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hamliet · 4 years

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Pain, Fear, Death, and God: Fyodor and Gogol as Two Halves of Kirillov

God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God.

-Alexei Kirillov, Demons

So remember how when I first read Bungou Stray Dogs I started screeching incoherently and turned those screeches into a somewhat-coherent meta on how Fyodor in BSD was modeled after Alexei Kirillov from Dostoyesvky’s Demons?

Well, here’s the follow up.

As I said in my previous meta, Demons is (tied with Crime and Punishment) my favorite novel of all time, and Alexei Kirillov is my very favorite character of all time, in any fictional medium, ever. He’s a walking bundle of paradoxes, existential angst and stunning compassion. But Demons is not necessarily a popular novel by Dostoyevsky standards and so Kirillov, despite being written about by literary critics and Camus, is somewhat obscure. That Asagiri is so clearly inspired by his character is shocking and thrilling for me; I’m pinching myself.

The tl;dr version of Kirillov is that his whole schtick is that he wants to kill himself to prove that he is free and thereby can escape. It’s far more nuanced and complex, as I’ll go into, but essentially both Gogol and Fyodor’s philosophies and goals reflect this.

Gogol does not want to kill Fyodor because he hates Fyodor; rather, it’s because Gogol and Fyodor are two halves of a whole. They are a paradox together, embodying Kirillov’s complexity. Like Kirillov, they are suicidal, because killing one of them is like killing themselves. To achieve their goals, they both need to die.

Fyodor reminds Gogol that he is human and can connect; therefore, Gogol wants to kill him to assert his free will, as he views connections as a cage. Similarly, while we haven’t gotten much insight into Fyodor’s thoughts on Gogol, I think it’s highly likely Fyodor allowed Gogol to kill himself (he thought) because he clings to his beliefs at the expense of his (very much there) empathy, and it’s better for his goals if people who provoke his empathy die. Basically: Fyodor allowed Gogol to “die” not because he doesn’t care about him, but because he does.

For a brief background: Demons itself is an allegory about how people who become consumed by their ideas become possessed by said ideas; thus, they become devils or demons. The actual title of the novel, Бесы, is difficult to translate, hence why it has three different titles in English: The Possessed, The Devils, and Demons. The word “Бесы” in Russian refers to the ones doing the possessing, which is why the latter two are generally considered to be more accurate translations of the title. In particular, the novel demonstrates the tragic consequences of Russian nihilism and singles out moral nihilism. (It’s also looked to as a rather eerie novel, because almost everything it wrote about happening in a--then fictional--political revolution is exactly what happened in Russia a few decades later.)

As I wrote in my previous meta, Fyodor, like Kirillov, is “consumed” by his ideas, something Kirillov laments in Demons. Fyodor’s consumption with his ideals means that he is willing to sacrifice everything for his goals. Gogol, too, shares this trait.

Where they differ is in motivations for their respective plans, motives they share with Kirillov. Kirillov’s master plan is to commit suicide for two reasons: firstly, that he has free will and will thereby inspire society to live freely, and secondly, because he sees life as nonsensically painful and thereby not worth living. The first reflects Gogol’s personal aims, and the second Fyodor’s.

Let’s discuss Kirillov and Fyodor first. Kirillov believes that mankind invented God (keep in mind the context this was written in; God=Russian Orthodox Christianity) to go on living because of the absurdity of life.

Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is--madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil's vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you're a man.”

Fyodor's disgust for the world and determination to save it from the sin of abilities reflects this same attitude. Life is wrong, so it should cease to exist. Abilities are wrong, so everyone with one should cease to exist. The reason is, most likely, strongly based in how painful Fyodor’s ability has been for him.

Kirillov laments:

“God is necessary and so must exist… But I know He doesn’t and can’t… Surely you must understand that a man with two such ideas can’t go on living?”

...

“If there is no God, then I am God.”

If Kirillov is god, then he is the ultimate master of his fate. Kirillov is very aware of his own limits, and so he thinks this absurd and life pointless.

That conversation continues (Kirillov’s responses are bolded):

“There, I could never understand that point of yours: why are you God?”

“If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”

“Self-will? But why are you bound?”

“Because all will has become mine. Can it be that no one in the whole planet, after making an end of God and believing in his own will, will dare to express his self-will on the most vital point? It’s like a beggar inheriting a fortune and being afraid of it and not daring to approach the bag of gold, thinking himself too weak to own it. I want to manifest my self-will. I may be the only one, but I’ll do it.”

This very much reflects Gogol: killing his high moral power (connection and empathy) through the man who identifies himself as a god (Fyodor) to prove his independence and freedom.

But we’ve kind of already seen where this ends:

Gogol you’ve literally shown yourself terrified of dying (which Kirillov is as well). I know Gogol was likely acting in this scene, but given the themes of BSD and Gogol’s character, plus the fact that he did, in fact, choose not to die, I think this is likely somewhat reflective of his true feelings.

But again, Kirillov asserts:

“I am awfully unhappy, for I’m awfully afraid. Terror is the curse of man.… But I will assert my will, I am bound to believe that I don’t believe. I will begin and will make an end of it and open the door, and will save. That’s the only thing that will save mankind and will re-create the next generation physically; for with his present physical nature man can’t get on without his former God, I believe. For three years I’ve been seeking for the attribute of my godhead and I’ve found it; the attribute of my godhead is self-will! That’s all I can do to prove in the highest point my independence and my new terrible freedom. For it is very terrible. I am killing myself to prove my independence and my new terrible freedom.”

As Gogol outlined, what disrupted his plans was Fyodor’s empathy for him, and his empathy for Fyodor. Their connection literally saved his life (hence I kind of doubt their connection will kill them in the end). He cannot die without killing that connection.

Two things almost disrupt Kirillov’s plans. Firstly, and chiefly, it’s his empathy for others. Kirillov is noted to be a character who is extremely kind, good with children, and unafraid to risk himself to help others. When Kirillov finds out his friend betrayed him and is planning to use Kirillov’s suicide to get away with the murder of a third friend, Kirillov is horrified. He refuses to go through with his suicide at first, screaming in horror that his friend is dead and that he unwittingly enabled his killer to end his life. When he does ultimately go through with it, he states that it is because “I want to kill myself now: all are scoundrels.” He goes through with it because his human connections are failing.

Even the novel’s most villainous character concludes “I agree” when Kirillov is called “good.” Kirillov will stop at nothing to help his friends, and he believes all people are good and will become good if they are just told they are. However, the tragic irony of this scene is that the person speaking to Kirillov--Nikolai Stavrogin--is very much a literary example of a psychopath. (Those of you who follow me know I don’t use that word lightly.) However, Stavrogin does not want to be this way; he wants to feel, he wants to be bothered by the terrible sins he’s committed. What he’s asking Kirillov, essentially, is to understand this and call him wrong for what he did, which absolutely no one does in the novel:

“Everything’s good.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. It’s only that. That’s all, that’s all! If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once...

“And if anyone dies of hunger, and if anyone insults and outrages the little girl, is that good?”

“Yes! ...They’re bad because they don’t know they’re good. When they find out, they won’t outrage a little girl. They’ll find out that they’re good and they’ll all become good, every one of them.”

“Here you’ve found it out, so have you become good then?”

“I am good.”

“That I agree with, though,” Stavrogin muttered, frowning.

“He who teaches that all are good will end the world.”

“He who taught it was crucified.”

“He will come, and his name will be the man-god.”

“The god-man?”

“The man-god. That’s the difference.”

Stavrogin’s examples are based on things he’s done. Kirillov isn’t aware of these deeds, but he does know his friend’s mind better than most of their other friends. The problem is that Kirillov refuses to truly act on this empathy, to accept that men can be scoundrels and good, because he wants what he believes (that all are good) to be so. Kirillov’s too consumed with his desire to end the world (hello Fyodor) to save mankind via proving himself free to actually use his empathy to help his friends. In fact, the murderer points out to Kirillov that if he’d focused more on his friend, he might have been able to prevent the murder.

A similar attitude is reflected in Fyodor’s desire to destroy ability-users (i.e. end the world) and in his interactions with people. He doesn’t put his empathy into forming actual connections, and those he has he deliberately does not invest in (such as when he kills the kid in his introductory chapter). He kills ability users paradoxically because he cares about them and about other people. I wrote about it a bit in this meta here:

Fyodor... lives very much in a world of black and white. He makes Goncharov happy all the time, unable to experience pain or negative emotions. He believes all ability users are a sin and should be destroyed. He’s an idealist in a lot of ways, believing in absolutes (which is also a hallmark of a childish perspective...). he wants to... force every single ability user to feel his pain (that their abilities are a sin) by wiping them out. In short, Fyodor wants empathy despite refusing to listen to the feelings of others. (He understands their feelings; he just chooses to emphasize his pain over theirs.)

Unlike Kirillov, however, whose last scene is renowned as “the most harrowing in all of literature” (I can’t even describe it; it has to be read) I think there’s pretty good reason to hope that Fyodor and Gogol will not end up taking each other out. Because the thing about Kirillov, the reason his character resonates so much with me, is the second reason his plans are almost disrupted: it’s how desperately he wants to live. He just wants to know that his life matters. The way Kirillov expresses these desires is absurd in a lot of ways and certainly hyperbolic, but it’s a desire reflected in most of BSD’s characters, and in, well, a lot of us in real life, too.

Empathy and genuine human connection are the greatest powers in BSD’s world, as we saw recently through Atsushi getting the location of the page from empathizing with Sigma by telling him what he most wanted to know: that he mattered.

Sigma now knows, to an extent, that he matters. At least, he’s been told as much.

Gogol states that Sigma is key to his plans succeeding: Sigma’s ability can tell him Fyodor’s ability, which will enable Gogol to kill Fyodor. Except... Sigma’s ability might just work in an way that cultivates empathy post-connection with Atsushi. If Sigma can trust that he matters, despite having been created by the page and having been abused and subjected to all manner of lies and exploitation, he might be key to Fyodor and Gogol’s conflict resolution rather than to them actually killing each other.

Fyodor matters despite having an ability that seems to make him unable to touch people--because he can touch people with his empathy. (His empathy is, of course, literally what draws Gogol to want to kill him.) Fyodor’s empathy with Gogol has already physically saved Gogol.

Gogol matters even if he is understood by someone, because empathy is a strength and not a weakness. Someone understanding him doesn’t make him matter less, and being bound by feelings isn’t actually a bad thing. His connection with Fyodor has already saved his life.

Both Fyodor and Gogol have now saved Sigma at some point. Sigma’s design, of course, is literally split with two different colored halves of his hair, indicating that the artist likely means to symbolize the clash of two halves (see: Q, who represents how soukoku (Dazai and Chuuya) are two halves of a whole in terms of their best and worst traits). However, they exist in one person, and Sigma seems reasonably stable for someone with his situation.

Additionally, Fyodor and Gogol both are also somewhat modeled after Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, whose name literally means “split” in Russian. (Actually, Kirillov is very much a more internal, tragic version of Raskolnikov.) Like Kirillov, Raskolnikov is a paradox embodied: he’s stunningly empathetic and kind (rushing into a burning building to save orphans), but his philosophy is that it’s fine for him to kill others because he’s a “Napoleon” (special figure; “man-god,” to use Kirillov’s term).

But what is split is ultimately made whole in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov meditates on the raising of Lazarus from the dead and essentially resurrects himself, redeems himself.

I highly doubt Gogol and Fyodor’s story will end with them dead because:

It’s BSD and nobody stays dead unless you’re Oda or a red shirt;

Gogol and Sigma have already served us fake-out deaths, so it’s a lot to ask your audience to buy another death from the same character (killing Fyodor is essentially Gogol killing himself);

them surviving and having Fitzgerald-esque redemption arcs very much fits with the themes of Dostoyevsky’s works and specifically with the book after which Fyodor’s ability is named;

resurrection seems to be a motif with everything involving Fyodor, from Cannibalism to this current arc.

#bsd meta #fyogol #bsd 79 #bungou stray dogs meta #fyodor dostoyevsky #nikolai gogol #alexei kirillov #demons #nikolai stavrogin #bsd sigma #sigma #atsushi nakajima #bsd theory

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grubbyduck · 4 years

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No Man’s Land - an essay on feminism and forgiveness

I have always proudly named myself a feminist, since I was a little girl and heard my mum proudly announcing herself as a feminist to anyone who would listen.

But I believe the word 'feminist' takes on a false identity in our collective imagination - it is seen as hard, as baked, severe, steadfast, stubborn and rooted. From a male perspective, it possibly means abrasive, or too loud, or intimidatingly intolerant of men. From a female perspective, though, these traits become revered by young feminists; the power of knowing what you think and never rolling over! My experience of being a feminist throughout my life has been anything but - it has been a strange and nebulous aspect of my identity; it has sparked the familiar fires of bravery, ambition, rage, sadness and choking inarticulacy at times, sure, but at other times it has inspired apathy, reactionary attitudes, bravado and dismissivness. And at other, transitive times, it caused me to rethink my entire outlook on the world. And then again. And then again.

In primary school, I read and re-read Sandi Toksvig’s book GIRLS ARE BEST, which takes the reader through the forgotten women of history. I didn’t feel angry - I felt awed that there were female pirates, women on the front line in the world wars, women at the forefront of invention, science and literature. I still remember one line, where it is revealed that NASA’s excuse for only hiring six women astronauts compared to hundreds of men was that they didn’t stock suits small enough.

When I was 13, I tried to start a girl's rugby team at my school. I got together 15 girls who also wanted to form a team. We asked the coaches if they would coach us - their responses varied from 'maybes' to straight up 'no's. The boys in our year laughed at us publicly. We would find an old ball, look up the rules online, and practise ourselves in free periods - but the boys would always come over, make fun of us and take over the game until we all felt too insecure to carry on. I shouted at a lot of boys during that time, and got a reputation among them as someone who was habitually angry and a bit of a buzzkill. Couldn't take a joke - that kind of thing.

When I was around 16, I got my first boyfriend. He was two years older (in his last year of sixth form) and seemed ever so clever to me. He laughed about angry feminists, and I laughed too. He knew I classified myself as a feminist, but, you know, a cool one - who doesn't get annoyed, and doesn't correct their boyfriends' bulging intellects. And in any case, whenever I did argue with him about anything political or philosophical, he would just chant books at me, list off articles he'd read, mention Kant and say 'they teach that wrong at GCSE level'. So I put more effort into researching my opinions (My opinions being things like - Trump is a terrible person who should not be elected as President - oh yeah, it was 2016), but every time I cited an article, he would tell me why that article was wrong or unreliable. I couldn't win. He was a Trump supporter (semi-ironically, but that made it even worse somehow) and he voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. He also wouldn't let me get an IUD even though I had terrible anxiety about getting pregnant, because of his parents' Catholicism. He sulked if he ever got aroused and then I didn’t feel like having sex, because apparently it ‘hurts’ men physically. One time I refused sex and he sulked the whole way through the night, refusing to sleep. I was incensed, and felt sure that my moral and political instincts were right, but I had been slowly worn down into doubting the validity of my own opinions, and into cushioning his ego at every turn - especially when he wasn't accepted into Oxford.

