insight, Jason Anderson writes that unlike Cronenberg's "controversial adaptations of Crash and Naked Lunch, this movie had a screenwriter (Patrick McGrath, who adapted his 1990 novel) and an actor (Ralph Fiennes) long before it had a director."It took Anderson's piece (and a sensible word from a Québecois writer, 'man-man-dot-org,' who notes that "the regular IMDB approach of watch-a-movie-write-a-review has done Spider a grave disservice") to remind me to look twice before leaping in.'Spider' is one of the Canadian director's slowest, darkest and saddest films, much more mature than 'The Dead Zone', which took me by surprise given an unpromising premise. I would guess, however, that much of the credit for the detailed rightness in Cronenberg's vision of the unhappier parts of the Britain I grew up in -- those dreary clothes, the dads with their allotments and sheds, the language and life of the poorer London streets -- goes to McGrath and to Fiennes and others in the adult cast. I'm glad I was in a cheerful mood when 'Spider' went into the DVD player last night, because it's a demanding film, close to exhausting first time round, before it starts to work on you, making a different contribution to your perceptions of "reality" from 'eXistenZ' but one which is also richly worthwhile. Video18607@blogcritics.org Fri, 13 Aug 2004 06:46:15 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/25/102530.php Nick BarrettOf all the places an "old European" would like to visit in such a vast and varied country as the United States, Los Angeles must be close to the bottom of my list. The notion of a big urban sprawl where an automobile is held to be almost indispensable appals me and the proximity to the world's dominant industrial dream factory gives me the shivers. Yet such a city, seen as backdrop -- and occasionally subject matter -- of countless feature films and documentaries and as recounted by American friends, exercises a magnetic fascination and sometimes future-minded appeal. Barely three years after the Los Angeles race riots (Wikipedia) set parts of the town ablaze and claimed at least 50 lives, it became the place where Kathryn Bigelow and her movie team got 20,000 people to the Millennium rave party that became the setting for the last part of an astonishing and provocative film.In 1995, 'Strange Days' was a box office disaster in the States and pulled in a mere 160,000 people when it was released here in France. This much "underrated" movie is, however, being rehabilitated in well-deserved terms by some users at the iMDB.In a racially explosive city where the police use armoured cars and tanks as well as riot gear, sacked LA cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has turned seedy, persuasive dealer in "virtual reality" wire tapes, or clips which are no games. These clips are recordings taken from the cerebral cortex, enabling the voyeur customer to get inside the head of somebody else and share their experience, emotions and memories. Sex is, of course, a hot commodity. At the nastiest, foulest end of the market -- a place where Nero refuses to go on account of the few ethical values he has left -- "snuff" recordings are hotter still. Some wire tape clients get a hell of a kick out of the direct experience of violent death, taken from the head of murderer or victim, and, most appallingly, in the case of the well-connected killer who proves extremely dangerous to Nero and his friends, both.'Strange Days,' dark, racy and brutal from the opening sequence (which is one of these "snuff" recordings), becomes a "trust nobody" movie from the moment Nero gets hold of a clip in which two police officers cold-bloodedly execute one of America's top black radical militants. This is December 30-31, 1999, but might it just be a not too distant tomorrow? A Los Angeles almost torn apart by casual crime and greed is gearing up for the biggest New Year's Eve party it has ever seen. Nero, with a clip which could trigger an all-out street war, is also landed with the rape and murder of a prostitute to investigate, and an ex-girlfriend turned star nightclub singer (Juliette Lewis) who is probably going to get killed. But Faith is no longer in love with him and really not interested in his crazy rescue efforts, since her career and her sex life are now a matter for ruthless music producer Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). In all this bloody mess, Nero reckons there are just two people he might be able to count on, his old buddy Max (Tom Sizemore) and wealthy men's chauffeur, bodyguard and martial arts expert "Mace" (Angela Bassett).There you have a few elements of a twisted and demanding plot from no less a movie writer and maker than James Cameron (iMDB), who for a few years shared his life with gifted painter turned hard-assed film director Bigelow. What these two achieved in 'Strange Days' (Cameron didn't want credit for his considerable hand in making the film, including developing the light prototype camera needed for the seamless wire-tape scenes) is, at nearly two and a half hours, apparently too long and convoluted for some. But others speak of it in the same breath as Ridley Scott's sci-fi masterpiece, 'Blade Runner.'The acting runs from good to first-rate. Bassett and Fiennes turn in two of the best performances of their careers. "Mace" hangs on to her morals and proves as sensitive as she is a kick-ass bodyguard. Nero is another complicated character, a likeable, quick-witted, untrustworthy and screwed-up scumbag who has to face up to the harsh truth that he is one of his own worst enemies. The plot is tense, socially interesting and emotive. To the several people, again at the iMDB, who don't seem able to articulate their