The Rustle of Letters in the Dark…

In 1936 the GPO (General Post Office) film unit made a 25 minute documentary about one of the LMS Mail trains on its overnight run from London to Glasgow. The film is famous now not simply for the quality of its cinematography (which is genuinely superb) but for its closing sequence, in which the score, commissioned of Benjamin Britten, is overlaid with the poem written for the film by W.H. Auden. The poem now is well known: it is called ‘Night Mail’.

The first electric trainset I ever received was also called ‘Night Mail’, and it featured a short rake of three coaches, including one TPO (Travelling Post Office), hauled by a Stanier Duchess. Now, many years later, the Duchess has gone the way of all flesh – but I still have the coaches, and indeed I have added to the rake to make a much more realistic depiction of a mail train. The locomotive in the film is a Royal Scot; before Christmas, I bought a model of one, and that has allowed me to produce this: Starlingford’s Night Mail.

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails.

Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro’ the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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Re: Starlingford – Poetry Train number two

by Black-Marlin on Tue Jan 05, 2010 3:41 am

MacNeice’s great friend was, as you recall, W.H.Auden. Although there have been other notable poets who have written about trains and railway travel (Betjeman springs to mind, as does -inevitably! – Muldoon), Auden is perhaps the one who captures the rhythms of the railway best, in the incomparable ‘Night Mail’. Auden’s poem was commissioned by the BBC for their documentary ‘Night Mail’, which featured a travelling post office hauled by a Royal Scot -class locomotive.

Here is my homage.

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails.

Top 10… Cars On Screen

Some things are so obvious as to need no explanation. It is, for example, perfectly clear that Famke Jannsen is the most beautiful woman on the planet, and I have the (signed) photograph to prove it. (I mention this mainly to please you, Impertinent Googler, rather than you, Dear Constant Reader). The photograph in question is this one (and with this, IG, you can go away again):

The unsigned version

Right. Now that that’s dealt with (although just you watch my blog stats skyrocket) I can get to what it was I actually wanted to talk about, which was ‘Cars on Screen’. This is a contentious issue. I make no bones about it. Some of you, I’m sure, are going to disagree with my list. If so, well…that’s just too bad. These are some of the very finest examples of automotive coolness to be seen anywhere, and you’ll just have to flame me later. With that in mind, let’s get things rolling…

#10: 1971 Plymouth Valiant

It’s not the most powerful car on the list. It’s not the prettiest car on the list. It’s not the coolest car on the list (well, duh) and it’s not the fastest car on the list – but it just might be the most courageous car on the list. This 4-door family saloon was the unsung hero of Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Duel‘, where Dennis Weaver used it to flee his pursuer, a literal ‘monster truck’. At the end of the film, the car careered into the lorry, destroying itself…but blinding the lorry driver for a few vital seconds until escape from the cliff-edge was impossible and he plummeted over the side. Kudos to the car for that.

Besides, look at that nose, reminiscent of a ’69 Charger… remember, this was Mom’s car, not an action hero’s. I can’t decide whether there’s a history in American films of using regular cars in extraordinary roles to suggest the triumph of the everyman; or if there’s a history of American car manufacturers designing extraordinary cars for ordinary situations as part of a marketing campaign. It’s the chicken or the egg query of automotive pop culture…

#9: 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T

In some respects the ultimate counter-culture car, the 1970 Dodge Challenger became so as the star of the very trippy and deeply weird anti-establishment chase movie ‘Vanishing Point‘. The big brother of the Dodge Charger, the Challenger was designed to be more comfortable, although apparently this is not the case when you plough into a couple of bulldozers at a hundred miles an hour. Perhaps the car should have survived – Quentin Tarantino certainly thought so, as a white 1970 Dodge Challenger became the hero of the otherwise-woeful ‘Deathproof’. Although the two movies don’t feature exactly the same model of car, the two Challengers do have the same license plate.

Whether you just have to make it to ‘Frisco, or you just have to get off the hood because you’re being chased by a maniac in a ’69 Charger, clearly, the Dodge Challenger is the answer to all your vehicular requirements.