When I was 17/18, I broke up with him, and got on with my A Levels. One of them was English Literature. I remember having essay questions drilled into us, all of which were fairly standard and uninspired, but there was one that I habitually avoided:

'Discuss the presentation of women in this extract'

It irritated me beyond belief to hear the way that our class were parroting phrases like 'commodification and dehumanisation of women' in order to get a good grade. It felt so phony, so oversimplified, and frankly quite insulting. I couldn't bear reading classic books with the intent of finding every instance that the author compares a woman to an animal. It made me so sad! I couldn't understand how the others could happily write about such things and be pleased with their A*. As a keen contributor to lessons, my teacher would often call on me to comment in class - and to her surprise, I think, my responses about 'women's issues' were always sullen and could be characterised by a shrug. I wanted to talk about macro psychology, about Machievellian villains, about Shakespreare's subversion of comic convention in the English Renaissance. I absolutely did not want to talk about womb imagery, about men’s fixation and sexualisation of their mothers or about docile wives. In my application for Cambridge, I wrote about landscape and the psyche in pastoral literature, and got an offer to study English there. I applied to a mixed college - me and my friends agreed that we’d rather not go if we got put into an all female college.

When I was 19, I got a job as an actor in a touring show in my year out before starting at Cambridge. I was the youngest by a few years. One company member - a tall, handsome and very talented man in his mid-twenties - had the exact same job title as me, only he was being paid £100 more than me PER WEEK. I was the only company member who didn’t have an agent, so I called the producers myself to complain. They told me they sympathised, that there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to pay me more - and in the end, I managed to negotiate myself an extra £75 per week by taking on the job of sewing up/fixing any broken costumes and puppets. So I had more work, and was still being paid 25% less. The man in question was a feminist, and complained to his agent (although he fell through on his promise to demand that he lose £50 a week and divide it evenly between us). He was a feminist - and yet he commented on how me and the other woman in the company dressed, and told us what to wear. He was a feminist, only he slept with both of us on tour, and lied to us both about it. He was a feminist, only he pitted me against and isolated me from the only other woman in the company, the only person who may have been a mentor or a confidante. He was a feminist, only he put me down daily about my skills as a performer and made me doubt my intelligence, my talent and my worth.

When I was 20, I started at Cambridge University, studying English Literature. Over the summer, I read Lundy Bancroft’s book ‘Why Does He Do That’ which is a study of abusers and ‘angry and controlling men’. It made me realise that I had not been given the tools to recognise coercive and controlling behaviour - I finally stopped blaming myself for attracting controlling men into my life. I also read ‘Equal’ by Carrie Gracie, about her fight to secure equal pay for equal work at the BBC in 2017-2019. It was reading that book that I fully appreciated that I had already experienced illegal pay discrimination in the workplace. Both made me cry in places, and it felt as though something had thawed in me. I realised that I was not the exception. That ‘women’s issues’ do apply to me. In my first term at Cambridge, I wrote some unorthodox essays. I wrote one on Virginia Woolf named ‘The Dogs Are Dancing’ which began with a page long ‘disclaimer for my womanly emotions’ that attempted to explain to my male supervisor how difficult it is for women to write dispassionately and objectively, as they start to see themselves as unfairly separate, excluded and outlined from the male literary consciousness. He didn’t really understand it, though he enjoyed the passion behind my prose.

The ‘woman questions’ at undergraduate level suddenly didn’t seem as easy, as boring or as depressing as those I had encountered at A Level. I had to reconcile with the fact that I had only been exposed to a whitewashed version of feminism throughout my life. At University, I learned the word Intersectionality - and it made immediate and ferocious sense to me. I wrote an essay on Aphra Behn’s novella ‘Oroonoko’, which is about a Black prince and his pursuit of Imoinda, a Black princess. I had to get to grips with how a feminist author from the Renaissance period tackled issues of race. I had to examine how she dehumanised and sexualised Imionda in the same way that white women were used to being treated by men. I had to really question to what extent Aphra Behn was on Imionda’s side - examine the violent punishment of Oroonoko for mistreating her. I found myself really wanting to believe that Behn had done this purposefully as social commentary. I mentioned in my essay that I was aware of my own white female critical ingenuity. For the first time, I was writing about something I didn’t have any personal authority over in my life - I had to educate myself meticulously in order to speak boldly about race.

As I found myself surrounded by more women who were actively and unashamedly feminist, I realised just how many opinions exist within that bracket. I realised that I didn’t agree with a lot of other feminists about aspects of the movement. I started to only turn up to lectures by women. I started to only read literary criticism written by women - not even consciously; I just realised that I trusted their voices more intrinsically. I started to wish I had applied to an all female college. I realised that all female spaces weren’t uncool - that is an image that I had learned from men, and from trying to impress men. The idea that Black people, trans people, that non binary people could be excluded from feminism seemed completely absurd to me. I ended up in a mindset that was constructed to instinctively mistrust men. Not hate - just mistrust. I started to get fatigued by explaining basic feminist principles to sceptical men.

I watched the TV show Mrs America. It made my heart speed up with longing, with awe, with nerves, sorrow, anger - again, it showed me how diverse the word Feminism is. The longing I felt was for a time where feminist issues seemed by comparison clear-cut, and unifying. A time where it was good to be angry, where anger got stuff done. I am definitely angry. The problem is, the times that feminism has benefitted me and others the most in my life is when I use it forgivingly and patiently. When I sit in my anger, meditate on it, control it, and talk to those I don’t agree with on subjects relating to feminism with the active intent to understand their point of view. Listening to opinions that seemed so clearly wrong to me was the most difficult thing in the world - but it changed my life, and once again, it changed my definition of feminism.

Feminism is listening to Black women berating white feminists, and rather than feeling defensive or exempt, asking questions about how I have contributed to a movement that excludes women of colour. Feminism is listening to my mother’s anxieties about trans women being included in all-female spaces, and asking her where those anxieties stem from. Feminism is understanding that listening to others who disagree with you doesn’t endanger your principles - you can walk away from that conversation and know what you know. Feminism is checking yourself when you undermine or universalise male emotion surrounding the subject. Feminism is allowing your mind to change, to evolve, to include those that you once didn’t consider - it is celebrating quotas, remembering important women, giving thanks for the fact that feminism is so complex, so diverse, so fraught and fought over.

Feminism is common ground. It is no man’s land. It is the space between a Christian housewife and a liberated single trans woman. It is understanding women of other races, other cultures, other religions. It is disabled women, it is autistic women, it is trans men who have biologically female medical needs that are being ignored. It is forgiveness for our selfishness. It feels impossible.

The road to feminism is the road to enlightenment. It is the road to Intersectional equity. It is hard. It is a journey. No one does it perfectly. It is like the female orgasm - culturally ignored, not seen as necessary, a mystery even to a lot of women, many-layered, multitudinous, taboo, comes in waves. It is pleasure, and it is disappointment.

All I know is that the hard-faced, warrior version of feminism that was my understanding only a few years ago reduced my allies and comrades in arms to a small group of people who were almost exaclty like me and so agreed with me on almost everything. Flexible, forgiving and inquisitive feminism has resulted in me loving all women, and fighting for all women consciously. And by fighting for all women, I also must fight for Black civil rights, for disabled rights, for Trans rights, for immigrant rights, for homeless rights, for gay rights, and for all human rights because women intersect every one of these minorities. My scoffing, know-it-all self doing my A Levels could never have felt this kind of love. My ironic jokes about feminists with my first boyfriend could never have made any woman feel loved. My frustration that my SPECIFIC experience of misogyny as a white, middle-class bisexual woman didn’t feel related to the other million female experiences could never have facilitated unity, common ground, or learning to understand women that existed completely out of my experience as a woman.

My feminism has lead me to becoming friends with some of those boys who mocked me for wanting to play rugby, and with the woman that was vying with me over that man in the acting company for 8 months. It is slowly melting my resentment towards all men - it is even allowing me to feel sorry for the men who have mistreated me in the past.

I guess I want to express in this mammoth essay post that so far my feminist journey has lead me to the realisation that if your feminism isn’t growing you, you aren’t doing it right. Perhaps it will morph again in the future. But for now, Feminism is a love of humanity, rather than a hatred of it. That is all.

#Feminism #yooo i have written a thesis lol #didn’t mean to do that it all kind of flowed out #intersectional feminism #forgiveness #carrie gracie #mrs america #why does he do that #lundy bancroft #equal pay #equal rights #literature #university #school #oroonoko #aphra behn

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justforbooks · 4 years

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George Steiner, the Prophet of Progressive Anti-Semitism

By William Kolbrener

Are the philosophical roots of contemporary left-wing denunciations of Israel to be found in a radical, twisted 1970s argument about the place of Jews in Western culture?

In the 1970 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered at Yale, the literary critic George Steiner offered a compelling explanation for the persistence of anti-Semitism: The Jews suffered for millennia as retribution for introducing the “Ideal” into Western culture. With its idealism and ethical imperatives, the revelation at Sinai “tore up the human psyche by its ancient roots,” depriving its inheritors of not just the material God and the image, but also “natural consciousness,” and “instinctual polytheistic needs.” Jews, the original Puritans, rejected the satisfaction of both the body and the image, for the purity and ascetic life dictated by the divine Word. From this perspective, Judaism represents the earliest celebration of the absolute, the West’s punishing superego, demanding idealism and self-denial, which was later incarnated in primitive Christianity and Messianic socialism, also founded by Jews, Jesus, and Karl Marx, in whose visions the Ideal persists “with terrible tactless force.” By Steiner’s lights, Hitler’s “jibe” that the Jews “invented consciousness” explains the tenacity of Western hatred of the Jews.

Western hatred of the Jews thus begins with anxiety about Jewish claims to exceptionalism. There can only be one bearer of the ideal: The city on the Hill is not Jerusalem, but Rome, later London, and even later still, Boston. In this form of anti-Semitism, which Steiner both described and in some ways endorsed, Jews are loathed because they represent a reminder of their antecedent claim to the Ideal—a claim that causes such anxiety that it must be extirpated. Non-Jewish messianic movements reject the notion of Jewish exceptionalism, because they are the exceptional ones. The continued existence of the Jews, and the resurgence of Israel, are troubling reminders that that the Jews were first to be singled out as God’s “chosen people.”

Steiner’s writings on the State of Israel provide an early primer on the dynamics of the specific form of secular anti-Semitism that has captivated so many progressives in academia and among the rank and file of the British Labour Party, as well as, increasingly, among American progressives. For Steiner, nationalism is a “madness,” as is the “vulgar mystique of flag and anthem.” But it is Israel’s “barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma” that represent a “rhetoric of self-deception as desperate as any contrived in the history of nationalism.” For Steiner, and in this, contemporary progressives follow him, Israel must bear all the sins of the nation-state. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his celebration of Athens—the Oresteia—avows that the city-state is founded on blood: For contemporary progressives, as for Steiner, only Israel, the nation-state ne plus ultra, has blood on its hands.

To be sure, the narrative of Israeli independence, the celebration of the Jewish State as an indigenous people’s movement, remains haunted by a different narrative, that of naqba, with Israel figured as a colonialist interloper. The profile of the latter narrative becomes even more compelling given Israel’s uncomfortable position in the cultural history of the 20th century. The great writers of international modernism, Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, celebrated the Greek idea of Nostos, return. For all three, return was a literary journey—to classicism, especially to the writings and culture of the Greeks. Joyce’s take on Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses, was published in 1922, the same year as the League of Nations confirmed the Mandate for Palestine. Eliot’s rewriting of Aeschylus, “The Cocktail Party,” was published in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding. Jewish return—the particular chutzpah of the Zionist enterprise—entailed not a literary, but a literal embodiment of return, the ingathering of the exiles, the Jewish people in the State of Israel. For literary modernists, return was a cultural ideal; for Jews, it was a millennial-old dream, actually realized on land that other people claimed as their own.

That the postwar West turned decisively away from the worldview expressed in international modernism made the Jewish State, in a context of the new postmodern emphasis on difference and the other, seem even more retrograde. Steiner, though himself a classicist by training, prefers the vision of Jewish nationhood expressed in the anti-ideal of the postmodern “homelessness” of “textuality.” For him, the Jewish homeland should remain a marginal literary enterprise, a figure of speech and nothing more. The literal return to Zion, for Steiner, is therefore the last and most unfashionable of the modernist projects.

From a postmodernist perspective, Jews and Israel especially, having barely escaped the old-style anti-Semitism of the Nazis, express their chosenness once more—in a hideous affront to a sensibility that renounced all forms of exceptionalism. It is this drive that explains why the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, with its ostensibly universalist human-rights agenda, specifically denies Jewish difference, that is, the exceptionalism made concrete in Jewish statehood, while insisting on the absolute moral and political necessity of a Palestinian state, no matter how theocratic such an entity might be.

Apologists can argue about the nuances of “From the River to the Sea,” but the slogan chanted by Hamas operatives on the Gaza border, Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and college students on American college campuses, in its most generous interpretation, advocates the ideal of a one-state solution, an ivory tower fantasy that could only come into being through catastrophic bloodshed and loss of human life. In its advocacy of this academic pipe dream, BDS has become the civilized and politically acceptable veneer for advocacy of the destruction of the Jewish State.

Western hatred of the Jews begins with anxiety about Jewish claims to exceptionalism.

But for all their anti-exceptionalist rhetoric, it is obvious that progressives have appropriated the rhetoric of Jewish exceptionalism as their own. Where for Steiner, Jewish consciousness is based upon the transcendent ideal, the truth of the progressive consciousness takes a Christian turn, and is incarnate, in every individual. Although progressives claim complexity and nuance, in regard to Israel/Palestine, their views are absolute: The Palestinians are good, while Zionists are evil. If only the Jews would divest themselves of their particularity, their unnecessary claims to nationhood, they might be tolerated, but Israel, as national project, is the devil of the nation-state made flesh.

Steiner is unabashed in his forthrightness, acknowledging the Jewish nationhood to be so abhorrent, “monstrous,” that he finds himself compelled to ask: “Has the survival of the Jew been worth the appalling cost?” and “Would it not be preferable, on the balance sheet of human mercies, if he was to ebb into assimilation and the common seas?” For Steiner, and his adepts, Jews should properly inhabit the utopian no-place of textuality, the shtetl of their study halls, a real-life version of the Hasidic dolls and figurines sold at shops in Poland.

Jewish Zionists—for Steiner, Jews are defined by their Zionism—deserve this fate, because they bear the lasting historical guilt of having introduced the horrifically oppressive idea of a transcendent and abstract God. They are responsible for the Western addiction to “speculative abstractions,” which in their grasp are not only dangerous but, in contemporary parlance, weaponized, murderous. Zionism is the last cultural gasp of the Jewish claim to be arbiters of absolute truth—a cardinal postmodernist sin—and are all the more guilty for having transformed this warped idea into a lived reality. The nation-state is flawed, but only Israel, in a postmodernist expiation for the sins of all other nations of the world, is to be not only reviled, but extirpated.

Israel’s imperfections are many, and a significant majority of Israelis want them confronted. But Steiner’s absolutist metric is applied only to Israel. For all other countries, as the philosopher Hilary Putnam writes, “enough may not be everything, but enough is enough.” The Jews alone are held to an impossible standard of perfection.

Steiner’s perverse version of the exilic Jew does have the virtue of being genuine; indeed, he utters the truth that left-wing contemporary critics of Israel dare not mention (at least publicly): It would be better for Israel not to exist at all. The allegorical morality play of radical and irredeemable Israeli evil thus gave birth to a corrosive new version of anti-Semitism, a sweeping new variant of the world’s oldest hatred dressed up as political idealism.

* William Kolbrener is professor of English Literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel. His most recent work is The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition.

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#JUST FOR BOOKS #George Steiner

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leopardprintismybrown · 5 years

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2. We can spend hours working on the right sound.

Queen’s first concert in Japan, 1975. (From Music Life June Issue 1975)

Already popular in Japan, Queen caught fire with the third album SHEER HEART ATTACK, which follows QUEEN II. They performed for the first time in Japan in April and May 1975. After he recovered, even Brian took part to the interview, and they told us once again their opinions about the band’s origin and their released works.