reasons for hating this film and calling it "crap", I imagine it seems subversive and anti-American -- the latter it isn't -- particularly in today's political climate. The film takes on high racial tensions, crime, voyeur consumerism, corruption and unrequited love. The music is loud, contemporary and will be adored by the Kid. Peter Gabriel's in there, along with Marilyn Manson, P.J. Harvey and Deep Forest. It's an eclectic soundtrack, from a bit of New Age to heavy rap and chunks of metal. The visuals -- camerawork, artwork and atmosphere -- are so relentlessly good that I think some critics have concentrated too much on the technology of the medium rather than the film's several messages, which got enough of my neurons firing to make me want to watch 'Strange Days' again soon.Coming just a night after I belatedly discovered 'eXistenZ' and that movie's very different take on "giving the 'virtual reality' punters what they want", 'Strange Days' proved a solid, exciting meal after an excellent entrée for the senses. Now, what on earth -- or off it for a change -- am I going to have for dessert? Video17823@blogcritics.org Sun, 25 Jul 2004 10:25:30 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/06/28/172100.php Nick BarrettThe chill, bleak morning Clément Mathieu arrives to take up his post as class supervisor at a private boarding school lost in the countryside, a small boy is waiting just inside the locked iron gates. Every Saturday, he hopes his father will finally come for him. Every other day is a Saturday in the child's mind, but his parents are dead. "Action. Reaction!" Each crime brings its punishment, even when the offences lie purely in troubled adolescent heads and hearts confined largely to dully furnished classrooms and spartan dormitories. The man Clément is replacing shows him an armful of surgical stitches. The stab wound was the reaction of the boy from whom he confiscated a packet of cigarettes. While the response to the assault is short of police intervention, the culprit spends much of his time in the lock-up or doing menial chores. Clément, a onetime music teacher and discreet amateur composer superbly played by Gérard Jugnot, is set straight to work with the benefit of grim good luck wishes, a shortlist of names of the most rebellious boys and a sour introduction to the despotic headmaster of the school.A modest new masterpiece of French cinema begins with bad news and a light classical waltz in modern New York, but the real story is set in the Auvergne of 1949, when much of France remained traumatised by enemy occupation and war. On the remarkable official site of 'Les Choristes' (Fr.), director Christophe Barratier outlines the then prevailing psychology of child reform, which is certainly "disturbing today", adding that "as in all periods of crisis, parents had other priorities ahead of educating their children." Such methods of "social reinsertion" (a term still employed but as little practised or thought out in some post-conflict countries in our time) prevailed well into the 1960s, along with much of the austerity Jugnot, like me, remembers from his own schooldays, the everlasting smell of chalk dust and the "mouldy memories".With a solid supporting adult cast, Jugnot, the teenagers and the music they come to make together are the real stars of this flawlessly paced and deeply heart-warming movie. The score is partly the original work of Bruno Coulais (Amazon.fr only for the soundtrack at present), who won fame when he composed the music for such outstanding and varied achievements as 'Himalaya' (1999) and 'Le Peuple Migratoire' ('Winged Migration,' 2001) . In his début as director for the general public, Barratier reveals another considerable talent by himself contributing two of the key songs performed by the chorale, in reality the Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc. The 12-year-old lad from this ensemble based near Lyon whose phenomenal voice convinced film-maker and producers alike that they could have a small miracle on their hands was Jean-Baptiste Maunier. He also landed the difficult child star role of Pierre Morhange, whom we first meet some 50 years later as one of the world's most acclaimed orchestral conductors.From half-remembered trailers, I'd wrongly expected a tale of the hard-won triumph of shared music-making over life's adversities on a par with the well-earned box-office success of the bitter-sweet 'Brassed Off' (1996, IMDb), the Yorkshire mining band tragi-comedy of ruptured families and the impact of Britain's Thatcher-ruled years when so-called "liberal capitalism" meant get rich quick for the few, along with everybody else for themselves in the failed vision of a classless society. Had he set his own film in contemporary France, Barratier, it turns out, might have set it in the urban ghettos of some inner cities and hopeless suburbs. Then we could have got something like 'Music of the Heart' (1999, IMDb), whose syrupy title might have made me miss Meryl Streep's striking teacher's struggle to bring the violin and orchestral discipline to Harlem street kids. But in 'Les Choristes', for all the attention to telling details of hard times, politics and most aspects of family life are kept well out of the picture, with the exception of the relationship between Morhange and his working single mother, Clément's disappointment in his own love-life and the paternal affection he introduces, along with the redemptive strength of music, to an institution run like a prison camp.On screen in France since March, the film co-written by Barratier and Philippe Lopes-Curval suffers no lack of drama in a taut plot, where Clément's humanist principles encounter many obstacles. When headmaster Rachin (François Berléand) acts on his initial misgivings about the whole absurd enterprise of trying to bring a team spirit and a shared passion to lost adolescent misfits for whom he has no love but a sliding scale of contempt, the chorale becomes an explicit act of resistance and Clément discovers some unexpected allies. The language of music infuses the narrative and some formidable camera and lighting work ranging from abrupt allegro to seamless successions of broad-measured slow movements with a faultless coherence. To shoot successful winter scenes in last summer's heat wave must have been tough enough for all involved, but such skilled visual mastery of a transition from metronome monotony to a summer coda is more remarkable still. Jugnot and others, including Berléand as erratically obsequious bully, bring some highly comic, often wordless gracenotes to the unfolding of the story. Which, all told, is one vast flashback. A flashback in Morhange's memory, where he comes to recognise his lifelong career as the repayment of a debt to a hero unsung for decades. A man for whom music, like his compassion, was one of the fruits of love.It's been a long while since I've watched and listened to a story where when the final credits had rolled, I felt quite ready to see the film and hear more all over again. At once. I couldn't. But I shall and 'Les Choristes' -- particularly as a writer-director's first -- takes an easy 8.5/10. A major box-office success at home, this is a movie worthy of international attention. Video16899@blogcritics.org Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:21:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/04/29/153615.php Nick BarrettSF writer Charlie Stross -- who's rightly proud to have been shortlisted for a Hugo (The Herald) and must today merit a blog award for the shortest entry (after "suffering for your art") -- has beaten me to my noun. "Get them, read them, think about current politics in the middle east, feel your head explode. NB: contains raw, undiluted anger. May cause burns to mucous membranes. Not to be taken internally." Anger. A step ahead of me (eyes to the right at his place for the "Dead Trees"), Charlie's given us a brief review of 'Felaheen', the "capstone" to Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 'Arabesk' trilogy. 'Effendi' (paperback 2003) is also an angry book, but the anger's neither raw nor undiluted. The crime thriller builds up a mighty head of steam, but subtly holds both the emotion and the reader in check until the climax in court. Back in El Iskandyria, the astute Ashraf al-Mansur has become chief of detectives, his first case a multiple murder mystery. Since Raf is a glutton for trouble, the man he's investigating is Zara's dad, his would-be father-in-law, Hamzah Quintrimala. Since 'Pashazade: The First Arabesk' did much of the scene-setting (as did I in my review of it here and at my place last September), Grimwood is more sparing with his fine brushstrokes for the city itself and even stronger on character, to equally potent effect and with as many twists, turns and tributaries as the Nile. "'Safety off,' said the gun. Stood beside Sergeant Ka, Zac said nothing. He'd spoken little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he talked even less . . . Ka thought that strange, because Zac's sister Ruth had also said little from the time she'd been captured to the moment she died. But now she talked so much that Ka couldn't concentrate on watching the growling trucks that rolled across the scrub towards him. 'Distance?' 'Half a click and closing . . .' Status and range. That was all the plastic H&K/cw could manage. It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the boy with the bone cross, feather amulet and boots several times too big didn't know why the manufacturer had bothered." This is not Isk. This is Sudan. 'Effendi: The Second Arabesk' is no more sci-fi or conventional crime thriller than 'Pashazade' was. And Grimwood's alternative today's world is no fantasy heaven and hell. Hence the anger: a tightly controlled rage laser-sighted in sparse but very telling prose, with wit, lightning humour and compassion, at some of the headline horror targets of our own First and Third Worlds. Like, just for instance, the use of child soldiers and the manipulation of "terrorism" in the affairs of state. In fewer than 400 pages, Grimwood takes a scalpel to some of the worst aspects of a modern Africa instantly recognisable to anybody genuinely familiar with the continent. That he can balance this against one or two of Africa's best features, write sexily about sex and make you smile in the process is considerably to his credit. Books15223@blogcritics.org Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:36:15 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/03/13/160015.php Nick BarrettWe were going to catch 'Big Fish' this weekend, me and the Kid, but got drawn instead into a long ramble of a film. Such a winding trail, indeed, that I cheat: "A gripping, supernatural thriller that taps into the turbulent nature of past, present and future. When a young man (called Evan) learns he can change the nature of his painful life by replacing his memories, he accidentally transforms the lives of everyone he holds most dear -- with chilling consequences. As his new existence spirals dangerously out of control, he races to discover the single event from his past that will save his life and reunite him with his one true love."Hmm. "Races" is scarcely the word for 'The Butterfly Effect'! That was the "official" synopsis. I'd only seen one write-up before we went in, had never heard of its star Ashton Kutcher before (apparently he usually does comedy), and was led to expect