#8: 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am

When I was seven I saw what I then thought was the single greatest movie ever made: ‘Smokey and the Bandit’. I was too young to realise that I was essentially watching the most expensive, most sustained commercial Coors Light Beer ever made: I just loved the car with the missing roof and the painting on the bonnet, the one whose speed was determined by the amount of money thrown towards it (a scene I didn’t understand for several years). The car itself didn’t wow me, exactly, but I loved the idea that it was essentially good-humoured anarchy on wheels. As such, I find it very difficult to forgive the two sequels, just as I find it equally difficult to ignore the darker cast given to the car by (again) Quentin Tarantino, who has The Bride drive it in volume 2 of Kill Bill. This car represented good fun, unlike the other famous TV Trans Am, which doesn’t make it onto this list: Knight Rider’ s K.I.T.T. Can you imagine being nagged incessantly by nothing more than a glorified and sentient satnav? Stick with the Bandit. Not even Hasselhoff could get away with that ‘tache. Instead, stick to the backroads, roar off in a cloud of dust, keep up the chatter on the CB and play hide-and-seek with the local law enforcement. Trust me, it’s much more fun.

#7: 1968 Ford Mustang 390 CID Fastback

Yes, I know that in THAT car chase they had to rein in the Dodge Charger, because it kept getting away; yes, I know that in that car chase Steve McQueen’s tyre-smoking antics weren’t entirely planned, nor was the Charger’s running into the camera; yes, I know that Mustang’s engine had to be extensively modified to increase the power output and that the Charger  somehow manages to lose a total of 6 hubcaps… but ‘Bullitt’ provides THE definitive movie car chase, and the Highland Green Mustang is, clearly, the star therof. It’s a cool car. It just is. And being driven by Steve McQueen made its coolness probably eternally unassailable. Filmed at full speed, with no soundtrack other than the tyres and the engine, this thing roared round San Francisco and into a well-deserved place in movie history.

#6: 1969 Dodge Charger ‘General Lee’

If you wanted a car that you had to enter via the windows (preferably after sliding over the hood), waved on by a girl in the shortest shorts history has ever seen, and which seemed to spend more time in the air than it ever did on the ground, well, there’s no choice: it has to be the General Lee. Less well known is the fact that General Lee is based on a real car, a 1958 Chrysler 300D used by a real bootlegger and named ‘Traveler’ – the name of General Robert E. Lee’s horse. Oh, and another fun fact: ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ used up no less than 256 ’68 and ’69 Chargers, much to the chagrin of classic car enthusiasts today. In fact so many cars were used for the series that by the end they were resorting to scale models. Even so, the General Lee – possibly the least-conspicuous criminal car ever built – stands out as a firm favourite. How did that horn go again?

#5: 1963 Aston Martin DB5

Well, let’s see: James Bond’s vehicle of choice comes fully stocked with twin machine guns, bulletproof glass, a retractable armour shield, oil slick dispensers, tyre-shredding hubcaps, revolving number plates, a champagne cooler, smokescreen generators, extending bumpers for ramming, and finally, who could forget the passenger-side ejector seat? The car, unlike most of the others on this list, suggests elegance rather than brute force. Mind you, you’d have to be out of your mind to make rude gestures at the driver… And you’d then have to drive awfully fast to escape him, as the standard DB5 was capable of 145mph. Though you would have to be insane to attempt driving it at that kind of speed, as the car’s brakes started life as milk-bottle tops. If you think you might just buy one, expect to have to pay a further £10,000  getting it up to a standard whereby it can be driven as it ought and deserves to be driven. Also, if you’re wealthy enough to be thinking seriously about buying one, will you be my friend?

#4: The Batmobile (Keaton Era)

There have been numerous Batmobiles over the years, but this is the best. Less camp than the TV version or the Schumacher monstrosities (*shudder*); less military-industrial complex than the Tumbler of Nolan’s two recent films: Tim Burton’s batmobile strock the perfect balance. Made from two Chevy Impala chasses and fitted with a 5.7 litre V8, it could actually go like stink – although that isn’t my favourite factoid about this machine. No, that honour goes to the fact that at least one was built with a real jet engine. Admittedly it was so thirsty that it drained the fuel tank in 15 seconds, which isn’t ideal, but the idea was basically good. They even went so far as to make all the gadgets actually work, with the exception of the shield mechanism, because that kind of solid-state science is still quite far off. But this is probably the meanest machine on the list, and I love it.