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Weren’t you surprised that there were a lot of female fans gathered at the airport and at the hotel waiting to meet you?

RT: To be honest, all of us were expecting that a bit. However, to receive such a welcome was beyond our imagination. It’s an amazing thing. It’s a relief that there weren’t hysterical groups and exaggerations as it happened in the past. We were at the point that we couldn’t even take a step out of the hotel.

You played concerts in America before coming to Japan, right?

FM: That’s right. It’s been 4-5 months since we’ve left England and we’re travelling. The concerts started in England, we travelled Europe and then we went back to England for a little while for Christmas and right after that we started a long American tour. We stopped in Hawaii to take a rest for 2-3 days and we came here.

How was America’s reaction?

RT: It was a huge success. I think it was a very good trip. Since we performed in many other cities than we previously did, our confidence jumped out throughout this tour because we could finally make it even in America.

I know that it was a huge success in every city…

RT: Aaah, it’s unbelievable. North America was where we had the most resonance. Also, in both the East and the West Coast. I know that the records sold well in the East. However, the spark catches fire always later in the West Coast. The South is tiresome for English bands. But, in general, we received a good reaction in every city. The only exception was Texas.

FM: That was mainly the promoter’s fault.

Brian May: On the other hand, there was a fantastic resonance in New York and Los Angeles, we were happy. It made it possible for us to know that there is a new market, we felt that we gained strong supporters.

RT: From Boston, the most trend-aware place was Cleveland. While we were trying to visit America it was like visiting completely different countries. Everything is different depending on each state. You don’t have control over the communication between states.

Where are you going after Japan?

RT: We’ll be able to go back home! It will be a holiday after the harvest season (as John opens his mouth from the side to add: “Just for two, three days” everyone looks downhearted)

And then you’ll start the recording?

BM: Yes, of the next album.

Have you already planned the next album?

BM: Not clearly, yet. Many people asked us but, actually, it’s often impossible to predict what will be done until our recording isn’t completed. But I’m not talking about the (total) concept album or similar. We let things take their course. I think that the songs will probably be completed before we go to the studio, as it happened with our previous albums. But the only certain thing is that it will turn out to be something different than the previous albums.

RT: The sound is probably going to change so that it won’t end up being boring. This is because it already happened when we were always doing the same things.

When will the next album be released?

FM: I guess around Christmas. (and then he looks at the other members. They all say: “We’re not certain”) We want it released as fast as possible.

How long does it take to make an album?

FM: It takes a very long time. That’s why I think that it’s impossible that the next album comes out before Christmas. And I think this album will be in a different format. I guess it’s clear that we did the recording of all the three albums all at once. However, this album will allow us to take a little more time: to go back and resume recording after going on a trip or while taking a break sometimes. This is because ideas spring out better this way. We can’t wait to start, because it’s like something new is about to happen to us.

RT: This is a memory from America, but when we landed there we were a bit worried, because when we thought that our album was in the 100th position of the hit chart, it immediately fell off. But when we left America, both the album and the single were again ranked in the top 100 and they actually seemed to still rise in the chart. So we were relieved, finally.

Freddie, have you started any new compositions for the new album?

FM: No, I have a few ideas but I’m not good to the point of being able to write along the way. Anyway, I often do that away on tour, so I don’t stick to writing only in the peace of my home.

Do you like to mix down?

FM: We are people who spend a lot of time on anything.

RT: We can spend hours working on the right sound. If the back track is weak, we try to put a sound on it, if it’s not good, we start over. We spend a lot of time on overdubbing, too. Because we don’t have to worry about doing things in a rush. (Brian adds: “We also spend a considerable amount of time on cutting”)

Where do you do the cutting?

BM: At Trident Studios. But, lately, when we went there, we couldn’t quite obtain what we wanted. So we took the tape to America and, when we tried to do the cutting there, it turned out way better than what we did at Trident Studios. We did it at Mastering Lab in New York.

FM: Actually, we’re doing everything by ourselves: while we’re doing the cutting we’re also making the CD jacket at the same time. But it’s good to be absorbed in our work.

Then, could you tell us about the aim and the theme of the three albums released so far?

BM: Actually, we don’t set down. (he means that they don’t establish rules and standards) We just want to make an album that leaves achievements behind. But I suppose that the only album with such thing as a concept was our second one, QUEEN II. Though it was the result of a coincidence, or, more precisely, there was a Black Queen and a White Queen by coincidence.

FM: I think there’s one concept. The record recreates what we were trying to do at the time. People say that QUEEN II is a concept album. However, it’s no more than a step towards the direction we’re trying to take. I mean, we don’t set big plans before we start making a record. We did no more than what we wanted to do at the time.

BM: It’s such a ridiculous thing. They see us as we’re trying to look for something, though we’re not trying to do anything like that. You’ll get over pampered for that reason, and you’ll end up thinking that you have to work very hard and put devotion in what the others expect. But this is hard. It took a lot of time for us to get noticed. That’s why they may have said that “there is no youth”. But I always remember the music I used to listen when I was 10. We were constantly thinking “Aah, if only we had their chance” while listening to Led Zeppelin and The Who. It’s for this reason that we always roam about between the music of that time and the music we’re doing now.

It seems that you all were acquainted before Queen were formed.

BM: Yes, absolutely. Roger and I have known each other for a long time and both of us were hanging out with Freddie since before. We’ve got to know John quite recently. Around 4 years ago. (John nods)

Who’s the one that mainly writes the lyrics?

FM: We don’t decide who is in charge. Everyone writes compositions and then, usually, we add the lyrics, but all the members worked on “Stone Cold Crazy”. This is the first song for which all of us wrote the lyrics, but usually each one brings an outline of the song, listens to it with the other 3 and incorporates ideas.

Please tell us your favourite album among the three.

FM: Uhm, it’s difficult, because I like all three of them. If had to choose only one I’d say SHEER HEART ATTACK. Even when we released the first album I thought it was a very good one, but when I look back now, I think that it's getting better every time we release an album. There is no room for development if you’re satisfied with one thing. I really liked even the second album when it came out, it was exactly what we wanted. I think it’s a good one even when I listen to it now but in this way we’re learning something new with every work.

RT: I think that the best was SHEER HEART ATTACK.

BM: Mine is QUEEN II, for many reasons. Because you can feel that it’s a very intense album.

FM: All three are different. That’s why I like all the three albums. In QUEEN II there’s drama but in SHEER HEART ATTACK we decided that this wasn’t necessary.

Your lyrics are very ambiguos, are you doing that on purpose?

BM: We are proud of it.

RT: I don’t like bad language. Brian is a literary man. It's okay not to use slang, but my the grammar is messy and the spelling is wrong… (everybody bursts into laughter)

FM: It’s a hard work to add lyrics to a composition, indeed.

RT: If the record will get a bad reputation it’s because the spelling is wrong. (he laughs)

Does it bother you if you receive a bad review?

FM: It depends on what they write. If it’s a fair judgement, we don’t mind. There are also articles that we wonder if they were written after properly listening to the record. Because it really can hurt if you’re criticized on the wrong information. They not only wrote terrible things about our songs in the past, but it happened that they mistook who was playing which instrument. Those people didn’t clearly listen to the record. That is a completely unjustified slander. Because if those magazines are influential, many people will end up believing them.

On another note, is any of you married?

FM: No one is. We’re married to the music.

Brian, I heard you’ve been a school teacher?

BM: Yes, I’ve taught maths to students from 12 to 18 years old. It was more like a hobby to me because I did it as a representative teacher or a lecturer. It was truly a fresh and meaningful experience.

What was the occasion that led you to become a musician?

BM: There isn’t a particular occasion that led me to give up on teaching and become a musician. Music was the closest to what I wanted to do the most. It doesn’t mean that I made a change of direction, I can always teach again and do astronomy, if I feel like it. I like astronomy.

Freddie, you were an art college student?

FM: I studied for 3 years at Ealing. A graphics and illustration specialization course. At first, I took a fashion course but since I didn’t like it very much I switched to graphics. I still like to draw and collect pictures.

RT: He designed the band logo. The lettering of the Queen logo and all the other things were done by him.

Would you make a comment on the following groups? First, Led Zeppelin.

ALL: Amazing band. We did concerts at the same time in New Orleans and Los Angeles and we exchanged ideas. We’ve been friends since then.

Bad Company.

BM: A good band. Amazing singer and amazing drummer. We also get along with them. I think Paul Rodgers is really a great singer.

Average White Band.

ALL: Even though the records are great, the live performances are not good. It certainly is a good band but it doesn’t meet our tastes.

What are your plans for the future?

ALL: We’re going to have lunch for the time being. Because we haven’t eaten anything since morning. (they laugh)

We’re terribly sorry.

ALL: It’s fine, MUSIC LIFE is the first magazine that introduced us to Japan. And also, you write almost every month about us. We’re extremely grateful, so we’d do anything to cooperate. We want to take this opportunity to thank all the readers from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you very much, to all of you. We’re very glad that you’ve chosen QUEEN II as the “album of the year” in the popularity contest of MUSIC LIFE. A great trophy is the best present. Thanks again!

**********************************************************

T/N: Second interview from the Music Life special issue about Roger Taylor. As always, I am not an English native speaker, so forgive any possible error. Also, remember that translating into a foreign language is difficult and I hope I have preserved the original meaning.

#translated by me #music life #queen #queen interview #queen in japan #1975 #roger taylor #Brian May #John Deacon #freddie mercury #70s #QUEEN II #SHEER HEART ATTACK

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grigori77 · 4 years

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2019 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 1)

30. GLASS – back in 2000, I went from liking the work of The Sixth Sense’s writer-director M. Night Shyamalan to becoming a genuine FAN thanks to his sneakily revisionist deconstruction of superhero tropes, Unbreakable. It’s STILL my favourite film of his to date, and one of my Top Ten superhero movies EVER, not just a fascinating examination of the mechanics of the genre but also a very satisfying screen origin story – needless to say I’m one of MANY fans who’ve spent nearly two decades holding out hope for a sequel. Flash forward to 2016 and Shyamalan’s long-overdue return-to-form sleeper hit, Split, which not only finally put his career back on course but also dropped a particularly killer end twist by actually being that very sequel. Needless to say 2019 was the year we FINALLY got our PROPER reward for all our patience – Glass is the TRUE continuation of the Unbreakable universe and the closer of a long-intended trilogy. Turns out, though, that it’s also his most CONTROVERSIAL film for YEARS, dividing audiences and critics alike with its unapologetically polarizing plot and execution – I guess that, after a decade of MCU and a powerhouse trilogy of Batman movies from Chris Nolan, we were expecting an epic, explosive action-fest to close things out, but that means we forgot exactly what it is about Shyamalan we got to love so much, namely his unerring ability to subvert and deconstruct whatever genre he’s playing around in. And he really doesn’t DO spectacle, does he? That said, this film is still a surprisingly BIG, sprawling piece of work, even if it the action is, for the most part, MUCH more internalised than most superhero movies. Not wanting to drop any major spoilers on the few who still haven’t seen it, I won’t give away any major plot points, suffice to say that ALL the major players from both Unbreakable and Split have returned – former security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has spent the past nineteen years exploring his super-strength and near-invulnerability while keeping Philadelphia marginally safer as hooded vigilante the Overseer, and the latest target of his crime-fighting crusade is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the vessel of 24 split personalities collectively known as the Horde, who’s continuing his cannibalistic serial-murder spree through the streets. Both are being hunted by the police, as well as Dr. Ellie Staple (series newcomer Sarah Paulson), a clinical psychiatrist specialising in treating individuals who suffer the delusional belief that they’re superheroes, her project also encompassing David’s former mentor-turned-nemesis Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), the eponymous Mr. Glass, whose life-long suffering from a crippling bone disease that makes his body dangerously fragile has done nothing to blunt the genius-level intellect that’s made him a ruthlessly accomplished criminal mastermind. How these remarkable individuals are brought together makes for fascinating viewing, and while it may be a good deal slower and talkier than some might have preferred, this is still VERY MUCH the Shyamalan we first came to admire – fiendishly inventive, slow-burn suspenseful and absolutely DRIPPING with cool earworm dialogue, his characteristically mischievous sense of humour still present and correct, and he’s retained that unswerving ability to wrong-foot us at every turn, right up to one of his most surprising twist endings to date. The cast are, as ever, on fire, the returning hands all superb while those new to the universe easily measure up to the quality of talent on display – Willis and Jackson are, as you’d expect, PERFECT throughout, brilliantly building on the incredibly solid groundwork laid in Unbreakable, while it’s a huge pleasure to see Anya Taylor-Joy, Spencer Treat Clark (a fine actor we don’t see NEARLY enough of, in my opinion) and Charlayne Woodard get MUCH bigger, more prominent roles this time out, while Paulson delivers an understated but frequently mesmerising turn as the ultimate unshakable sceptic. As with Split, however, the film is comprehensively stolen by McAvoy, whose truly chameleonic performance actually manages to eclipse its predecessor in its levels of sheer genius. Altogether this is another sure-footed step in the right direction for a director who’s finally regained his singular auteur prowess – say what you will about that ending, but it certainly is a game-changer, as boldly revisionist as anything that’s preceded it and therefore, in my opinion, exactly how it SHOULD have gone. If nothing else, this is a film that should be applauded for its BALLS …

29. THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON – quite possibly the year’s most adorable indie, this dramatic feature debut from documentarian writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz largely snuck in under the radar on release, but has gone on to garner some well-deserved critical appreciation and sleeper hit success. The lion’s share of the film’s success must surely go to the inspired casting, particularly in the central trio who drive the action – Nilson and Schwartz devised the film with Zack Gotsagen, an exceptionally talented young actor with Down’s Syndrome, specifically in mind for the role of Zak, a wrestling obsessive languishing in a North Carolina retirement home who dreams of escaping his stifling confines and going to the training camp of his hero, the Saltwater Redneck (Thomas Haden Church), where he can learn to become a pro wrestler; after slipping free, Zak enlists the initially wary help of down-at-heel criminal fisherman Tyler (Shia LaBaouf) in reaching his intended destination, while the pair are pursued by Zak’s primary caregiver, Eleanor (Dakota Johnson). Needless to say the unlikely pair bond on the road, and when Eleanor is reluctantly forced to tag along with them, a surrogate family is formed … yeah, the plot is so predictable you can see every twist signposted from miles back, but that familiarity is never a problem because these characters are so lovingly written and beautifully played that you’ve fallen for them within five minutes of meeting them, so you’re effortlessly swept along for the ride. The three leads are pure gold – this is the most laid back and cuddly Shia’s been for years, but his lackadaisical charm is pleasingly tempered with affecting pathos driven by a tragic loss in Tyler’s recent past, while Johnson is sensible, sweet and likeably grounded, even when Eleanor’s at her most exasperated, but Gotsagen is the real surprise, delivering an endearingly unpredictable, livewire performance that blazes with true, honest purity and total defiance in the face of any potential difficulties society may try to throw at Zak – while there’s excellent support from Church in a charmingly awkward late-film turn that goes a long way to reminding us just what an acting treasure he is, as well as John Hawkes and rapper Yelawolf as a pair of lowlife crab-fishermen hunting for Tyler, intending to wreak (not entirely undeserved) revenge on him for an ill-judged professional slight. Enjoying a gentle sense of humour and absolutely CRAMMED with heartfelt emotional heft, this really was one of the most downright LOVEABLE films of 2019.