a moderately interesting sci-fi drama. Fiction it certainly was, by the sloppy bucketful, in a series of episodes (those transformations) of varying interest which had me coming out hopping for a pee, as if we'd just sat without a break through so many episodes of a mystery B-series for TV that I lost count. Science it most certainly wasn't. The premise, you are kindly reminded at the outset, is the famous chaos theory one coined by Edward Lorenz in 1963 -- Greg Rae explains chaos (imho) -- and developed in 1972 for a talk on 'Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?'The tornadoes triggered when Evan tampers with time involve all kinds of alternatives for his one true love (Amy Smart), including plenty of sex, violence, drugs and rock'n'roll, and problems of varying sizes for everybody else, including his mother (Melora Walters). Mum gets worried early on when Evan's teacher asks the class to show her what they'd like to be when they grow up and our seven-year-old hero hands in a picture of a psychopathic killer: one the poor boy has no recollection of drawing. From there on in, the plot goes to places which are sometimes the fruit, to be fair, of remarkably lively imaginations. Marianne buried her face in my shoulder only once, and when I remarked on this later, she said she had shut her eyes rather more often (in Britain, it will be released with a R-15, in Canada it's an 18A, says the IMDb, but for the French it's R-12). The acting, at all ages, is consistent and solid, the subject matter includes some of the nastier aspects of life we now talk about openly, such as paedophilia, and writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber seemed so keen to get several messages across that they forgot that the plot -- and the science -- should at least make sense!I didn't find 'The Butterfly Effect' "achingly dull", as one of the unkinder IMDB reviewers thought, but it dropped off my credibility scale well under halfway through and only stopped me escaping to the loo before the end because some of the characters sustained my interest even when I was otherwise bored or mildly appalled. Without going into gore, some of the clichés the movie fails to avoid are very unpleasant, but they are clichés of the kind that makes life itself a horrible place sometimes. It's a film I'll remember, for certain episodes, and has some amusing moments as well, but the "serious social issues" the Kid and I will be talking about in its wake were in the right places at the wrong time in the wrong way. She enjoyed it, but hasn't rated it yet. For a whole that turned out to be so much less than some of its parts, I can't manage more than a 3.5/10, even for effort. 'The Butterfly Effect' does try very hard to succeed, and maybe that's half the problem. It makes me want to be more generous to it. That prolific 'unemployed critic (IMDb)' who didn't like it at all -- though many did, including Michelle Mauriere right here at BC -- suggests that "the similarly themed 2001 film 'Donnie Darko' is a much better take on the time bending mysteries of the brain". If the rotten tomatoes are anything to go by, that looks like a sound point. Video13685@blogcritics.org Sat, 13 Mar 2004 16:00:15 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/03/08/162915.php Nick Barrett(Published at my place as 'Sounds great (iii): with 'Sarac'h', a Breton takes on the world'. "Sounds great" since I thought it was about time I started giving a category to the music reviews...)Unlike the Kid, her mum and large numbers of my friends and workmates, I scarcely know Brittany and have only set foot there twice, though it's one of the nearest parts of France to Paris that could almost be a different country. But Marianne loves its legends and has told me several stories which are echoed in old tales I knew from the south-western part of la Grande-Bretagne, my native side of the water.Good Breton music was, until the late 80s at least, a feature of my corner of town, since that part of the country is served by trains from Montparnasse and some of the streets around the large southern Paris station acquired Breton "settlers", bars, shops and clubs. Apart from the many crêperies still to be found today, most of that has disappeared in less than two decades.All honour, then, to Denez Prigent, a Breton musician from northern Finistère who first learnt a traditional and difficult a capella narrative style, known as gwerzioù, from his grandmother as a boy in the 1960s and has gone on to captivate people in Paris, the nation and recently, other parts of Europe, with some increasingly original and wonderful albums.Like his internationally renowned compatriot Alan Stivell (Fr., Eng. and Breton), Denez believes that Breton musical traditions are best upheld and maintained by reviving them with a leap across barriers and venturing into some bold juxtapositions and harmonies of style.His latest CD, Sarac'h' (Oct 2003, Barclay, Amazon Fr.), is proof that "he who dares -- sometimes -- wins". And, surprise, it's part of my ongoing exploration of the voices of women too. In this instance, those of Lisa Gerrard ('Immortal Memory' and ex-Dead Can Dance), Gaelic stunner Karen Matheson ... and Bulgaria's Yanka Rupkina as well as fellow Breton Louise Ebrei. This mixture works. Admirably and beautifully. And so does Prigent's call on musicians as diverse as Nabil Khalidi from Morocco, with his oud, or lute, Latif Khan playing Indian tabla drums and Marcel Aubé on both the guitar-like north African gembri and the Chinese violin in the accompaniments, alongside more customary instruments and some carefully dosed electronica. The recording is of spectacularly high quality and the CD's lavish presentation in little book