#3: 1967 Chevrolet Impala

Close all the doors, break out the salt and lock up your daughters: the Winchester boys are in town. Apparently Eric Kripke, the creator of ‘Supernatural’ was originally going to use a ’65 Mustang for the show, but he was talked out of it by a neighbour who explained that with the Impala “you could hide a body in the trunk”. Good thinking that man. While they have used it for that purpose (chalk up a hex on the  dusty black paintwork and you’ve got yourself an excellent demon trap), what the trunk mostly contains is about the most impressive armoury you’re likely to see outside of Camp Victory. Who’d've thought ghosts could be so vulnerable to 12-gauge shotguns? Or a Colt…? This is a car elevated from ‘meanness’ to ‘bad-ass’, and the rumble of that V8 means it’s time for the baddies to start quaking in their boots. Or hoofs. Whatever.

#2: 1983 GMC G-15 Vandura

“In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team.”

Sure, the van handled like a pig; sure, the 0-60 time required a long weekend; sure, everybody gets the colour scheme wrong (it’s not, as you can see, all-over black, but is instead black and gunmetal-grey): but who cares? When the A-Team came to town, they did so in style. They might have been the worst shots in the entire universe, but they always had a plan. And then a different one would come together and it would all be alright. Yay!

And finally…

#1: DeLorean DMC-12

Not only the coolest car on the list but also the fastest (relatively speaking), this is Northern Ireland’s only supercar. Well, I say ‘supercar’ – the speedometer only went up to 85mph. Which means finding out exactly when you were likely to hit the magic number of 88mph could be problematic… With its stainless steel body, gullwing doors, and digital displays, the DeLorean still seems futuristic, whether or not you opt for the flux capacitor upgrade, hover conversion, or Mr Fusion power supply. And if it all goes really badly wrong, converting it for use on the railways is not impossible…

I’m from Northern Ireland. Someday I too will be Doc Brown(e). I think I ought to get a DeLorean…

And finally (genuinely, this time), a little piece of cinema magic. Enjoy!

Well and Truly Punished

Hello fellow lovelies!

I have been away in the land of the Giant-Sized Waistband across the atlantic and what with one thing and another haven’t had time to blog. I will catch you all up on my thoughts, experiences and impressions as and when the XXXXL spirit moves me, but for now, I want to give you a further film review.

In February the most recent Punisher film was released, called Punisher: War Zone. I didn’t see it, because it wasn’t released in Aberdeen, but it was waiting for me on my return thanks to the wonders of Play.com. I have now watched it.

Punisher: War Zone

The film refers to one of the more interesting characters in the Marvel universe, Frank Castle, a former soldier turned mercenary after his family is killed for witnessing a mob execution. Castle suits up in black, gets a hold of an unbelievable number of guns, grenades, grenade launchers, missiles and knives, and opens hunting season on all criminals.

He’s interesting because, like Watchmen’s Rorshach, he’s completely uncompromising in his pursuit of the goals defined by a rigid, incorruptible morality. Except that that morality leads him to kill rather than apprehend. There is no mercy with the Punisher, which means that everyone always knows where they stand with him, even if he’s just shot out their kneecaps. He’s like Batman’s darker side personified.

The Punisher comics are interesting too, particularly because they feature someone with no superpowers at all operating in a world where ‘normal’ superlegal activities are the eminent domain of superheroes. However, there are several Punisher titles. These include ones published by Marvel Max, which is the range of Marvel titles suggested for mature readers. I don’t like them, because the ‘maturity’ espoused is a red herring: they are much more violent, and they contain sexual content that is almost always unnecessary, and these things are almost never treated maturely. Garth Ennis, who also wrote Preacher and some of the Hellblazer series, was the leading light of the Punisher Max series, and his storylines apparently provided the inspiration for this horrible, horrible film.