28. PET SEMATARY – first off, let me say that I never saw the 1989 feature adaptation of Stephen King’s story, so I have no comparative frame of reference there – I WILL say, however, that the original novel is, in my opinion, one of the strongest offerings from America’s undisputed master of literary horror, so any attempt made to bring it to the big screen had better be a good one. Thankfully, this version more than delivers in that capacity, proving to be one of the more impressive of his cinematic outings in recent years (not quite up to the standard of The Mist or It Chapter 1, perhaps, but certainly on a par with the criminally overlooked 1408), as well as one of the year’s top horror offerings. This may be the feature debut of directing double-act Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, but they both display a wealth of natural talent here, wrangling bone-chilling scares and a pervading atmosphere of oppressive dread to deliver a top-notch screen fright-fest that works its way under your skin and stays put for days after. Jason Clarke is a classic King everyman hero as Boston doctor Louis Creed, displaced to the small Maine town of Ludlow as he trades the ER for a quiet clinic practice so he can spent more time with his family – Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color, Stranger Things), excellent throughout as his haunted, emotionally fragile wife Rachel, toddler son Gage (twins Hugo and Lucas Lavole), and daughter Ellie (newcomer Jeté Laurence, BY FAR the film’s biggest revelation, delivering to the highest degree even when her role becomes particularly intense). Their new home seems idyllic, the only blots being the main road at the end of their drive which experiences heavy traffic from speeding trucks, and the children’s pet cemetery in the woods at the back of their garden, which has become something of a local landmark. But there’s something far darker in the deeper places beyond, an ancient place of terrible power Louis is introduced to by their well-meaning but ultimately fallible elderly neighbour Jud (one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from screen legend John Lithgow) when his daughter’s beloved cat Church is run over. The cat genuinely comes back, but he’s irrevocably changed, the once gentle and lovable furball now transformed into a menacingly mangy little psychopath, and his resurrection sets off a chain of horrific events destined to devour the entire family … this is supernatural horror at its most inherently unnerving, mercilessly twisting the screws throughout its slow-burn build to the inevitable third act bloodbath and reaching a bleak, soul-crushing climax that comes close to rivalling the still unparalleled sucker-punch of The Mist – the adaptation skews significantly from King’s original at the mid-point, but even purists will be hard-pressed to deny that this is still VERY MUCH in keeping with the spirit of the book right up to its harrowing closing shot. The King of Horror has been well served once again – fans can rest assured that his dark imagination continues to inspire some truly great cinematic scares …

27. THE REPORT – the CIA’s notorious use of torture to acquire information from detainees in Guantanamo Bay and various other sites around the world in the wake of September 11, 2001, has been a particularly spiky political subject for years now, one which has gained particular traction with cinema-goers over the years thanks to films like Rendition and, of course, controversial Oscar-troubler Zero Dark Thirty. It’s also a particular bugbear of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, Contagion, Side Effects) – his parents are both psychologists, and he found it particularly offensive that a profession he knows was created to help people could have been turned into such a damaging weapon against the human psyche, inexorably leading him to taking up this passion project, championed by its producer, and Burns’ long-time friend and collaborator, Steven Soderbergh. It tells the true story of Senate staffer Daniel Jones’ five-year battle to bring his damning 6,300-page study of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, into the light of day in the face of increasingly intense and frequently underhanded resistance from the Agency and various high-ranking officials within the US Government whose careers could be harmed should their own collusion be revealed. In lesser hands this could have been a clunky, unappetisingly dense excuse for a slow-burn political thriller that drowned in its own exposition, but Burns handles the admittedly heavyweight material with deft skill and makes each increasingly alarming revelation breathlessly compelling while he ratchets up the tension by showing just what a seemingly impossible task Jones and his small but driven team faced. The film would have been nought, however, without a strong cast, and this one has a killer – taking a break from maintaining his muscle-mass for Star Wars, Adam Driver provides a suitably robust narrative focus as Jones, an initially understated workman who slowly transforms into an incensed moral crusader as he grows increasingly filled with righteous indignation by the vile subject matter he’s repeatedly faced with, and he’s provided with sterling support from the likes of Annette Bening, delivering her best performance in years as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Jones’ staunchest supporter, the ever-wonderful Ted Levine as oily CIA director John O. Brennan, Tim Blake Nelson as a physician contracted by the CIA to assist with interrogations who became genuinely disgusted by the horrors he witnessed, and Matthew Rhys as an unnamed New York Times reporter Jones considers leaking the report to when it looks like it might never be released. This is powerful stuff, and while it may only mark Burns’ second directorial feature (after his obscure debut Pu-239), he handles the gig like a seasoned pro, milking the material for every drop of dramatic tension while keeping the narrative as honest, forthright and straightforward as possible, and the end result makes for sobering, distressing and thoroughly engrossing viewing. Definitely one of the most important films not only of 2019, but of the decade itself, and one that NEEDS to be seen.

26. DARK PHOENIX – wow, this really has been a year for mistreated sequels, hasn’t it? There’s a seriously stinky cloud of controversy surrounding what is now, in light of recent developments between Disney and Twentieth Century Fox, the last true Singer-era X-Men movie, a film which saw two mooted release dates (first November 2018 then the following February, before finally limping onto screens with very little fanfare in June 2019, almost as if Fox wanted to bury it. Certainly rumours of its compromise were rife, particularly regarding supposed rushed reshoots because of clashing similarities with Marvel’s major tent-pole release Captain Marvel (and given the all-conquering nature of the MCU there was no way they were having that, was there?), so like many I was expecting a clunky mess, maybe even a true stinker to rival X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In truth, while it’s not perfect, the end result is nothing like the turd we all feared – the final film is, in fact, largely a success, worthy of favourable comparison with its stronger predecessors. It certainly makes much needed amends for the disappointing mismanagement of the source comics’ legendary Dark Phoenix saga in 2006’s decidedly compromised original X-Men trilogy capper The Last Stand, this time treating the story with the due reverence and respect it deserves as well as serving as a suitably powerful send-off for more than one beloved key character. Following the “rebooted” path of the post-Days of Future Past timeline, it’s now 1992, and after the world-changing events of Apocalypse the X-Men have become a respected superhero team with legions of fans and their own personal line to the White House, while mutants at large have mostly become accepted by the regular humans around them. Then a hastily planned mission into space takes a turn for the worst and Jean Grey (Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner) winds up absorbing an immensely powerful, thoroughly inexplicable cosmic force that makes her powers go haywire while also knocking loose repressed childhood traumas Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) would rather had stayed buried, sending her on a dangerous spiral out of control which leads to a destructive confrontation and the inadvertent death of a teammate. Needless to say, the situation soon becomes desperate as Jean goes on the run and the world starts to turn against them all once again … all in all, then, it’s business as usual for the cast and crew of one of Fox’s flagship franchises, and it SHOULD have gone off without a hitch. When Bryan Singer opted not to return this time around (instead setting his sights on Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody), key series writer Simon Kinberg stepped into the breach for his directorial debut, and it turns out he’s got a real talent for it, giving us just the kind of robust, pacy, thrilling action-packed epic his compatriot would have delivered, filled with the same thumping great set-pieces (the final act’s stirring, protracted train battle is the unequivocal highlight here), well-observed character beats and emotional resonance we’ve come to expect from the series as a whole (then again, he does know these movies back to frond having at least co-written his fair share). The cast, similarly, are all on top form – McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (as fan favourite Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto) know their roles so well now they can do this stuff in their sleep, but we still get to see them explore interesting new facets of their characters (particularly McAvoy, who gets to reveal an intriguing dark side to the Professor we’ve only ever seen hinted at before now), while Turner finally gets to really breathe in a role which felt a little stiff and underexplored in her series debut in Apocalypse (she EASILY forges the requisite connective tissue to Famke Janssen’s more mature and assured take in the earlier films); conversely Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler) and Evan Peters (Quicksilver) get somewhat short shrift but nonetheless do A LOT with what little they have, and at least Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult still get to do plenty of dramatic heavy lifting as the last of Xavier’s original class, Raven (Mystique) and Hank McCoy (Beast); the only real weak link in the cast is the villain, Vuk, a shape-shifting alien whose quest to seize the power Jean’s appropriated is murkily defined at best, but at least Jessica Chastain manages to invest her with enough icy menace to keep things from getting boring. All in all, then, this is very much a case of business as usual, Kinberg and co keeping the action thundering along at a suitably cracking pace throughout (powered by a typically epic score from Hans Zimmer), and the film only really comes off the rails in its final moments, when that aforementioned train finally comes off its tracks and the reported reshoots must surely kick in – as a result this is, to me, most reminiscent of previous X-flick The Wolverine, which was a rousing success for the majority of its runtime, only coming apart in its finale thanks to that bloody ridiculous robot samurai. The climax is, therefore, a disappointment, too clunky and sudden and overly neat in its denouement (we really could have done with a proper examination of the larger social impact of these events), but it’s little enough that it doesn’t spoil what came before … which just makes the film’s mismanagement and resulting failure, as well as its subsequent treatment from critics and fans alike, all the more frustrating. This film deserved much better, but ultimately looks set to be disowned and glossed over by most of the fanbase as the property as a whole goes through the inevitable overhaul now that Disney/Marvel owns Fox and plans to bring the X-Men and their fellow mutants into the MCU fold. I feel genuinely sorry for the one remaining X-film, The New Mutants, which is surely destined for spectacular failure after its similarly shoddy round of reschedules finally comes to an end this summer …

25. IT CHAPTER 2 – back in 2017, Mama director Andy Muschietti delivered the first half of his ambitious two-film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s most popular and personal novels, which had long been considered un-filmable (the 90s miniseries had a stab, but while it deserves its cult favourite status it certainly fell short in several places) until Muschietti and screenwriters Cary Joji Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman seemingly did the impossible, and the end result was the top horror hit of the year. Ultimately, then, it was gonna be a tough act to follow, and there was MAJOR conjecture whether they could repeat that success with this second half. Would lightning strike twice? Well, the simple answer is … mostly. 2017’s Chapter 1 was a stone-cold masterpiece, and one of the strongest elements in its favour was the extremely game young cast of newcomers and relative unknown child actors who brought the already much beloved Loser’s Club to perfectly-cast life, a seven-strong gang of gawky pre-teen underdogs you couldn’t help loving, which made it oh-so-easy to root for them as they faced off against that nightmarish shape-shifting child-eating monster, Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It was primal, it was terrifying, and it was BURSTING with childhood nostalgia that thoroughly resonated with an audience hungry for more 80s-set coming-of-age genre fare after the runaway success of Stranger Things. Bringing the story into the present day with the Losers now returning to their childhood home of Derry, Maine as forty-something adults, Chapter 2 was NEVER going to achieve the same pulse-quickening electric charge the first film pulled off, was it? Thankfully, with the same director and (mostly) the same writing crew on hand (Fukunaga jumped ship but Dauberman was there to finish up with the help of Jason Fuchs and an uncredited Jeffrey Jurgensen) there’s still plenty of that old magic left over, so while it’s not quite the same second time round, this still feels very much like the same adventure, just older, wiser and a bit more cynical. Here’s a more relevant reality check, mind – those who didn’t approve of the first film’s major changes from the book are going to be even more incensed by this, but the differences here are at least organic and in keeping with the groundwork laid in Chapter 1, and indeed this film in particular is a VERY different beast from the source material, but these differences are actually kind of a strength here, Muschietti and co. delivering something that works MUCH better cinematically than a more faithful take would have. Anyway, the Loser’s Club are back, all grown up and (for the most part) wildly successful living FAR AWAY from Derry with dream careers and seemingly perfect lives. Only Mike Hanlon has remained behind to hold vigil over the town and its monstrous secret, and when a new spree of disappearances and grisly murders begins he calls his old friends back home to fulfil the pact they all swore to uphold years ago – stop Pennywise once and for all. The new cast are just as excellent as their youthful counterparts – Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy are, of course, the big leads here as grown up Beverley Marsh and Bill Denbrough, bringing every watt of star power they can muster, but the others hold more interest, with Bill Hader perfectly cast (both director and child actor’s personal first choice) as smart-mouth Richie Tozier, Isaiah Mustafah (best known as the Old Spice guy from those hilarious commercials) playing VERY MUCH against type as Mike, Jay Ryan (successful on the small screen in Top of the Lake and Beauty & the Beast, but very much getting his cinematic big break here) as a slimmed-down and seriously buffed-out Ben Hanscom, James Ransone (Sinister) as neurotic hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak, and Andy Bean (Power, the recent Swamp Thing series) as ever-rational Stan Uris – but we still get to hang out with the original kids too in new flashbacks that (understandably) make for some of the film’s best scenes, while Bill Skarsgard is as terrifying as ever as he brings new ferocity, insidious creepiness and even a touch of curious back-story to Pennywise. I am happy to report this new one IS just as scary as its predecessor, a skin-crawling, spine-tingling, pants-wetting cold sweat of a horror-fest that works its way in throughout its substantial running time and, as before, sticks with you LONG after the credits have rolled, but it’s also got the same amount of heart, emotional heft and pathos, nostalgic charm (albeit more grown-up and sullied) and playful, sometimes decidedly mischievous geeky humour, so that as soon as you’re settled in it really does feel like you’ve come home. It’s also fiendishly inventive, the final act in particular skewing in some VERY surprising new directions that there’s NO WAY you’ll see coming, and the climax also, interestingly, redresses one particularly frustrating imbalance that always bugged me about the book, making for an especially moving, heartbreaking denouement. Interestingly, there’s a running joke in the film that pokes fun at a perceived view from some quarters that Stephen King’s endings often disappoint – there’s no such fault with THIS particular adaptation. For me, this was altogether JUST the concluding half I was hoping for, so while it’s not as good as the first, it should leave you satisfied all the same.

24. MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN – it’s taken Edward Norton twenty years to get his passion project adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel to the big screen, but the final film was certainly worth the wait, a cool-as-ice noir thriller in which its writer-director also, of course, stars as one of the most unusual ‘tecs around. Lionel Essrog suffers from Tourette syndrome, prone to uncontrollable ticks and vocal outbursts as well as obsessive-compulsive spirals that can really ruin his day, but he’s also got a genius-level intellect and a photographic memory, which means he’s the perfect fit for the detective agency of accomplished, highly successful New York gumshoe Frank Minna (Bruce Willis). But when their latest case goes horribly wrong and Frank dies in a back-alley gunfight, the remaining members of the agency are left to pick up the pieces and try to find out what went wrong, Lionel battling his own personal, mental and physical demons as he tries to unravel an increasingly labyrinthine tangle of lies, deceit, corporate corruption and criminal enterprise that reaches to the highest levels of the city’s government. Those familiar with the original novel will know that it’s set in roughly the present day, but Norton felt many aspects of the story lent themselves much better to the early 1950s, and it really was a good choice – Lionel is a man very much out his time, a very odd fit in an age of stuffy morals and repression, while the themes of racial upheaval, rampant urban renewal and massive, unchecked corporate greed feel very much of the period. Besides, there’s few things as seductive than a good noir thriller, and Norton has crafted a real GEM right here. The pace can be a little glacial at times, but this simply gives the unfolding plot and extremely rich collection of characters plenty of room to grow, while the jazzy score (from up-and-comer Daniel Pemberton, composer on Steve Jobs, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) provides a surprising complimentary accompaniment to the rather free-form narrative style and Lionel’s own scattershot, bebop style. Norton is exceptional in the lead, landing his best role in years with an exquisitely un-self-conscious ease that makes for thoroughly compelling viewing (surely more than one nod will be due come awards-season), but he doesn’t hog ALL the limelight, letting his uniformly stellar supporting cast shine bright as well – Willis doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time, but delivers a typically strong, nuanced performance that makes his absence throughout the rest of the film keenly felt, Gugu Mbatha-Raw continues to build an impressive run of work as Laura, the seemingly unimportant woman Lionel befriends, who could actually be the key to the whole case, Alec Baldwin is coolly menacing as power-hungry property magnate and heavyweight city official Moses Randolph, the film’s nominal big-bad, Willem Dafoe is absolutely electrifying as his down-at-heel, insignificant genius brother Lou, and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael K. Williams is quietly outstanding as mysterious jazz musician Trumpet Man, while Bobby Canavale, Ethan Suplee and Dallas Roberts are all excellent as the other hands in Minna’s detective agency. It’s a chilled-out affair, happy to hang back and let its slow-burn plot simmer while Lionel tries to navigate his job and life in general while battling his many personal difficulties, but due to the incredible calibre of the talent on offer, the incredibly rich dialogue and obligatory hardboiled gumshoe voiceover, compelling story and frequently achingly beautiful visuals, this is about as compulsively rewarding as cinema gets. Norton’s crafted a film noir worthy of comparison with the likes of L.A. Confidential and Chinatown, proving that he’s a triple-threat cinematic talent to be reckoned with.