form original. Some of the songs are on traditional, story-telling bardic themes, with unusual excursions -- 'La Gwerz de Kiev' on famine in Ukraine, 'Geotenn ar marz' on genetically modified crops -- and I've no idea what others are about, since not all the lyrics are translated and I don't understand Breton. In an interview I've just found at M La Music (Fr.), Denez explains: "...I only translated what can be translated, because not everything is, like rhyme and humour. It's pretty difficult to translate a gwerz into French." Not that it matters. Music is a language all its own. Though one French reviewer comments that if you have only just one album of Breton music, make it 'Sarac'h', I don't hear that myself. Breton it may be in origin and tradition, but the only possible pigeon-hole for this CD is "world music". It's that broad in its scope. "Sarac'h" apparently means the rustling of the breeze in leaves. And there's a Ridley Scott connection. Prigent features on the soundtrack of 'Black Hawk Down', while we have Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer to thank for the score to 'Gladiator'. Music13514@blogcritics.org Mon, 8 Mar 2004 16:29:15 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/29/135745.php Nick BarrettNoting my tastes, my friend Stuart recently returned from England and thrust his copy of 'We' into my hand to fill one of the holes in my reading. Yevgeny Zamyatin's short novel, written in the immediate aftermath of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, is the grandfather of all 20th-century science fiction dystopias and remains immensely readable almost 83 years after he penned it. "A dystopia is any society considered to be undesirable, for any of a number of reasons. The term was coined as a converse to a Utopia, and is most usually used to refer to a fictional (often near-future) society where current social trends are taken to nightmarish extremes," the superb Wikipedia informs us.The ordinary narrator of 'We' is D-503, a contented Number in the perfect OneState, whose citizens live and work their mathematically ordered 26th-century existences under the benevolent rule of the 'Benefactor', watched over by the Guardians. Nobody has or needs names in OneState, a monumental and proud social collective living in glass and steel buildings protected from the chaos of an inhuman, natural world which lies beyond the Green Wall, constructed in the aftermath of a devastating 200 Years War. D-503, like Zamyatin himself, is a mathematician and engineer, the builder of "the glass, the electric, the fire-breathing INTEGRAL," a spaceship due for imminent lift-off "to place the beneficial yoke of reason round the necks of the unknown beings who inhabit other planets -- still living, it may be, in the primitive state known as freedom."This tightly written tale -- not much more than 200 pages long in Clarence Brown's 1993 translation published in Penguin Twentieth Century Classics (Amazon UK) -- is hard to read with a fresh eye when you come to it after digesting the dystopian novels and films it directly inspired or has influenced, from George Orwell's '1984' to Kurt Wimmer's 'Equilibrium' (2002; IMDb, reviewed last July). While 'We' retains all its relevance when it comes to humanity's pursuit of happiness and as a satirical critique of planning for a perfect society, it is also, as Brown points out in an admirable and witty introduction, very much a work of its time. "I suddenly recalled," D-503 notes in his 'Record Two', "a picture in the museum: one of the avenues they had back then, after twenty centuries -- a stunningly garish, mixed-up crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colours, birds . . . And they say it was really like that. It could have been like that. It all struck me as so unlikely, so idiotic, that I couldn't help it, I burst out laughing. And suddenly there was an echo, laughter, from the right. I turned. Before my eyes were teeth -- white, uncommonly white, sharp teeth -- and a woman's face that I didn't know. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'but the way you were looking at everything, it was inspired, as if you were some god out of myth on the seventh day of creation. I think you believe you created me, too -- you and nobody else. I'm very flattered.' All this with a straight face." D-503 gets confused from this very first encounter with I-330. D-503 is destined to become totally infatuated with I-330. D-503 is soon even going to need sick notes so he can see I-330 outside his allocated Personal Hours and her part in his Table of Sex Days. His own brief notes for unknown readers are already becoming sick, disjointed. And I-330 is dangerous, she teases D-503's previously dormant imagination, erupts into his dreams. I-330 is a rebel. Worse, she is not alone and she has designs on D-503 and the INTEGRAL. While Zamyatin's Numbers are thinly developed as characters, serving mainly as vehicles for ideas, I-330 is a striking creation from a Russian naval engineer who served in Britain for two years during World War I. He must have assimilated notions of the women's liberation movement taking off in England's rigid post-Victorian society before returning to a homeland where he was supportive of the Marxist revolution. I-330 is a courageous, free-thinking, sexually adventurous leader and breaker of barriers. She is viscerally opposed to the workings of the Benefactor, in whom it is much easier to see Lenin and notions of perfectibility through scientific socialism than the Big Brother of '1984'.Orwell, and Aldous Huxley in 'Brave New World', were respectively writing just after (1948) and before (1931) the terrifying manifestations of a new totalitarianism and a global confrontation of ideologies in the last century's total war. From this perspective, I found 'We' far less of a political novel than those it has inspired. Unlike some of those offspring, OneState is not evidently derived from any one nation of Zamyatin's day, but the parallels with the regulated lives many of us live in the big cities of today's "developed world" become more pertinent with each passing decade as nature is driven out of the metropolis. Zamyatin wrote the book as no enemy of the Soviet State, though it was swiftly perceived that way and went unpublished in any faithful rendition of his original text in Russia itself until 1988, 57 years after Stalin allowed him in exile in Paris, disabused by the absence of creative outlets and the conformity of Soviet thought. 