I watched this film and wondered what I had done wrong that had earned me this dreadful, dreadful 101 minutes of gore-filled tedium. Make no mistake, this is one of the bloodiest, goriest, nastiest films I have ever seen. Heads are cut off with combat knives, legs are cut off with machinegun fire and people are chopped up with fire axes; heads explode, bodies explode and faces are shot off (a supremely hideous moment involving a sawn-off shotgun from a yard away); necks are snapped, chair legs are pushed through eyes and faces are chewed off with a glass bottle recycling facility. As a visual spectacle this is, without doubt, an incomparably unpleasant experience. A surprisingly decent cast are given nothing to work with, because money that could have been usefully spent on the script was instead clearly spent on the gallons and gallons of fake blood that dominates all available screen time.

It is possible, I think, to make a good, interesting, mature Punisher film. But this isn’t it. This is its antithesis. This is so far away from that good film, in fact, that if Einstein’s theories about the curvature of space are true then ‘Punisher: War Zone’ is almost approaching that good film from the other direction.

This is a cataclysmically awful film. It gets no stars at all.

The Belie of the Beast

So, Dear Reader, as you will know, I like my superhero movies. The Dark Knight (obviously) is way out ahead in terms of which I think is the best, but there are plenty of others out there that are well worth the admission fee. I thought Watchmen superb. I liked Iron Man within the first three seconds (it opens to the sound of AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’, which is one of my all-time favourite songs). Men in Black is hilarious (although not a lot of people know it’s based on a comic book, trust me, it is). And there are lots of second-rank entrants that are still great matinee popcorn flicks. The Incredible Hulk. Spiderman 2. Batman Begins. And the X-Men franchise.

I like the X-Men movies for a number of reasons. I like the team dynamic. I particularly like the friction between Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian MacKellan), and the fact that one can genuinely sympathise with the nominal villain. I like the way the scripts deal with the thornier aspects of minority group behaviours with wit and intelligence – the best example of this being in X-Men 2, when Bobby (‘Iceman’) ‘comes out’ to his parents as being a mutant. His mother’s response? “Bobby, have you tried not being a mutant?” – what a great way to talk about generational differences in attitudes to homosexuality.

In case, though, you think I’m taking the whole thing too seriously, I should confess that I also like the X-Men films for this reason right here:

This is the lovely Famke Janssen. So lovely, in fact, that she even makes ‘Famke Jannsen’ sound sexy – quite a feat, given that, phonically, ‘Famke Jannsen’ doesn’t have a lot going for it. Nevertheless, she fills the silver screen most appealingly when she happens to be on it, and I’m predisposed to favour those films in which she appears.

(Ross, in Friends, had a list of five actresses he considered attractive. So, it turned out, did the rest of the characters. I have a similar list, which, in the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you consists of Famke Jannsen, Gong Li, Monica Bellucci, Jennifer Connelly, and… well, I like to keep the last vacancy open, for the reason Ross discovers to his cost in that episode.)

Anyway, back to the X-Men. I have now been to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and…weeelll…hmm. But before I get to the ‘hmm’, let me tell you the ‘yay’. Liev Schreiber, as Wolverine’s half-brother Victor Creed/Sabretooth, is really very good. He taps into the feral nature of the character very well, and he’s a believable villain as someone who’s just got a little too in touch with his inner animal. Kevin Durand, who plays Frederick Dukes/Blob, provides some welcome comic relief, and Taylor Kitsch, who is Remy LeBeau/Gambit, manages to out-cool Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine himself in the (maddeningly brief) periods he’s on-screen. The opening montage looks brilliant (while not as clever as Watchmen‘s, it nevertheless does an admirable job of compressing more than 150 years of history and character development into a couple of minutes, and the visual effects and cinematography involved enhance the effect) and some of the big set-pieces (the collapse of the cooling tower, for example) look equally impressive.