23. PROSPECT – I love a good cinematic underdog, there’s always some dynamite indies and sleepers that just about slip through the cracks that I end up championing every year, and one of 2019’s favourites was a minor sensation at 2018’s South By Southwest film festival, a singularly original ultra-low-budget sci-fi adventure that made a genuine virtue of its miniscule budget. Riffing on classic eco-minded space flicks like Silent Running, it introduces a father-and-daughter prospecting team who land a potentially DEEPLY lucrative contract mining for an incredibly rare element on a toxic jungle moon – widower Damon (Transparent’s Jay Duplass), who’s downtrodden and world-weary but still a dreamer, and teenager Cee (relative newcomer Sophie Thatcher), an introverted bookworm with hidden reserves of ingenuity and fortitude. The job starts well, Damon setting his sights on a rumoured “queen’s layer” that could make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, but when they meet smooth-talking scavenger Ezra (Narcos’ Pedro Pascal), things take a turn for the worse – Damon is killed and Cee is forced to team up with Ezra to have any hope for survival on this hostile, unforgiving moon. Thatcher is an understated joy throughout, her seemingly detached manner belying hidden depths of intense feeling, while Pascal, far from playing a straight villain, turns Ezra into something of a tragic, charismatic antihero we eventually start to sympathise with, and the complex relationship that develops between them is a powerful, mercurial thing, the constantly shifting dynamic providing a powerful driving force for the film. Debuting writer-directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell have crafted a wonderfully introspective, multi-layered tone poem of aching beauty, using subtle visual effects and a steamy, glow-heavy colour palette to make the lush forest environs into something nonetheless eerie and inhospitable, while the various weird and colourful denizens of this deadly little world prove that Ezra may be the LEAST of the dangers Cee faces in her quest for escape. Inventive, intriguing and a veritable feast for the eyes and intellect, this is top-notch indie sci-fi and a sign of great things to come from its creators, thoroughly deserving of major cult recognition in the future.

22. DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE – S. Craig Zahler is a writer-director who’s become a major fixture on my ones-to-watch list in recent years, instantly winning me over with his dynamite debut feature Bone Tomahawk before cementing that status with awesome follow-up Brawl On Cell Block 99. His latest is another undeniable hit that starts deceptively simply before snowballing into a sprawling urban crime epic as it follows its main protagonists – disgraced Bulwark City cops Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Tony Lurasetti (BOCB99’s Vince Vaughn), on unpaid suspension after their latest bust leads to a PR nightmare – on a descent into a hellish criminal underworld as they set out to “seek compensation” for their situation by ripping off the score from a bank robbery spearheaded by ruthlessly efficient professional thief Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann). In lesser hands, this two-hour-forty-minute feature might have felt like a painfully padded effort that would have passed far better chopped down to a breezy 90-minutes, but Zahler is such a compellingly rich and resourceful writer that every scene is essential viewing, overflowing with exquisitely drawn characters spouting endlessly quotable, gold-plated dialogue, and the constantly shifting narrative focus brings such consistent freshness that the increasingly complex plot remains rewarding right to the end. The two leads are both typically excellent – Vaughn gets to let loose with a far more showy, garrulous turn here than his more reserved character in his first collaboration with Zahler, while this is EASILY the best performance I’ve seen Gibson deliver in YEARS, the grizzled veteran clearly having a fine old time getting his teeth into a particularly meaty role that very much plays to his strengths – and they’re brilliantly bolstered by an excellent supporting cast – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’s Tory Kittles easily matches them in his equally weighty scenes as Henry Johns, a newly-released ex-con also out to improve his family’s situation with a major score, while Kretschmann is at his most chilling as the brutal killer who executes his plans with cold-blooded precision, and there are wonderful scene-stealing offerings from Jennifer Carpenter, Udo Kier, Don Johnson (three more Zahler regulars, each featured with Vaughn on BOCB99), Michael Jai White, Laurie Holden and newcomer Miles Truitt. This is a proper meaty film, dark, intense, gritty and unflinching in its portrayal of honest, unglamorous violence and its messy aftermath, but fans of grown-up filmmaking will find PLENTY to enjoy here, Zahler crafting a crime epic comparable to the heady best of Scorsese and Tarantino. Another sure-fire winner from one of the best new filmmakers around.

21. FAST COLOR – intriguingly, the most INTERESTING superhero movie of the year was NOT a major franchise property, or even a comic book adapted to the screen at all, but a wholly original indie which snuck in very much under the radar on its release but is surely destined for cult greatness in the future, not least due to some much-deserved critical acclaim. Set in an unspecified future where it hasn’t rained for years, a homeless vagabond named Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is making her aimless way across a desolate American Midwest, tormented by violent seizures which cause strange localised earthquakes, and hunted by Bill (Argo’s Christopher Denham), a rogue scientist who wants to capture her so he can study her abilities. Ultimately she’s left with no other recourse than to run home, sheltering with her mother Bo (Middle of Nowhere and Orange is the New Black’s Lorraine Toussaint), and her young daughter Lila (The Passage’s Saniyya Sidney), both of whom also have weird and wondrous powers of their own. As the estranged family reconnect, Ruth finally learns to control her powers as she’s forced to confront her own troubled past, but as Bill closes in it looks like their idyll might be short-lived … this might only be the second feature of writer-director Julie Hart (who cut her teeth penning well-regarded indie western The Keeping Room before making her own debut helming South By Southwest Film Festival hit Miss Stevens), but it’s a blinding statement of intent for the future, a deceptively understated thing of beauty that eschews classic superhero cinema conventions of big spectacle and rousing action in favour of a quiet, introspective character-driven story where the unveiling and exploration of Ruth and her kin’s abilities are secondary to the examination of how their familial dynamics work (or often DON’T), while Hart and cinematographer Michael Fimognari (probably best known for his frequent work for Mike Flanagan) bring a ruined but bleakly beautiful future to life through inventively understated production design and sweeping, dramatic vistas largely devoid of visual effects. Subtlety is the watchword, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fireworks here, it’s just that they’re generally performance-based – awards-darling Mbatha-Raw (Belle) gives a raw, heartfelt performance, painting Ruth in vivid shades of grey, while Toussaint is restrained but powerfully memorable and Sidney builds on her already memorable work to deliver what might be her best turn to date, and there are strong supporting turns from Denham (who makes his nominal villain surprisingly sympathetic) and Hollywood great David Strathairn as gentle small town sheriff Ellis. Leisurely paced and understated it may be, but this is still an incendiary piece of work, sure to become a breakout sleeper hit for a filmmaking talent from whom I expect GREAT THINGS in the future, and since the story’s been picked up for expansion into a TV series with Hart in charge that looks like a no-brainer. And it most assuredly IS a bona fide superhero movie, despite appearances to the contrary …

#glass #glass movie #the peanut butter falcon #pet sematary #the report #dark phoenix #it chapter 2 #motherless brooklyn #prospect #prospect movie #dragged across concrete #fast color #2019 in movies

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what-eats-owls · 5 years

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Hi! I just saw the news about your book; congratulations!!! That's so amazing!!! I was hoping I could ask you what your querying/publishing process was like? My dream is to get published by a big name kind of publisher like Tor, and it would be wonderful to hear if and how you got an agent, what the process was like, etc. Thank you, and congrats again!! I'll definitely be keeping a lookout for the book

Hey there!

(Sidebar: if anyone’s curious and/or wants to preorder my book, which I, in my unbiased opinion, highly recommend, here’s everything you need to know)

I can tell you about not one, but two querying processes, because they’re both equally important in how I made it this far.

The first querying process was for a book that I still love and would like to resuscitate someday.

Here’s how it went down:

I drafted the manuscript from February - October 2013.

I revised November-January 2014

I began querying literary agents toward the end of Jan 2014 and revised based on the feedback I got

I submitted the manuscript to Pitch Wars in 2014, and then again in 2015, and made it in for 2015, revising September-October, and pitching in November

Around mid-March 2016, I sent the last query for that novel, and focused my undivided attention on another WIP.

And here is a comprehensive list of every mistake I made:

I drafted the manuscript from February - October 2013.

It was a difficult-to-classify genre. Science Fantasy? Future Fantasy? If a bookseller doesn’t know where to put your book, they won’t make a whole new shelf just for you. (Note: this seems to be on the verge of shifting, but I wouldn’t bank on it for your debut.)

It was 152,000 words long. The industry standard for YA SFF (SciFi+Fantasy) is 100,000 words or less. Exceptions are rare and usually extended to established authors who have proven their marketability.

I revised November-January 2014

I had no critique partners. Sure, you can be your own worst critic, but you absolutely need another perspective.

I made no substantial changes. Removing an apostrophe didn’t fix a sloppy plot.

I began querying literary agents toward the end of Jan 2014 and revised based on the feedback I got

I queried without doing much research into industry standards, comp titles, etc. I just googled “how to sell a book” and went to town.

I submitted the manuscript to Pitch Wars in 2014, and then again in 2015, and made it in for 2015, revising September-October, and pitching in November.

Pitch Wars was actually great! I made a lot of friends who I still speak to today. That said, it was a big risk to enter a story that hadn’t made it in the previous year, because most of the mentors had passed on it a year earlier.

Around mid-March 2016, I sent the last query for that novel, and focused my undivided attention on another WIP.

CUE SIRENS, AIRHORNS, SKYWRITERS THAT SPELL OUT “THIS WAS THE SMART CHOICE”

At this point, I had spent two years trying to query a manuscript that wasn’t gonna make it. It was hard, and heartbreaking, because at that point I had poured everything I had into that story, and because it wasn’t enough, I didn’t feel like I was enough. I felt like Sisyphus pushing a big lousy rock up a hill, telling myself it was my fault it kept rolling to the bottom. But I loved that lousy rock! I didn’t want to walk away and find a different rock I could push up a hill, I wanted that rock. It took two years of pushing before I finally realized: it’s a rock. Without me, it’s not going anywhere. And I could come back when I was ready.

(I was also dealing with some major life events at the time - my mother had just been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, and my miserable job was in a downward spiral. IT WAS A GREAT MENTAL SPACE ALL AROUND. But my mom is cancer-free now, and I write for a living, so suck it cancer! Suck it, shitty job!)

What I didn’t realize until much later is that when you spend two years pushing a boulder uphill? You get shredded like Kylo Ren.

All those failures, all those mistakes I’d learned from, had made me a better writer. (It also made me a slower drafter because I was waaaay more critical of my own writing, but eh. I could draft slower because the end product needed less revision.)

So here’s how things went down with my second manuscript:

I drafted the manuscript off-and-on from January - July 2015, then exclusively from March - December 2016

I revised January and February 2017 (when I wasn’t, y’know, wallowing in existential horror in the orange mold infestation in the White House)

I was accepted into Pitch Madness, a contest which asked for a VERY short pitch (35 words or less) and the first 250 words of the manuscript; this was in early March 2017.

The response from agents in the contest was positive enough that I sent queries out to the rest of the agents on my priority list

I signed with my fabulous agent in mid-April 2017

My book sold in late June 2017

Said book will be released in just over four months from now. :)

So let’s review:

Manuscript one: eight months drafting, two years querying, no agent, no deal

Manuscript two: ~1.5 year drafting, one month querying, sold two months after signing with my agent

Yeah, I’d say I learned a thing or two.

As far as things go once you’ve sold to a publisher, everyone’s timeline is SUPER different:

Sometimes your editor has minimal notes, but you don’t get them for months.

Sometimes you get a ton of notes even BEFORE you sign your contract.

Sometimes your book may be in pristine shape, but the release schedule is super crowded, so it won’t be out until there’s an opening in a year; or the reverse, your book is super buzzy and gets fast-tracked and has to be ready on a SUPER FAST schedule.

Sometimes your editor moves to a different publisher, and you get assigned to a new editor.

All of these have happened for authors I know. It’s basically Calvinball, there is no norm. (Fun fact: this is also part of why every author yells “DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB FOR THE LOVE OF GOD” but that’s another post.)

One other note for this: if you’re interested in publishing with a mid-to-major publisher, you need an agent. Publishing contracts are notoriously full of potential pitfalls - for example, I can think of at least one major publisher that has language in their default contract that says the contract can be terminated if the author “flauts public convention.” And there are other, less flagrantly terrible parts of the contract that can still screw you over if they aren’t caught, and things that can still get weird outside of contracts that your agent can help you navigate, and basically your agent is there to make sure you’re all getting the best deal possible.

Anyway, that’s my publishing journey thus far! If anyone has any questions, hit up my inbox.

#not draws #my books #querying #publishing #ya fantasy #listen y'all it turns out failure makes you buff as hell #Anonymous

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faithfulnews · 4 years

Text

Work, Play, Poetry

By Anthony Domestico

March 4, 2020

The life of the late novelist Robert Stone was filled with improbabilities. As Madison Smartt Bell puts it in his new biography, Stone, whose globe-spanning novels took on American history and the American soul, had “a taste for marijuana and alcohol (and for quaaludes and opiates).” In the 1960s, Stone was friends with Ken Kesey; you can imagine how much imbibing that entailed. While in Vietnam on a reporting trip, he experimented with heroin. (He “snorted, smoked, [and] possibly drank it on one occasion,” Bell writes.) Yet Stone lived to the ripe age of seventy-seven, writing a strong novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, two years before he died in 2015. “A connoisseur of women of all varieties,” Bell writes, perhaps a little too forgivingly, “Bob was far from above the occasional fling.” He had an open marriage—so open that he had a child with a family friend in the 1960s and a tempestuous affair with a younger writer three decades later. Yet he stayed with his wife Janice for fifty-five years. By Bell’s reckoning, and it seems accurate, theirs was a happy marriage.

But the most pleasant surprise, for me at least, was the decades-long friendship Stone had with Marilynne Robinson. What a literary odd couple they make: Robinson the proud Calvinist and Stone the lapsed Catholic; Robinson known best for her quiet, lovely novels about mid-century Iowa and Stone known best for his wild, prophetic novels—A Hall of Mirrors (1967), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), and others—all probing the manic brain and corrupted heart of American empire. What must the two writers have talked about? The nature of God, I’m sure. (Stone in an interview: “As a result of having been a Catholic, I’m acutely aware of the difference between a world in which there’s a God and a world in which there isn’t.”) The nature of craft, I imagine. (Stone taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale, among other places.)