'We' is instead an entertaining, sometimes funny and seminal work of science fiction, where the core of social satire lies in a simple arithmetical challenge I-330 puts to D-503 as the tale nears its climax. Zamyatin's biographers tell us he much admired another of the first great "sci-fi writers", H.G. Wells, whose influence is evident, and the naïf D-503 also has a little in common with Voltaire's wide-eyed Candide until he finds himself increasingly distanced from a society founded on a scientific ideal.In our 21st-century societies, scientific thinking has to many minds dethroned traditional religious notions. Developments in medicine and nanotechnology have given a new twist to the concept of human perfectibility as a taming of the genetic "freedom" exercised in the evolution of the species to its current point. I found 'We' a particularly stimulating read in the immediate wake of some catching up on current thinking in genetics and biology, most especially the conclusion that any further evolution of Homo sapiens -- if we avoid rendering our world uninhabitable first -- will be determined primarily by our technologies, medical science and socio-cultural achievements. Beyond the Marxist model Zamyatin adopted, beyond the manic consumer capitalism of our day, the concepts of utopia and dystopia have assumed a new relevance, drawing on developments scarcely conceivable until they began happening in the latter half of the 20th century. According to the cover of the British edition, one of my blogheroines, the wide-ranging writer Ursula K. Le Guin (her site), described 'We' as "the best single work of science fiction yet written". Ever wary of superlatives, I'd simply rate it among the best SF books I've yet read. If this were to be an essay of the order of Patrick Parrinder's 'Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells' (Science Fiction Studies, 1973), I would digress into a similar piece contrasting 'We' with the book I lent Stuart in exchange, Le Guin's own 'The Dispossessed' (1974). In that profoundly influential novel of ideas, much richer in character, the physicist hero Shevek declares: "Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild walls." With that, he could be Zamyatin speaking.Brown, in explaining the chequered history of 'We', its various renditions, and the need for his new translation, says that Zamyatin regarded the book -- which some might describe as a mere "novella" alongside the hefty, often multi-volume tomes of contemporary science fiction -- as his most light-hearted and most serious work. It's a light and swift read, that's for sure. But it delivers a subtle and serious message of the kind you could be thinking about for months. ________(The 1993 translation of 'We' reviewed here and at my place stands alongside another recent one by Mirra Ginsburg, also listed below. The latter is said to be easier to obtain in the United States, but one Amazon reviewer notes that it may not be the best. Not having seen it, I couldn't say.) Books13248@blogcritics.org Sun, 29 Feb 2004 13:57:45 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/19/131815.php Nick BarrettFor a book called 'Permanence' (paperback, March 2003), it's all change in Karl Schroeder's first venture into space opera, crammed with very bright ideas, races against time and another go at one of science fiction's big questions: if we're not alone, how come space isn't teeming with civilisations? Most of them got wiped out. Scientist Laurent Herat has spent much of his life studying the ruins of alien cultures, with his assistant Michael Besquith, who also happens to be an undercover Neo-Shinto monk. Humanity has populated vast tracts of what's out there, but the only surviving alien species encountered are totally uninterested in contact, let alone cooperation.Rue Cassels, daring her valiant getaway from an abusive brother and an appalling aunt on a backward mining station, strikes lucky with a major discovery on her way to the nearest planet around the dwarf star that is all she has known for a sun. She stakes a salvage claim to an abandoned, silent "cycler", one of the vast and slow vessels that link the "halo" worlds. Schroeder's threads begin to draw together, the military is swiftly involved, and Rue and an unexpected benefactor in her family circle are caught in a battle to gain and keep control of her starship and a struggle between the Cycler Compact and the Rights Economy of the "lit" worlds, who have faster-than-light travel. The Rights Economy has driven religion underground, including the non-theistic kind, and masters nanotechnology, one of the key ideas in Schroeder's equally rich and dense debut novel, 'Ventus' (reviewed on my blog last June). In 'Permanence', however, nano is largely about labelling, price, payment and enforcement. The Cycler Compact, by contrast, relies on trade in goods, ideas and information. At the cost of a more Manichean development of his