But…

There’s a great big ‘hmm’ that lurks at the core of this film (and you should know that spoilers will appear in the next paragraph). The hmm is this – this film proceeds like a point-and-click PC game. It says something, I think, that the character development shown in the dialogue-free opening montage matches the character development in the rest of the film, where, you know, they’re allowed to talk. This is a film that relies on hurtling from one fistfight to another via a big explosion in order to progress the plot. At least, I’m choosing (charitably) to believe that that’s the reason; I have a horrible suspicion that’s growing firmer the more I think about it that the fistfight/explosion/fistfight structure is the plot.

And I could even cope with that – this is a film about Wolverine, after all, not Anna Karenina – if it wasn’t for the fact that the movie’s mythology bears no relation to the character as I understand him. In fact, it goes further than that: the movie actively sets out to wreck who Wolverine is. And the biggest betrayal of the character is his relationship with Sabretooth, which is entirely fundamental to his story. In the comics, Sabretooth murders Wolverine’s lover, Silver Fox. In the movie, Sabretooth appears to do the same thing…only to have the surprise twist that she’s not dead! It was all a set-up to persuade Wolverine to get the adamantium grafted onto his skeleton! Gotcha!

Well, I was surprised, alright, but horribly so. Because now the film makes no sense. Wolverine’s been hunting Sabretooth for killing his lover. It turns out Sabretooth didn’t kill her. Yet Wolverine explains that “This changes nothing between us.“

Wait, what?

Wolverine will continue to hunt down Sabretooth for doing something that, it turns out, didn’t actually happen, and everybody’s okay with that? Including Sabretooth? For decades (literally), the comic was about Wolverine and Sabretooth and the spectre of Silver Fox hanging invisible between them. When Wolverine finally killed Sabretooth (just a couple of years ago), it was for Silver Fox, and all the other women Sabretooth had killed, including Wolverine’s Japanese wife (oh yeah – don’t be looking for that crucial piece of his backstory here). So with that backstory eradicated, you’re left with Wolverine as a moral black hole. Which I guess is kind of ironic, really, for a character who believes so strongly in personal honour. An example of the hero being unheroic: Wolverine shows up at a prison where lots of mutant children are being held captive, in order to avenge Silverfox (one word, in the film). Silverfox turns out to be alive. His purpose thus negated, Wolverine decides to leave, leaving behind the captured children.

Huh? The writers have clearly dragged the nobility out of the character and had it shot at dawn round the back of the chemical sheds. Wolverine may be many unpleasant things, but a nihilist has never been one of them. Of course, he comes back and rescues the kids (including Silverfox’s younger sister, Emma Frost – yup, didn’t see that one coming either, but again, with good frakking reason), but he should never have left in the first place.

Other notable nonsenses include Deadpool as a ‘Sum of all Fears’ -style mutant with no mouth – which is ironic, really, since in the comics Deadpool is known as ‘The Merc with a Mouth’. Not here, he isn’t. Here, he’s weapon XI, successor to Wolverine, Weapon X himself. Okay – I have to stop now. I’m depressing myself. (Worst of all – I’m sorry, but I have to forewarn you – Famke Jannsen isn’t in it, although Patrick Stewart makes a brief cameo).

Watching this film, I kept thinking about the boardgame ‘Scrabble’, and the mixing of the letters that occurs before you put them on the board. The Wolverine script is like that bag of letters. The scriptwriters have taken various cool words and concepts from the Marvel universe, mixed them up, and pulled them out at random in the hope of producing an Origin story. They succeeded, but only insofar as they managed to identify some of the core ideas. In terms of telling us Wolverine’s origin, this film’s a mess. In terms of being entertainment to scoff popcorn to, it’s barely adequate because – bizarrely for a film which depends so heavily upon them – the visual effects aren’t that good. There are times when the CGI appears embarrassingly ropy. Wolverine’s claws, the single most important physical attribute of the character (the sideburns, trust me, are of secondary importance), sometimes look as though they have been physically painted onto the film negatives. Watch the scene in the bathroom and tell me you were convinced by those claws. I dare you. And try to look at Hugh Jackman’s hair when he’s upset without laughing. I double-dare you.