Bell was friends with Stone, and his affection for his subject comes through. Writing in the first person, Bell recreates trips the two took to Haiti and conversations they had about fiction’s moral purpose. Despite this love, though, Bell doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to the suffering brought on by Stone’s addictions. The last hundred or so pages are difficult to read, an onslaught of car crashes—Stone was a terrible driver, even when sober—narcotic dependence, increasingly frequent falls, and an attempted suicide. Stone was charismatic, everyone agrees. He was also destructive, to others occasionally and to himself consistently.

Bell is an accomplished novelist in his own right, and Child of Light, like a good work of fiction, lives through its details. Stone “huffed as much oxygen as possible in a back room of Politics and Prose” before giving a reading. David Milch, the producer of Deadwood, put Stone on the payroll at his production company to give him something to do, and some money, after a stint in rehab. Annie Dillard and Joy Williams vacationed with Stone in the 1990s. (Dillard and Stone went white-water tubing in Missoula and saw a brown bear.)

Stone’s writing offers an imaginative record of America’s political and spiritual dimensions: “That is my subject,” Stone wrote, “America and Americans.” Bell reads this wild life and lasting achievement with grace and sympathy.

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone Madison Smartt Bell Doubleday, $35, 608 pp.

Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is the best baseball novel ever written, and I won’t hear otherwise. But The Cactus League, the first novel by Paris Review editor Emily Nemens, is also very good.

If Nemens’s debut is not quite in the same league as The Universal Baseball Association, that’s partly because it’s playing a different game. Coover’s is a postmodern novel about the postmodernism of America’s pastime. (We often care less about the game itself than about its statistical representations—batting averages and win shares.) Nemens’s is a work of straightforward realism. Baseball here is a business, and Nemens gives it to us from all angles: superstar outfielders losing fortunes at the gambling table; groupies hanging out by the bullpen; agents hushing up scandals; elderly stadium organists whose stiff hands can’t hit the keys they once could.

The Cactus League takes place in Arizona during spring training. Each chapter, nine in all, follows a different figure associated with the imaginary Los Angeles Lions franchise. Most of the particulars are right. Nemens knows that Notre Dame’s baseball team is in the ACC, and she nicely skewers the increasing encroachment of hot tubs and goofy sound effects in new ballparks. A lovely small detail: Jason Goodyear, the book’s self-sabotaging superstar, gets a signature sneaker—“the first time they’d named a shoe after a ballplayer since Griffey.”

Not everything works. No fan would call a pitcher a “fastballer,” as one character does. (At least it’s not “speedballer,” à la Bruce Springsteen.) No partial owner could demand that a prominent outfielder be traded because of sexual jealousy—and then have it happen within days. (Partial owners don’t have that much power; star players don’t get traded overnight, especially when their replacement has only played college ball.) Such details wouldn’t much matter in a postmodernist romp. They do here.

But the pacing is good and the prose generally strong. Nemens refuses to engage in the romanticizing many fall into when spring comes around. Bartlett Giamatti famously and poetically said that baseball “is designed to break your heart.” After all, Giamatti rhapsodizes, “the game begins in spring…blossoms in the summer…[and] leaves you to face the fall alone.” Fair enough. But Nemens shows how baseball also breaks your heart for more prosaic reasons: because rotator cuffs fray, because spring-training towns are depressing, and because billion-dollar franchises don’t give a fig about poetry.

The Cactus League Emily Nemens Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, 288 pp.

In baseball, there can come a point when you’ve so often been described as underrated that you cease to be underrated. Trot Nixon, for example: a decent right fielder in the early 2000s who Red Sox fans so often dubbed underrated that he became overrated. Charles Portis, the Arkansas-born novelist who was famous for being underrated and who died on February 17, never suffered this fate. There’s a certain kind of greatness that, no matter how many times we remark upon it, will always be underrecognized.

People who know Portis, whose out-of-print novels were reissued in the 1990s, probably know him as the author of True Grit. It’s a great novel, and it’s been made into two great movies. But every shaggy-dog story he wrote, every picaresque comedy of American naiveté and dreaminess, was great. His sentences display a funny, poetic, loose yet disciplined, absolutely American prose style. Since his death, fans have been passing around some of their favorite passages. Here are a few of my own. From The Dogs of the South: “I don’t believe we’ve ever had a President, unless it was tiny James Madison with his short arms, who couldn’t have handled Dupree in a fair fight.” From Masters of Atlantis: “It’s not healthy, locking yourself away in here so you can eat pies and read all these monstrous books with f’s for s’s.”

Rest in peace, Charles Portis.

The Dogs of the South and Masters of Atlantis

For decades, the poet and critic Paul Mariani has been a shining light for those interested in the Catholic imagination. We can hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, that great poet of the dark night, when Mariani laments no longer being able to see the “greengold grass, / glistening the bright skin of the copper beeches.” And we can hear Hopkins again, that great poet of the shining day, when Mariani describes “know[ing] that somewhere, now as then, the wind keeps whispering still”—the Holy Spirit moving and transfiguring always, even when we can’t sense it.

Mariani’s new work of criticism, The Mystery of It All, is a twilight book. Its epigraph, addressed to his wife of more than fifty years, begins, “Moon, old moon, dear moon, I beg you / answer when I call out to you.” Its final sentences read, “‘In His Will Is Our Peace.’ The very words I have etched into our gravestone.” In recent years, the eighty-year-old Mariani has been diagnosed and treated for brain cancer. This gives his epilogue, titled “On the Work Still to Be Done,” particular force.

Yet what is most striking about this book is how buoyant it is, how joyful is its account of a life of reading and writing. Hopkins, Stevens, Berryman, O’Connor: they’re all here, and Mariani attends both to their smallest formal decisions and their most expansive metaphysical concerns. “I have read and taught Stevens for over fifty years,” he remarks. “He is someone who never ceases to delight.” Great critics are able to turn the readerly delight they experience transitive: to explain it, yes, but also to pass it on to the reader. By this and many other standards, Mariani is a strong critic.

Here he is on Hopkins’s darkness: “All is unselved, untuned, and, just as violin or catgut strings go slack, all clear voweling lost, so do we, the words themselves as if swallowed, until ‘all is enormous dark / Drowned.’” And here he is on Hopkins’s sacramental, perceptual joy: “Look at the Welsh farmers with their horses in the countryside about him, breaking up the moist clods of earth: how the light shines upon them, catching the quartz glints, in an instant turning them into diamondlike shards of light—‘sheer plod’ itself doing this, allowing the plow and the sillion both to shine in God’s light.”

Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

The Mystery of It All Paul Mariani Paraclete Press, $25, 240 pp.

Even and especially in twilight, Mariani shows us the light.

Hopkins, who broke and remade form in almost everything he wrote, would have loved the poet Jericho Brown. The Tradition is Brown’s third collection of poetry. It’s also his best—the most interesting in form, the most wide-ranging in reference, the most daring in its wedding of the private and public, the spiritual and the sexual.

Brown has talked about reading T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” obsessively while working on this book. Eliot’s influence can be felt in this collection’s sense of tradition speaking to, and being changed by, the present. Eliot’s ghost is here. So too are the ghosts of James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, and Essex Hemphill.

Brown writes several poems in a new form he calls the duplex: a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. “Though I may not be, I do feel like a bit of a mutt in the world,” Brown has said. Queer, black, and Southern, he wanted to create a form that felt as unlikely as himself. These duplexes work by repetition and reconfiguration. Here’s a snippet:

My first love drove a burgundy car. He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

As seen here, Brown often writes about trauma: the trauma of being a hurt child or a hurt lover; the trauma of being black in America (“I promise if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me”) and the trauma of being queer in America (“My man swears his HIV is better than mine”).

But The Tradition also gives witness to joy—in sex and language, in the traditions of black art and the black church. Brown was raised Baptist, and you can hear this legacy in his imagery and music:

Forgive me, I do not wish to sing Like Tramaine Hawkins, but Lord if I could Become the note she belts halfway into The fifth minute of “The Potter’s House”

When black vocabulary heralds home- Made belief: For any kind of havoc, there is Deliverance!

That duplex I quoted from above begins and ends with the same line: “A poem is a gesture toward home.” Brown finds a temporary home, a form of deliverance, in and through tradition in its many forms.

The Tradition Jericho Brown Copper Canyon Press, $17, 110 pp.

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beattalk · 5 years

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Playboi Carti - Die Lit ALBUM REVIEW

Playboi Carti (alongside Lil Uzi Vert) may be the closest thing the modern music scene has to a real rockstar. He’s amassed a large following over the past couple of years, and after his departure from Father’s Awful Records, went on to frequently collaborate with A$AP Rocky, and become part of his AWGE collective. After years of buildup, he released his first self-titled mixtape in April of 2017. Die Lit was a surprise release, following a flurry of leaks and speculation about his next move.

Playboi Carti and his main producer Pi’erre Bourne are quite the duo. With Bourne’s airy, cloud-rap inspired minimalistic beats and Carti’s sheer energy, they have managed to craft an established sound. However, on Die Lit, they took that to the next level. On this album, rap is stripped down to its barest form, over drums and minimal synthesizers. Everything Carti does on this album is to solidify his take on what punk music would be considered in today’s music scene. What Punk is to rock'n'roll, Die Lit is to rap music.

But, what makes the album stand out most is Carti’s vocals. He adopts a never-before-seen high-pitched tone of voice throughout the album, reminiscent of… a small toddler. While that sounds absolutely terrible and grating in theory, in execution it works exceptionally well. There’s just something about hearing him yell “Bought a crib for my mama off that mumblin’ shit” on R.I.P., for instance, in a shrill tone that gets me going. Perhaps the best example of this voice is on Flatbed Freestyle, which is an absolutely phenomenal track. It’s nearly impossible to be in a bad mood after giving it a listen.

R.I.P. as a whole is a perfect example of the aesthetic of the album as a whole. The song opens up with the lines “I’ma go fuck that bitch, I’ma go thrash that bitch,” a straightforward expression with explicit intention. He doesn’t beat around the bush at all here, he just dives straight into the point: he is, indeed, going to fuck that bitch. That’s what I love about this album. It’s not hiding its debauchery by using metaphors or any literary devices. It’s pure, unfiltered expression. There’s no clever wordplay, because there is no need for any.

Carti also enlists a little help along the way from his star-studded friend group, featuring the likes of long-time friend Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Nicki Minaj, Skepta, Bryson Tiller, Gunna, Young Thug, Young Nudy and Red Coldhearted (I’m not too familiar with that last name, either). They all complement Carti perfectly. Even Nicki Minaj delivers a good verse on Poke It Out, which I did not expect going into the album. Each feature glides across their respective beat with ease. It’s not often that features work so perfectly with the source material, but Carti organizes it perfectly.

The beats themselves are out of this world as well. They are all simplistic in nature, featuring a simple looped synthesized melody over a drum pattern. Long Time, for instance, does a fantastic job of not overthinking the production process, but still managing to support Carti’s vocals exceptionally well. Beats like Shoota feature piano loops, which complement Carti and Uzi’s back to back flows exceptionally well. Other beats such as Foreign are ethereal in nature, and the listener cannot help but feel as they are ascending into the astral plane as they take a listen. Carti’s adlibs are another aspect that truly ties the album together. He keeps his signature “What?” while joined by an array of “Bee!”s and “Woah”s and the like.

My largest complaint with the album is the sheer amount of tracks it has. Some songs were just much more forgettable than others, which really cannot be helped when you make a 19 track album. I had to remind myself what songs like Old Money and Pull Up sounded like before I set out to review the album. However, this does not stop them in the slightest from being good songs, they just get overshadowed by the absolute bangers like R.I.P., Shoota and the like.

Many people criticize today’s rap music for relying on ad-libs and mumbled melodies. Carti embraces this criticism instead of making an effort to change his style. Die Lit is modern rap in its purest form, while still distorting its standards and offering an unapologetic take on what it means to be punk in a post-rock music scene. And, it’s just a fun album overall. I give it an 8/10.

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mwsa-member · 4 years

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MWSA Interview with Bill Riley

Date of interview: 27 October 2019 Bill Riley is a writer and retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel with interests in space exploration, coffee roasting, global communication, intelligence activities, and ancient ruins. Bill was an intelligence analyst during the Cold War. Later, he specialized in strategy and communications. During his career, he’s worked with intelligence and special operations professionals from every service, virtually every intelligence agency, and several friendly foreign governments. Bill’s deployments took him through combat zones across the Middle East where he played significant roles in Kuwait and Iraq, supported joint coalition operations, and helped nations rebuild after wars. He was the first US electronic warfare officer in Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom, he led the air force’s largest network operations and security center, and he was the first cyberspace operations officer to receive the Air Force Combat Action Medal. He holds degrees in literature, public administration, and strategic leadership, and he is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College and the Air Force Space Command VIGILANT LOOK program. Bill lives in Idaho, just outside Boise, with his wife and two sons. Find him at billrileyauthor.com Look for him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at billrileyauthor

Interview

MWSA: How has MWSA helped your writing and/or marketing skills? Bill Riley: I've been a member for less than a year, and MWSA has already directly helped me in two ways. The biggest is networking. In a short time, I've had the opportunity to meet many writers willing to answer my questions and discuss both the art of writing and the struggle to make writing a career. Very well established authors have been generous with their time and advice, and both new and experienced writers have shared valuable tools, perspectives, and approaches with me. The second benefit has been feedback and recognition. These go hand-in-hand, and the review process MWSA offers is phenomenal. The volunteers who conduct book reviews are professional, constructively critical, and provide notes that provide feedback on what worked and didn't. This dovetails into the MWSA Awards program, which represents the genre of Military Writing in the United States. It judges each submission against professional literary criteria, not against the books submitted in a given year. This means we compete against the best standards of writing and storytelling, not each other. Baghdaddy won the 2019 MWSA Founders Medal and Gold Medal for Memoir, and I was blown away. It was exciting and humbling. As a writer, it was a moment I'll never forget. Now, being able to market Baghdaddy as an award-winning author has opened up speaking and media gigs that were difficult to get before. So please submit your work, the feedback is excellent, and you never know what'll happen. MWSA: Baghdaddy is an intensely personal sharing of your life’s journey. At what point and how did you decide it needed to be written?