characters -- pretty clear-cut heros and villains -- than in the first book, Karl develops a deft political subtext as fitting for our own times as it is for his far future. Mostly he keeps it under the surface.A different kind of writing needs deciphering on Jentry's Envy, the name Rue takes from her brother for the ship that could propel her into the elite ranks of the Cycler Captains. The scientists come into their own with this challenge, not just the experts in xenobiology and linguistics, but a bunch of brains, set to be roped, sometimes kicking and rebelling, into Schroeder's imaginative variations on the tug of war between fascinating theory and fearsome technological application. Jentry's Envy is alien. It will take Rue's quick wits and tough guts, Herat's experience and Mike's grasp of alien psychology -- which has plunged him deep into a kind of "dark night of the soul" as a result of his efforts to capture the "kami" (or recorded essences) of otherness -- to unravel the cycler's secrets. It could also take something even harder to obtain: alien help. In a vast void of indifference.For all that's spelled out in too much black and white, Schroeder's characters are mostly convincing and real, including the kind of resourceful, clever, sometimes funny and brave people you'd like to be able to count on as friends in times of crisis. Herat's a great one for explaining things; perhaps there's an excess of explanation and exploration of the wildest ideas to please readers who don't like the arias overly digressive in their space operas. Some of the ensemble "set pieces" are fantastic writing: a celebratory party in a monastery which turns into a high-stakes power game, the final and furious showdown... The many changes of scenery are generally smooth and sometimes surprising, the big cast includes murderers, rebels, adventurers, the monastic community that upholds the Cycler Compact's concepts of "permanence", marines and even not-so-little green men. There are hidden treasures, high tech and underhand behaviour, cunning twists on some more recent astronomical discoveries -- including brown dwarfs -- and a new look at the old idea of doomsday weaponry. Oh, and there's a love story.'Permanence' is a very different novel from 'Ventus', and that, for all its minor flaws, is one of its strongest merits. Not one to let go of good ideas, the Canadian writer also likes to develop them at his own place, as shown in his pursuit of "inscape" (Works of Karl Schroeder). With luck, he'll find time for a new novel. Books12931@blogcritics.org Thu, 19 Feb 2004 13:18:15 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/18/152100.php Nick BarrettAs Westerns go, apart from two or three classics which are "ancient" already, I enjoy what's offbeat, original and shot with a really attentive eye to the wild, so 'Blueberry' was just my kind of film. Where the "cinéma fantastique" goes, Jan Kounen's movie went a long way, far more interesting than many, but sometimes much too dependent on the special effects to get near the heart of shamanism and journeys of initiation.The big French film to start the year brings a generally excellent international cast to a tale borrowed from a comic strip hero, with Vincent Kassel in his strongest starring role to date as the small town marshal from Louisiana who has to confront a savage killer at the same time as his own past, his fears and a mind scar left by the violent death of a prostitute. The sense of new frontiers on the edge of what passes for "civilisation", both physical and spiritual, pervades the whole film, which has a good number of strong scenes in town (Palamito, with entertaining nods in the direction of Western clichés, the tense saloon, a noisy defenestration, booze and shootouts), and among the Indians and in the desert and the sacred mountains where the climax of Blueberry's journeys takes place. Before making 'Blueberry', which strays a long way from the character created by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Kounen spent months with the Tarahumara people in Mexico and pursued his interest in shamanism into the Amazonian forest. The movie was shot in Spain, Mexico and France: the 'Blueberry' site (Fr. and Eng.) tells something of the locations, while nature itself plays an important role in the story.Somebody who saw 'Blueberry' a few days ago told me it had "a touch of intelligent spaghetti Western meets Lara Croft" and I kind of see what she meant, though it mines a much deeper vein than both. Kounen's 'Dobermann' (1997; IMDb) was a violent like-it-or-loathe-it first venture beyond stylish shorts and videoclips. I didn't enjoy it myself, but saw signs of a talent with the potential of a Luc Besson or a Matthieu Kossevitz. Here, the director asks a great more of his cast and it pays off. Kassel, thin-faced, tired and clever, is perfect for the title part and carries much of the film on his back, along with New Zealand-born Temuera Morrison as his Indian friend Rumi, who becomes a shaman. In secondary roles, I enjoyed Michael Madsen as the brutal Wallace Blount -- who doesn't kill, as he puts it, Indians and other "animals" -- and Eddie Izzard as the Prussian geologist and adventurer Prosit. As the girl, Juliette Lewis gives more than I've seen before. After coming out of it this afternoon, I read a good interview in 'L'Ecran Fantastique' (construction site for now; Fr.) where Kassel explained how deeply he got into the role and the difficulties of some of the location shooting. And it shows.For me, the climax of the film, much written about and illustrated in the French cinema magazines, was a relatively successful failure, diverting to watch but as incapable as any other attempt I've seen of