I really, really wanted to like this film. I really did. Wolverine comes from a more troubled place than most superheroes, and there’s a great film to be made about him – if for no other reason that he is prepared to go places and do things that very few other characters in the Marvel universe are prepared for – but this is not that film. Like The Punisher*, we will all have to keep waiting for the decent film we all know is in there somewhere.

Two out of five stars.

Here’s some Zen. It’s more than Gavin Hood deserves…

60xx King George V slows through the level crossing

*The Punisher deserves to have a good film made about him, but no one’s done it yet. Directors tend to obsess about the violence and leave the character and plot to go hang. For my money, the only guy who could do it well would be one who understood that violence, in comics, is necessarily aestheticised, and who understands that Frank Castle deserves to be treated like a human being rather than a machine. There are plenty of other Marvel machines out there to play with without turning Frank into one of them. So really it’s obvious. The only person who could write and direct a really good Punisher film is Quentin Tarantino who, even when he makes a bad movie (‘Deathproof’ springs immediately to mind), at least makes it interesting.

I accidenty the Pope

I have not always been a good person.

I don’t have regrets, as such; I find that regret seldom achieves anything and is generally unpleasant. But I have known shame. Shame, though equally unpleasant, is at least motivational: one is shamed, and so one resolves not to do (or at least, not to get caught doing) the shameful thing again. But sometimes I remember the occasions when I have not been a good person and I feel shame. I remember those occasions when I failed to live up to my self, my ethics, or my morals; I recall unhappily those times when I said precisely what I shouldn’t, did precisely what I shouldn’t, wanted precisely what I shouldn’t. I don’t like those recollections. They whine like the most vampiric mosquito imaginable over the tender surface of the soul.

But today I was brought face-to-face with one of these memories, and it is with some considerable shame that I relate it to you now. There is no pride to be found anywhere in this. The knowledge that so afflicts me is this:

Six years ago, I, voluntarily, uncoerced and of my own free will, read Dan Brown’s book Angels & Demons.

It hurts, this knowledge. It buzzes and stings like a hornet, continually pricking at my sense of self-worth. There are excuses I could make, and believe me, in the privacy of my own head, I make them. I was in an English-speaking country for the first time in six months and was desperate for some – any – reading material. (Admittedly I was in the US, so I was only nominally in an English-speaking country, but bless them, they try.) I hadn’t been forewarned. The book was on special offer and I had very limited funds available. The cover looked interesting. It has antimatter bombs, which are cool. And so…I bought it (from Borders in San Diego, if memory serves) and read it.

I read it in just over an hour. Now, I read ludicrously quickly anyway. I own, by this stage, probably more than 1000 books, because I read the damn things so fast they don’t last me and I need new material on an expensively frequent basis. But I also read A&D so rapidly because it made no demands on me whatsoever. Not a one. Nada. Zip. It’s extraordinary, but the only effort I recall making at all was, occasionally, turning the book upside down to check that the ambigrammatic writing really did do what it said on the tin. (I can’t now remember the point of a code that reads exactly the same as it did before you figured out the trick, but I’m sure there was one).

The other thing I remember was the shocking state of the writing. It was atrocious. I mean, it was really, truly, cataclysmically awful. Think Jeffrey Archer on ketamine. It was right up there (or down there, depending on your point of view) with Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ woeful Left Behind series, which for me represents the very pinnacle (or, again, nadir) of dreadfulness. To be fair, Dan Brown hasn’t quite plumbed those sorry depths. His characters may belabour their turgid way through reams of expository prose (although, again, there was several forests’ worth of fantasy written in the ’80s that was every bit as bad, if not worse) but they do at least sound vaguely (very vaguely) like human beings while doing so, a claim I cannot in good conscience make for the Left Behind characters. (Please allow me to indulge my passion for shocking puns when I say that Left Behind is a right arse.)

I read The Da Vinci Code as well, and it is exactly the same as Angels & Demons structurally, linguistically, tonally, thematically, emotively, editorially, and probably culinarily, sartorially, and hygienically too. Then I went and saw the film, which is probably the only movie ever in the history of humanity or any other species to include, as a piece of reasonable, realistic dialogue, the immortal phrase “We have to get to a library – fast!” No one, not even in those last few coffee-fueled adrenaline-mainlining moments before the completion of an overdue dissertation, has ever said such a thing. Tom Hanks saying it made it, if anything, worse. I used to respect him. A bit. Though not after that movie with Meg Ryan.