Bill Riley: I witnessed the effects of Saddam’s rape of Kuwait and his failure to honor the terms of his surrender. Later, I was stationed in Iraq and experienced the unique challenges of trying to rebuild that country while some of its people were trying to kill me. My father tried to prepare me for the worst that life could throw at me. He taught me hard lessons that often hurt, and I resented them. After he passed away, I tried to put things in perspective. I realized that there wasn’t a lot of difference between the skills I needed to survive my childhood, be a father, and go to war. I met some amazing people along the way, and connecting those dots brought me to Baghdaddy. MWSA: What attracted you to intelligence and national security? Bill Riley: I wish I could say I had a noble purpose or a higher calling, but I didn’t. I was the stereotypical enlistee, in a bad situation without other good options, and the air force offered me a way out, an opportunity to prove myself, and a fresh start. Funny story: I entered the air force without a guaranteed job. I was an “open general” recruit, which is another name for “whatever the air force needs most.” A.k.a my recruiter Jedi mind tricked me into meeting his quota. Halfway through Basic, our military training instructor lined us up and said, “I have to send five volunteers to the new special ops pre-qualification course. Who thinks they have what it takes?” You’d think everyone would want in, but no. He got four volunteers, and I was “voluntold” to be the fifth. I was annoyed. It was just one more thing I had to do. But I said, “YES, SERGEANT,” on cue. I figured it would be obvious I wasn’t into it, nature would take its course, and I’d be out. The thing was, it wasn’t bad. Yeah, it was chaotic and exhausting, but there was no yelling, I ran and swam, and avoided the most tedious aspects of basic training. Our ability to observe and improvise was tested, and we wrote short essays to answer unanswerable morality questions as our group got smaller and smaller. When there were five of us left, we were given our final task. Dive in the water, reach the other side of the pool, pick up a mask from the bottom of the deep end, clear it, put it on, and swim back to where we started. All underwater, all in one breath. Problem was, when I’d almost gotten to my mask, some asshole with a padded stick hit me and knocked the mask away. I grabbed it, but another stick knocked me in the head, and I let go. I was running out of air, but surface and you lose, and I was pissed. I swam to the wall just above the mask, and the sticks came at me again. This time I grabbed both and kicked off the wall as hard as I could. One stick came free in my hand, and there was a big splash. I grabbed my mask, cleared and donned it, and swam to the finish line. When I broke the surface to gasp for air, a hand the size of a ham grabbed my head and hauled me out of the pool. It was a huge, unhappy sergeant in soaking wet fatigues. I figured I’d screwed up. I just hoped they’d let me finish Basic. They congratulated me. I finished first in that class and was offered a spec ops class slot. But there were only two slots, and there were three of us. In the pit of my stomach I knew I wasn't the right man for the job. I didn't want it like the other candidates did, and I figured their passion had to mean something. I declined the Pararescue slot I was offered, got yelled at by a major, for what seemed like a long time, then the big sergeant I dunked in the pool came in. He told the major that while he questioned my decision-making skills for not going in the program, I had integrity and grit and he recommended me for an intelligence job that just felt right. No one had ever told me I had grit or integrity before. I stayed because there’s a sense of community in the military that, for me, was like family. MWSA: Your book’s cover art elicits strong reactions. What were your thoughts behind it? Bill Riley: The Baghdaddy cover is polarizing, and I love it. I wanted it to cut to the heart of my story, and with one glance it does. I wish we lived in a world where there weren’t child soldiers, but we do, and they’re a part of this story. The art also captures the warlike aspects of my upbringing, and it feels personal. My father once said, “One definition of adult is surviving your childhood,” and I never forgot it. Each story element meets on this cover. You know the moment you pick it up. MWSA: Baghdaddy provides a firsthand view of war; what are the most common misconceptions held by many Americans? Bill Riley: We see war mostly in snapshots, and not everything gets the coverage or the attention or focus it deserves. There’s been a terrible war in Yemen for years, but the media barely covers it. The same was true of the atrocities of Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait and the campaign of rape and terror employed by Slobodan Milošević during the Bosnian War. Few were interested in investigating and reporting until the world couldn’t look away anymore. The first time I was in Iraq was just after President Bush declared victory. We absolutely met and exceeded the first phase objectives of the war, but even at the highest levels of power, there were misconceptions over what “victory” meant, and unfortunately, an agenda often drives what gets reported and what the public sees. I was with an army signals unit on the outskirts of Karbala, about fifty-five miles southwest of Baghdad. There was a friendly village just off the major supply route, and we encountered a news crew at the burnt and twisted remains of a blown-up semi-tractor-trailer. People from the village were rummaging through the blast field, looking for salvageable spoils. We waved, the Iraqis waved back, and the reporters were busy setting up their shot. We pulled over, and I went to touch base with the news crew just as they were assembling a group of men and boys with slung Kalashnikov rifles in front of the still-smoking vehicle for a picture. Back then, if a supply truck fell out of a convoy along the route, the driver detonated the vehicle and cargo so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. The vehicle in front of me, and the reporters was one of those. We knew it, they knew it. The title that ran on the picture in a scathing news story was, 'Insurgents Destroy Military Supplies.' It was a good picture, and insurgents did destroy military supplies, just not that time. If you look closely at the picture, you can see all the boys smiling for the camera. Don't get me wrong, there is still great reporting. Unfortunately, we've also reached a point of manufactured and skewed news saturation. The difficulty in separating the truth from the lies has, more than anything, led to misconceptions. MWSA: You're currently writing a YA series. What can you share about the series, and does it have a connection at all to Baghdaddy? Bill Riley: Absolutely, it does. Thank's for asking about this, I just finished the first book in my new Cypher series. In it, I draw on my military background and time in secret organizations, and while I was raising boys when I was often away doing things I couldn’t talk about. I’ll take readers to places they haven’t seen before in Young Adult Fiction, and it will be a wild and surprisingly moving ride. The first book is called Ashur’s Tears. In it, near-future technology collides with magic in a vibrant world where the government has a lot to hide. An apocalypse-class artifact has been stolen, powerful factions have emerged, and demons are poised to invade the world if a disgraced temple guardian and the three Cypher children can’t find their father and stop it. I love this story, and I can't wait to share it, probably late 2020/early 2021. You can check out billrileyauthor.com for updates and events.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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We’re currently in a Stephen King renaissance that shows no sign of stopping. Thanks to the record-breaking success of last year’s remake of It, Hollywood is lining up to dig into the horror master’s massive literary output — starting with a long overdue remake of Pet Sematary, the uneven yet hypnotic 1989 treatment of one of King’s scariest novels.

In the wake of It’s massive success, it’s easy to see why directors (like Guillermo del Toro) are interested in improving upon older King adaptations that may not have lived up to their source material. But there are also plenty of King gems that have yet to be unearthed for movie audiences — some of which have long been stuck in development hell, to hopefully be rescued by this new cultural craving for King adaptations.

Although King stories have traditionally found recurring success as television miniseries, the tremendous payoff to Hollywood’s gamble of releasing It as two separate feature film installments has paved the way for more big-screen adaptations that take similar chances. With that newfound cinematic appetite in mind, here are 10 King novels and short stories, ranging through horror, suspense-thriller, science fiction, and fantasy, that are just waiting to be transformed (or remade) into films for the next generation of moviegoers.

Darek Kocurek

King wrote this story while he was still in college and later compiled it in the 1978 story collection Night Shift. One of his earliest published works, it has all the earmarks of King at his finest: an engrossing plot featuring psychological suspense, a deep sense of nostalgia for a specific time and place, and a complex villain — in this case, a serial killer nicknamed Springheel Jack.

Why it would work: King’s writing throughout this popular story is lush and evocative, just begging for graceful, ever-moodier cinematography that mirrors the story’s encroaching sinister subtext.

The biggest pitfall in adapting “Strawberry Spring” is that the ending, undoubtedly a serious shocker in 1968, would probably be instantly guessed by savvy modern audiences. Still, given audiences’ love for King and his ability to ground his stories in a deep sense of place, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, and in the hands of a solid screenwriter, this story could be well-told.

gfpeck/Flickr

Another Night Shift short story, “The Boogeyman” tells the classic demon/poltergeist tale of a family pursued by a horrifying supernatural entity that may or may not be murdering children. The tense psychological ambiguity of King’s writing and the grim, terrifying certainty that no child is safe sets this tale apart from innumerable “scary thing in the closet” stories, as the protagonist fights to keep his kids away from the clutches of the Boogeyman. What makes this story stand out from other similar tales is that King’s Boogeyman is corporeal and dangerous, with the kill count to prove it.

Why it could work: Despite being part of King’s most popular short story collection, this story has only ever been adapted into short films. (In fact, a 1982 adaptation was the first of King’s famous “dollar baby” short films.) But there’s a lot of potential for this story to be absolutely terrifying as a feature film in the right writer’s hands. Like Pet Sematary, there are themes of grieving and parenthood, and like many other King stories, the protagonist’s psychological breakdown muddies the waters. Above all, there’s lots of potential to expand the world of King’s short story into something truly complicated and memorable.

King’s beloved novel of Lovecraftian horror infesting a small modern-day New England town succeeds on multiple levels, serving up memorable characters, loads of action, and a central haunted house setting as creepy as they come. It’s also an analogue for dying rural ways and steadily encroaching sociopolitical shifts that go unnoticed for years until suddenly all hell breaks loose. And you thought it was just about vampires.

Why it could work: Though it’s been made into two television miniseries — a 1979 miniseries directed by Tobe Hooper that hasn’t aged well, and a forgotten 2004 remake — Salem’s Lot has never been given a big-screen adaptation. This is undoubtedly because, like many of King’s best works, it’s sprawling and epic. (A Dracula-esque short story prequel, “Jerusalem’s Lot,” and a sequel, “One for the Road,” add even more background context.)

But as Muschietti’s adaptation of It showed, a somewhat scaled-down version of the story could work elegantly on the big screen. And with its emphasis on nostalgia and the terrors of childhood, it shares many themes with It that could make it a hit with new audiences. Plus, the vampires, easily the most popular part of Hooper’s adaptation, could be made even scarier through modern effects — and we all know, the vampires are the main draw.

King’s most popular novel under the Richard Bachman pseudonym is set in an alternate history in which Germany won World War II. The modern US under fascist rule is a deeply disturbing dystopia where boys compete in a grueling pedestrian marathon — think Speed meets The Hunger Games — that ends in death for all but one winner.

Why it could work: The power of this novel rests in its explication of the deep emotional and physical toll taken on the walk’s participants, all of whom come into the race shouldering the broader social effects of a deeply oppressive government. The book features memorable characters and even more memorable moments along the route of the walk, in which no one is allowed to slow to a speed below 4 miles an hour. It’s tricky, but in the hands of a thoughtful screenwriter and director, an adaptation of this novel could be a brutal, suspenseful, thrilling anti-fascist takedown.

Cujo is a jaunt into two subjects King loves: non-human killers and terrible forces of nature. A story about a St. Bernard that goes rabid and becomes nigh unstoppable in his urge to kill, Cujo brought us one of horror’s most memorable titular villains and is constantly being brought up by King fans as one of his scariest books.

Why it could work: As terrifying as Cujo the book remains, the lackluster 1983 film adaptation suffered from a fatal flaw, which is that it’s hard to make a real dog into a convincing actor, let alone a convincing arbiter of terror. This is one area where modern special effects could be a significant assist — think of Life of Pi’s entirely computer-generated yet terrifying tiger. It helps that dogs are currently enjoying something of a moment in an internet culture long dominated by cats; in an environment where all dogs are good doggos, a new spin on Cujo — who, as noted in a famous line from the novel, had always tried to be a good dog — could easily take the populace by scary surprise.

Full of mythical symbolism and beautiful imagery, Rose Madder is one of King’s many attempts to tackle the subject of domestic violence. It tells the story of a woman who leaves her intensely violent husband and attempts to start over in a new place, with a policeman hell-bent on tracking her down.

Yes, that is the exact plot of Nicholas Sparks’s Safe Haven, but here’s where things get distinctly King-ian: In her new town, Rose impulsively buys a portrait of a woman in a rose madder gown that leads her into an incredible other world, where she meets and befriends a woman named Dorcas. Dorcas sends Rose on a quest in that other world, and through it, Rose becomes a warrior and a fighter and a slayer of minotaurs. Whether any of that will help her free herself from her real-life stalker husband, though, is a more complicated question.

Why it could work: Rose Madder is teeming with solid roles for women, particularly the leads of Rose and Dorcas, whose friendship is the book’s greatest asset. In addition to delivering more of the complex fantasy world building that fans of King’s Dark Tower crave, its interweaving of fantasy and reality is bait for sumptuous cinematography and artistic direction.

Plus, its unusual combination of fantasy and suspense thriller tropes makes it rife for a high-art treatment — a feature that could actually make it an improvement over the book, which, as Grady Hendrix at Tor notes, fails to truly capture the compelling essence of the gorgeous painting at its center. There’s room for a treatment of this story that’s both nuanced and evocative. Please can we have this one yesterday?

lockthedoors / Deviantart

Like both Rose Madder and Duma Key, this short story involves a painting with supernatural or magical properties. And like a multitude of King’s works, it features a writer who could be a stand-in for King himself, this time a famous but weary horror writer who stumbles across a demented painting at a yard sale. Intrigued by the weirdly titled painting and the tragic death of its creator, he buys it, only to discover the details in the painting are subtly changing. The painting, it seems, has a life of its own and is impossible to leave behind or destroy. Things escalate quickly, and while this is all standard horror fare, the combination of weird details, the King traits, and a gripping climax make it one of his more memorable short stories.

Why it could work: This story was already adapted for the small screen, in a 2005 episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes starring Tom Berenger as Richard Kinnell. With the proper treatment, however, this could be an excellent fun horror flick. While the “object in the picture is moving” plot is clichéd, it could be easily juiced up with a lot of world building, an infusion of jump scares, and opportunities for hammy acting. In short, this could be a perfectly enjoyable bit of mainstream horror with the King brand attached.

This short story received critical acclaim when it was published due to its harrowing and exhausting depiction of a woman’s struggle to escape a violent serial killer. The story plays out as a slow-build tale of a woman empowering herself after a traumatic event (think every ’90s Ashley Judd movie). Emily is a grieving mother who finds solace in a grueling physical regimen — which proves to be her only defense when she runs, literally, into the clutches of a serial killer one day on the beach. What follows is a classic cat-and-mouse horror story with plenty of twists and turns.

Why it could work: Emily, the titular Gingerbread Girl, is a juicy role for any actress. No waiflike Final Girl, she’s an adult woman who spends the first part of King’s story reinventing herself mentally and physically — rare stuff for any horror film. Like many of the best horror narratives, this one sets itself up to be about one thing and then abruptly proves to be about something completely different. A good director could easily lull an audience with the seductive beach setting and our empathy with Emily’s quest to rebuild her life — all to make the abrupt about-face and the sudden switch to a grueling slasher/stalker narrative that much more terrifying.

One of King’s most successful “post-sobriety” novels, Duma Key is a rich tapestry of myth, artwork, and terror splayed across a sunny Floridian landscape. After a near-fatal injury, a still-recuperating man moves to a remote Florida Key island, where he and his daughter are soon engulfed in a local mystery involving old secrets, psychics, and strange paintings that seem to have the power to predict and change the future. This is a story that’s bursting with plot, with a powerful and enigmatic villain at its center.

Why it could work: Duma Key is easily one of King’s most unusual and interesting stories. Who doesn’t love a movie set in a sumptuous coastal paradise — especially with an element of horror lurking amid all the local color? Add in the parade of intricate paintings that play key roles in an equally intricate plot, and Duma Key could easily make for a highly successful film adaptation.

(Yes, several of these suggestions involve paintings that exert power over the viewer — but that theme could be a refreshing break from Hollywood’s typical interest in King stories that focus on writing as a creative metaphor, rather than visual arts.)

This underread King novella is a tribute to his love of baseball — but it’s also got an ominous undertone not typically paired with this kind of Americana. Set in 1950s New Jersey, the story focuses on an initially unimposing Rube Waddell-type figure, a quixotic, mysterious new player up from the minor league whose powerful playing style quickly endears him to fans and fellow teammates. But “Blockade Billy” has a secret, and things get dark fast. For a short work of fiction, this story manages to pack in a lot, from rumination on identity to fan mania and the maintenance of cultural rituals at all costs. Oh, and death.

Why it could work: A movie adaptation of Blockade Billy could easily sell itself as a baseball story for fans of baseball — with a twist. It takes a while for the cracks to show through in this entertaining novella, and there’s plenty of room for a good screenwriter to play on the conventions of the baseball movie genre to surprise and upend the audience’s expectations just as King does. Plus, like all of King’s best works, there are plenty of characters here to love and hate, which makes this perfect movie fodder.