bringing inner voyage or acid trip to the screen. Minor "confession": in younger days, I experimented, as people then called it, with LSD, magic mushrooms and the like, but have read far too much of the hard psychology and neurobiology of all that since to be contented with anybody's attempts to convey hallucinogenic experience on celluloid. You might enjoy the way Kounen tries it if you're into South American Indian art and snakes ... or you might yawn through it. It's hard to imagine how 'Blueberry', released in France on February 11, will go down in the United States. It deserves to do well, but it's not very much like anything else I've seen to date. 7/10 in my book. Video12893@blogcritics.org Wed, 18 Feb 2004 15:21:00 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/08/061930.php Nick BarrettIf you want a novel of near-future politico-scientific speculation, ablaze with mind-stretching ideas and taut with the tension of total disaster in the making, then Stel Pavlou's 'Decipher' (2001, Simon & Schuster; Pocket Books, 2002, Amazon UK) is it. The action begins in savage weather aboard the 'Red Osprey', an energy giant's exploration vessel in the Ross Sea off Antarctica, where a tough team from Rola Corp. and some queasier scientists are after oil reserves. Yes, this kind of research is illegal and wicked. We know all about the last great wilderness, the provisions and bans of the Antarctic Treaty. The earth's vast southern icecap is a place where you can't shit without tanking the stuff up and taking it home for disposal. And nobody owns it. But as Pavlou points out in a brief preface starting in 1960, the Treaty "guaranteed that even if mankind had any desire to rid itself of the Seven Deadly Sins, Greed had been assured of a place in our hearts by virtue of time. By writing it down on a piece of paper and parading it as law and belief, Greed could be resurrected at a moment's notice. That was the beauty of the written word." However, it's not oil they strike with Rola Corp.'s depth node sunk from 'Red Osprey'. It's some weird rock, Carbon 60, and it's got incomprehensible writing on it.Roll on Dr Richard Scott, linguist extraordinaire, expert in the origins of language, bane of the Bible Belt because he explodes the very foundations of the Christian faith with his knowledge of comparative religion and mythologies. Scott is a kind of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade rolled into one and doing his thing in 2012. But with the United States on the verge of an energy resources war with China, the reliable old sun suddenly behaving so dangerously strangely that humanity's own recent and considerable contribution to global warming is among the least of our worries, and more bizarre discoveries being made in places as distant as the Amazon and Egypt, Scott's needed to take on something new. So are Jon Hackett, nuclear physicist, Sarah Kelsey, leading geologist, engineer Ralph Matheson and a few others who who have to join an uneasy alliance of scientists, the military and Rola Corp. to find that they have about a week to save the world.Pavlou is good. His first novel rivets the attention for nearly 800 (paperback) pages, draws richly on two of the oldest and most widespread myths known to humanity -- the Flood and notions of Atlantis -- and abounds with wit and ideas. But even when I finished it, I still wasn't sure whether my imagination had just absorbed a large chunk of encyclopaedia or a blockbuster film script to which the likes of James Cameron, Ridley Scott or even the grown-up Steven Spielberg might do justice, given a lot of money and some staggering but discreet special effects. The man does write movies. The year 'Decipher' came out, so did 'The 51st State', which the Liverpool University graduate both wrote and co-produced, to mixed crits. And it shows in the book, where the visual imagery is big-screen stuff, right up to its climax beneath the ice, but the characters are mostly not filled out: brilliant, funny, and sometimes devious and dangerous, but stereotypes nevertheless. This didn't bother me, since I was hooked. What did, however, was the number of times Pavlou puts his people in the most appalling situations and they respond in the most unlikely of ways. By chattering, relentlessly. Experience has taught me that when you're being shot at, for example, you don't chunter on as if you're in some cosy scientific conference. I don't know how I'd react if I encountered something as monstrous as a Golem, but I doubt that I'd resort to verbal pyrotechnics. Stel does seem vaguely aware of this flaw! At one point, a character does a nice parody of Scott, who is by far the worst offender.The trouble is that while this Britannica meets Hollywood approach pads the book out and can beggar belief while interfering with the action, what the characters have to say is often interesting. John Howard takes Pavlou to task in a nice exercise in comparative review: 'On Writing and Decipher' (Walden East). I agree with Howard that he sometimes crams too much in "as if Pavlou wasn't sure that he'd ever be able to write another novel", but John misses the point in calling the four-page bibliography at the end a "tad pretentious". Had he looked more closely, he would have noticed that the works listed include: Matheson, Ralph K., Ecological Controls in Oil Production, USC Press, San Francisco, 2009 and Scott, Richard, Tales of the Deluge: A Global Report on Cultural Self-Replicating Genesis Myths, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2008.Stel's sense of humour invariably steps in each time he goes right over the top. This redeems the dull bits. And I'll read his next book. Books12511@blogcritics.org Sun, 8 Feb 2004 06:19:30 EST