The movie adaptation of Angels and Demons comes out this week. Tom Hanks reprises his role as a Harvard symbologist (never mind that there’s no such thing as a Harvard symbologist. Never mind that ‘Harvard’ shouldn’t be used as an adjective, or that the word ‘symbologist’ was invented by people who couldn’t remember how to spell ‘semiologist’ or ‘semiotician’), and there is obligatory prettiness in the shape of Ayelet Zurer, who plays an improbably attractive physicist (I seem to recall something about French cryptographers, in the aftermath of the Da Vinci Code film, issuing an official statement about Audrey Tatou being rather more comely than was average – ah, here it is).

It’s likely to be undemanding. It’s likely to be inoffensive fluff. It’s also likely to be a toss-up between brainless and brain-dead. Go and see it if you wish, enjoy it if you must, but don’t come running to me when you feel ashamed of yourself afterwards.

Oh, go on then – console yourself with today’s moment of Zen:

Departmental Class 37 'British Steel Hunterston' rescues broken-down Intercity Class 37 'Highland Region'

Q: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? A: Ego. Video Custodes.

So, it’s here, it’s 2hrs 44mins long, and it adheres with almost religious zeal to its source text, but just what is the long-awaited Watchmen like?

The human 'heroes' of Watchmen: The Comedian, Nite Owl II, Ozymandias, Rorshach, and Silk Spectre II

First of all, let’s not kid ourselves that this movie featuring superheroes is for either children or adolescents: it gets an 18 rating, and deservedly so. It is, on occasion, extremely violent – we see people bloodily disintegrate, a character gets both arms cut off with an angle-grinder, and someone else get chopped in the head with a cleaver in a scene reminiscent of Crime and Punishment – and there is sex and nudity.

All these points were clearly at the forefront of Christopher Tookey’s mind when he wrote his vitriolic review for the Daily Mail, which I urge you to read here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1159801/Watchmen-Superheroes-sick-slick.html. I urge you to read it because I’m about to take it apart, line by line, with joy and enthusiasm.

It is worth saying upfront that I don’t rate Tookey as a critic. He was spectacularly wrong about David Cronenburg’s Crash (1996) (he called for it to be banned) and he was about the only mainstream newspaper critic in the UK to consider the recent epic The Dark Knight a failure. He has a real problem with violence on screen (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but his arguments don’t hold up under scrutiny. I feel I am qualified to make such comments as my PhD focuses on the problems of representing violence and, from a theoretical point of view at least, I think I know what I’m talking about.

Let’s turn to his review then. He starts off by saying the project has defeated other directors, and that Alan Moore, the author of the original graphic novel, called it unfilmable. All this is perfectly true. Moore, in some respects, set out Watchmen to demonstrate what comics can do that films can’t. And other Moore adaptations have been…well…not very good. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was simply a travesty; From Hell, the story of Jack the Ripper, became a whodunnit when that was precisely what the graphic novel so assiduously avoided; and V for Vendetta, though the best-looking (and probably best-adapted) of the three, upped the Hollywood spills ‘n’ thrills at the expense of the subtle and complex political argument at the heart of the novel. So Watchmen‘s cinematic pedigree isn’t all that it might have been.

Director Zack Snyder therefore took possibly the least commercial but most fan-friendly approach available: his adaptation is extraordinarily faithful to the novel. And this is where Tookey’s criticisms begin to show their prejudices.

“It all feels woefully dated, as well it might  -  the film is doggedly faithful to a graphic novel published more than two decades ago, long since overtaken by political events.

And it’s one too many movies  -  after X Men, The Dark Knight and Push  -  set in a world where crime-fighting superheroes have been outlawed”, he writes, and in so doing demonstrates a cataclysmic failure to understand the film’s context. Ignoring, for a moment, his dismissal of the superhero genre in its entirity (if you can face the prospect, search his other posts on other superhero movies to see this displayed), he shows us that he doesn’t understand what Watchmen represents and that, therefore, he cannot possibly understand the purpose of this movie. Watchmen is a pivotal comic in the history of comics because it was the first to reimagine heroes as being un-heroic. We tolerate Batman putting on a cape and a mask to beat up villains because as a boy he watched his parents’ murder and we sympathise with his need for vigilante-based catharsis. What Moore does is to explore the psychology of his vigilantes (only one of whom is a true superhero with superpowers) and to use his conclusions to enable readers to draw parallels with the ‘heroes’ of everyday life. It is no coincidence that Snyder said of his movie that he wanted the look not only to invoke the novel Watchmen but also the films Taxi Driver and Se7en – both movies featuring characters whose actions and motivations remain troubling to the viewer long after the film has finished playing. The ‘heroes’ of Watchmen are not meant to be emulated: Nite Owl (in some respects Watchmen‘s Batman) is impotent until he has worn his costume and saved some lives; The Comedian is morally bankrupt (at the end of the Vietnam war he shot a pregnant Vietnamese woman rather than having to remain a father with an irrevocable link to a country he can’t stand) who shoots protestors and has on at least one occasion attempted rape; and Rorshach is to all intents and purposes a functioning sociopath. These are not commendable individuals. It is to Snyder’s credit though that they become ambiguous for the audience – our loyalties are divided. We know The Comedian is (if you will excuse me) a bastard: we watch him brutally put down a riot on American soil. The problem is, he looks cool while doing so. His fight moves are straight out of The Matrix. This, I suspect, is where Tookey has his problem. You can’t look good doing bad things. That generates a level of complexity Tookey does not want to deal with.

In fact, society in general doesn’t want to deal with it. There was an interesting article in the Guardian about a year ago (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/apr/18/whynaziartisadangerous) that discussed the problems of Nazi aesthetics. For instance, the black uniforms of the Waffen SS were designed to look elegant, tailored…attractive. But because of what the men in those uniforms did – and I have no illusions about that, no one who reads as much WWII military history as I do could possibly have any illusions about that – I suspect I would find myself on the receiving end of flame comments if I was to say those uniforms remain attractive. It is the same problem. The nazis looked good while doing unspeakable things.

Anyway, back to Tookey. He criticises a novel written 20 years ago for not being contemporary (when in fact the deeper themes of both the novel and the film resonate all too well – to paraphrase (slightly) one character at the end of the film, “There must be sacrifices if we are to put an end to terror”), and says that after a string of films outlawing superhoes this is one to many. As I said above, this is because this the story that started all that, but there is one other point I wish to make here. One of the examples Tookey chooses is The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight is based at least in part on the graphic novel The Killing Joke. The author of the Killing Joke is… Alan Moore. Tookey criticises an Alan Moore story… for being reminiscent of an Alan Moore story.

He comments on the brutality of the film without considering that Snyder’s objectives were not to impress 14-year-old boys but rather to highlight that this is a sick society with troubling parallels to our own. My comparison of the ‘cleaver in the head’ incident to Crime and Punishment was not accidental, and was (I suspect) in Snyder’s mind too – that scene is very different in the Watchmen book (there is no cleaver – the book’s version I find, on a personal level, far more troubling). The death of the little girl that brings about the cleaver retribution also generates in full in Rorshach his sociopathic personality and his dismissal of God (“He saw everything that went on that night and he didn’t seem to mind, he did nothing to stop any of it”) – which is in itself a criticism of a current American society that sees retribution as a cure-all and christian political fundamentalism, divorced from any form of sensitivity, as an indefatigable campaign of moral victory.

Make no mistake. Watchmen is a smart film, a film that through representations of violence, through questions about the nature of good and evil, and through an exploration of characters’ backstories (in a manner reminiscent of the metanarrative of The Canterbury Tales), explores complex psychological terrain and poses difficult questions about the use of force. Watchmen is brilliant, complex, fierce and provocative. It is a film for grown ups.

No wonder Tookey didn’t get it.

Finally, your moment of Zen for today:

D49/1 'Cheshire' about to head onto the supension bridge with the county train