Original Source -> 10 great Stephen King stories that are ripe for film adaptation

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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starvingnovelist-blog · 6 years

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Overcoming Self-Doubt as a Writer

Overcoming Self-Doubt "Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong." ~Peter T. Mcintyre "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt." ~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1604 "Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else." ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960 Self-doubt: the bane of any writer's existence. It's the dark cloud looming on the horizon, threatening to rain down self-loathing, inferiority and regret. In short, it's the one thing that can end a writer's career before it even has a chance to take flight. With its uncanny knack for stifling one's creativity, self-doubt renders its sufferer an empty shell. I don't believe there has ever been an author who--at one point in time--has never suffered from a minuscule amount of self-doubt. Recently, I've had my own bouts with this affliction and the symptomotology has been enough to render me virtually useless. In going through my manuscript and some of my former blogs, I've noticed glaring typos and grammatical errors--I should, at times, be locked away for comma abuse--as well other cringe-inducing faux pas. As my blogs are being shared and re-tweeted (of which I'm extremely appreciative of), I often find myself critiquing the hell out of what has been passed around and fear I may not be living up to the high standards I try to set for myself. This stems partly from sheer fear; fear of being rejected by those in the community I'm striving to gain acceptance in. The other part is being exposed to those who write so flawlessly and so seemingly effortlessly that I often wonder if they have the same fears and self-doubts that I do. The answer to that is, I'm certain, a resounding YES. The question is how do you prevent it from consuming you and your writing? I believe the answer to that is through lots of practice, support and self-motivation. Now let's analyze some techniques, shall we? (Too bad, we're going to anyway...) Find a writing partner--A writing partner or support group of fellow writers is invaluable to any word- crafter. It's imperative to receive both good and bad feedback (constructive criticism) and to have mini cheerleaders, motivational speakers and drill sergeants by your side at a moment’s notice to both encourage your pursuits, celebrate your victories, tell you what works and what doesn't, and most importantly, to prevent the storm clouds from rolling in. Before I started involving myself in social networks, I had a small group comprised of family, friends and co-workers who would read my work and provide me with the encouragement I needed when I wanted to chuck my laptop across the room (because a bad writing day is all that blasted computer's fault, don't cha' know). After I joined social networking sites for writers (or ones that just harbor a substantial writing community such as Twitter, Blogger, Absolute Write, Query Tracker, Tumblr, Facebook, Goodreads, etc.), I felt as though I'd arrived home. These communities offer a seemingly unlimited amount of talented aspiring authors and published authors, alike willing to dispense a plethora of advice and support. After all, we're all in the same boat so why not travel together? Quit standing in your own way--I know there are famous quotes out there that roughly state something about being your own worst enemy and creating the barriers that block your own path to success. Well, they're all completely true. The human mind is a beautiful oddity with the ability to both propel a person into greatness or cast them aside in the gutter at the slightest twist in thought. However, it's when one allows those negative twists in thought to consume them that the problems really begin to erupt, and minor problems such as grammatical errors and the writer's own fickleness in wording forces them to question their abilities. It's one thing to be critical of your work with the intent to make it the best it can be, it's a completely different story to beat yourself up over a misplaced comma. Have faith in yourself, your errors aren't as glaring as you believe them to be. And when you feel like giving up, take a walk, watch a movie, or do the moonwalk to take your mind away from the negativity. You'll be pleasantly surprised by how much a break and a set of fresh eyes will vastly improve your disposition. Not everything you write is going to be bestseller--Wouldn't that be great, though? You, sitting at home and typing away, knowing there are a whole slew of famished individuals out there ready to feed upon your every word. Alas, for most of us it's time to wake up from this dream, for we know it takes work--lots and lots of agonizing, frustrating work--before we even see a tenth of that kind of success. That is, if we ever see any success at all. To be a writer, you must remove the stars from your eyes and humble yourself with the sobering truth that writing isn't going to make you rich and famous. With that truth, thankfully, also comes the equally as truthful statement that that's pretty much the norm for most writers and it isn't because your work isn't up to snuff that you aren't a multi-millionaire. Write because you love it; because it makes you happy. Don't write because you believe it to be your meal ticket or that success equals validation of your abilities. Comparing apples to elephants--The worst thing you can do as a writer is to compare your work to that of others because, unless they're absolutely terrible or you have a slightly inflated ego, you're probably going to surmise their work as being on a level much higher than yours. I'm insanely guilty of this. Whether it be friends, fellow bloggers, writers, or published novels, I'm constantly critiquing my work against that of others. Where does this get me? A night without a single word written, a woe-is-me state of mind and a chocolate massacre on my hands (and face, and probably somewhere in my hair, as well). Your novel is yours and no one else's. Your writing style is unique to you. How you write and what you write is a mark of your true identity, setting you apart from the rest of the pack. To compare your work to the work of another is like trying to compare your DNA with theirs. In the end, the strands will never match and to tinker with one to make it comport with the other will only result in a contrived, mutated product. Different is good; variety is the spice of life; Pepsi is way better than Coke...oops wrong blog. The point is, your style is unique, special, something to be proud of and chances are the person you're relentlessly comparing yourself to thinks the same way about their work when compared to yours. You possess the same tools as the next person-The beauty with fiction writing is there isn't a single person out there who is more qualified or who possesses a clear advantage over you (unless they're a celebrity, but that's a topic for another day). We all come equipped with a brain comprised of creative, technical threads, enabling us to put sentences together to create characters and worlds beyond the scope of reality. Although some naturally have more than others, all of us come off the biologic assembly line with drive and determination ingrained deep within our souls. Our collective brains, drive and determination, though differentiated by thoughts, execution and persistence are the tools every writer needs to succeed. It's how one chooses to use them and how one lets their self-doubt affect their potency that makes all the difference in the world. Great expectations--If you're like me, you tend to set the bar at the peak of the mountain. Some days you're able to clear it so effortlessly you think your writing will ascend into orbit. Other days, you're barely able to hurdle over a blade of grass and you feel your writing is on par with that of your toddler's (my daughter can blow me out to water most days with her creativity). At the risk of ripping off Charles Dickens, setting great expectations for yourself is both healthy and necessary if you plan on succeeding at anything you set out to do in life. Yet those same expectations--if left to run rampant--can also be your undoing. Don't make your great expectations impossible ones. Instead of trying to clear hurdles in the sky, concentrate on those down here on Earth first. Not to be cliché, but Rome wasn't built in a day. Like your literary dreams, it takes time for empires to emerge. Creativity is key--For a writer, creativity is second nature. Telling a writer to be creative is like telling a kid to play at Chuck-E-Cheese; it's just going to happen. When you write and you get stuck on the way your dialogue, sentence structure, narrative, or overall thought process is panning out, don't think to yourself, well, I'm not going to be the next Sara Gruen, keep writing. Allow your creativity to flow until you've either worked out your problems or completely replaced them with new, even better ideas. Perhaps open a different document to draft alternative scenarios or move on to a completely different chapter in your book and come back to the section that's plaguing you when you feel you're better able to tackle it. After all, the world doesn't need another Sara Gruen, it needs to be introduced to you. Be positive--I know it's hard to do every day and I'm not saying that it's not healthy to have a good cry from time to time to clear your head. It's just that, after you dry those tears and finally leave the pillow you were beating the hell out of alone, you need to move on. Don't dwell on your problems and frustrations. Fix them. Even the longest, darkest tunnel ends eventually, and so will the sudden resurgence of negativity encapsulating you. This is where the writing group mentioned earlier comes particularly in handy. If you're stuck on a plot point or a grammatical dilemma, they may be able to supply you with the ideas and information needed to fix said dilemmas and reign in your self-doubt before it breaks you. One final tool I've found particularly helpful when I'm in a slump is to read positive remarks I've received on past projects. Those kind comments and helpful suggestions have a way of rejuvenating me like emotional coffee, giving me the drive to carry on and the ability to leave those negative thoughts in the dust.

#writerlife selfdoubt writers books empowerment writerprobs amwriting

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thefandomlesbian · 6 years

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any tips for editing stories? i’ve been working on a story for some months now and i’ve finally finished it. and since i wrote it all in one go, i’m having some trouble with fixing parts of it without thinking it’s terrible and wanting to rewrite the whole thing. or the opposite where a passage is not top notch and i leave it, and then later on i realize how horrible it actually is. i’m not too worried about grammar, spelling, etc cause i fix it as i re-read, it’s mostly just the writing itself

part 2 of the editing ask: i don’t like other people reading my work till i publish it somewhere so i mostly self-edit everything myself until it’s up to my standards. i like to write as if you’re reading a novel, which is pretty typical, but i struggle with scene lengths, internal monologue, etc without sounding too dull and not enough detail. i don’t want to leave anything up to the readers imagination unless that’s my intention. i’d greatly appreciate any tips you have, thank you xxx

Honestly my biggest tip would be to get a beta reader. Almost any book on the shelf you see when you walk through a bookstore has been through a laundry list of names of people viewing it before it was bound with a cover and put up for sale. It takes a village to raise a child or to publish a book. The movie Rebel in the Rye shows how even big-time literary names such as JD Salinger struggle to find a place for themselves in the world of writing. I’m not sure what your goals are as an author; if you’re writing a fanfic for something to drop on AO3 or Wattpad, I wouldn’t be too concerned about every moment of words on the screen being perfect and flawless. On the flip side, if you’re working on an original piece and want to be published by a publishing house, you might want to start counting your dollars and saving to hire a professional editor (and, yes, professional editors are pretty expensive; this is how they make their living).

If you can, print out pages of your story to correct with a red pen. I find this helps me separate myself from the piece as the author and instead regard it as an audience. When I’m away from my document, I don’t feel like the literary god these characters worship but instead like someone observing the characters in their natural habitat like in a nature documentary. To help the cause: leave the work sitting for a long time before you revisit it. Since I’m a fanfic writer, I publish chapter-by-chapter. It usually takes me two to three weeks to knock out a chapter, and I write five chapters ahead of where I’m published, so at minimum, ten weeks pass before I revisit each chapter to edit (in the mean time, my beta examines it and points out grammar and content problems).

It’s also very common for original fiction writers to do exactly like you said--rewrite from beginning to end. Harper Lee, for example, wrote Go Set a Watchman before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. When she took the original manuscript to be published, the publishing company told her the story she needed to tell was the one in her characters’ pasts. She took her adult main character, Scout, and wrote about her when she was six years old and told a completely different story, and she said for decades that To Kill a Mockingbird was what she wanted to say all along, which never would’ve happened at all if the publishing company had accepted her rough draft. (Personally I think this is a lot of effort to exert on a fanfic, which is incredibly unlikely to get you any monetary gain and will suck up all your time, but if it’s what you feel you need to do to make your story yours, then go for it. There is no wrong way to write anything, fanfiction or otherwise.)

When I’m rewriting scenes, I don’t look at the old scene at all. I tell myself, “This is what needs to happen in this scene that the last draft didn’t achieve for whatever reason,” and then I write it from scratch, like I’m telling it anew again, and only when I’m completely finished do I compare the two. If there’s something the original did better than the rewrite, I’ll try to mash them up, but only after I’ve got two completely different scenes.

Also, the find-replace tool is your best friend. It’ll help you knock out redundancies and misused words. I started using it to find every place I used the word “that” and cut it out except in places where it was absolutely necessary; I also use it in academic writing to help locate passive voice, and it helps with adverbs, as well.

Remember: You are your own worst critic. Nothing is ever quite as bad as you suspect, I promise.

I hope this helped give you a little bit of direction! My messages and my ask box are always open.

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grigori77 · 5 years

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Movies of 2019 - My Pre-Summer Favourites (Part 2)

The Top Ten:

10. GLASS – back in 2000, I went from liking the work of The Sixth Sense’s writer-director M. Night Shyamalan to becoming a genuine FAN thanks to his sneakily revisionist deconstruction of superhero tropes, Unbreakable. It’s STILL my favourite film of his to date, and one of my Top Ten superhero movies EVER, not just a fascinating examination of the mechanics of the genre but also a very satisfying screen origin story – needless to say I’m one of MANY fans who’ve spent nearly two decades holding out hope for a sequel. Flash forward to 2016 and Shyamalan’s long-overdue return-to-form sleeper hit, Split, which not only finally put his career back on course but also dropped a particularly killer end twist by actually being that very sequel. Needless to say 2019 was the year we FINALLY got our PROPER reward for all our patience – Glass is the TRUE continuation of the Unbreakable universe and the closer of a long-intended trilogy. Turns out, though, that it’s also his most CONTROVERSIAL film for YEARS, dividing audiences and critics alike with its unapologetically polarizing plot and execution – I guess that, after a decade of MCU and a powerhouse trilogy of Batman movies from Chris Nolan, we were expecting an epic, explosive action-fest to close things out, but that means we forgot exactly what it is about Shyamalan we got to love so much, namely his unerring ability to subvert and deconstruct whatever genre he’s playing around in. And he really doesn’t DO spectacle, does he? That said, this film is still a surprisingly BIG, sprawling piece of work, even if it the action is, for the most part, MUCH more internalised than most superhero movies. Not wanting to drop any major spoilers on the few who still haven’t seen it, I won’t give away any major plot points, suffice to say that ALL the major players from both Unbreakable and Split have returned – former security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has spent the past nineteen years exploring his super-strength and near-invulnerability while keeping Philadelphia marginally safer as hooded vigilante the Overseer, and the latest target of his crime-fighting crusade is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the vessel of 24 split personalities collectively known as the Horde, who’s continuing his cannibalistic serial-murder spree through the streets. Both are being hunted by the police, as well as Dr. Ellie Staple (series newcomer Sarah Paulson), a clinical psychiatrist specialising in treating individuals who suffer the delusional belief that they’re superheroes, her project also encompassing David’s former mentor-turned-nemesis Elijah Price, the eponymous Mr. Glass, whose life-long suffering from a crippling bone disease that makes his body dangerously fragile has done nothing to blunt the genius-level intellect that’s made him a ruthlessly accomplished criminal mastermind. How these remarkable individuals are brought together makes for fascinating viewing, and while it may be a good deal slower and talkier than some might have preferred, this is still VERY MUCH the Shyamalan we first came to admire – fiendishly inventive, slow-burn suspenseful and absolutely DRIPPING with cool, earworm dialogue, his characteristically mischievous sense of humour still present and correct, and he’s still retained that unswerving ability to wrong-foot us at every turn, right up to one of his most surprising twist endings to date. The cast are, as ever, on fire, the returning hands all superb while those new to the universe easily measure up to the quality of talent on display – Willis and Jackson are, as you’d expect, PERFECT throughout, brilliantly building on the incredibly solid groundwork laid in Unbreakable, while it’s a huge pleasure to see Anya Taylor-Joy, Spencer Treat Clark (a fine actor we don’t see NEARLY enough of, in my opinion) and Charlayne Woodard get MUCH bigger, more prominent roles this time out, while Paulson delivers an understated but frequently mesmerising turn as the ultimate unshakable sceptic. As with Split, however, the film is once again comprehensively stolen by McAvoy, whose truly chameleonic performance actually manages to eclipse its predecessor in its levels of sheer genius. Altogether this is another sure-footed step in the right direction for a director who’s finally regained his singular auteur prowess – say what you will about that ending, but it certainly is a game-changer, as boldly revisionist as anything that’s preceded it and therefore, in my opinion, exactly how it SHOULD have gone. If nothing else, this is a film that should be applauded for its BALLS …

9. PET SEMATARY – first off, let me say that I never saw the 1989 feature adaptation of Stephen King’s story, so I have no comparative frame of reference there – I WILL say, however, that the original novel is, in my opinion, easily one of the strongest offerings from America’s undisputed master of literary horror, so any attempt made to bring it to the big screen had better be a good one. Thankfully, this version more than delivers in that capacity, proving to be one of the more impressive of his cinematic outings in recent years (not quite up to the standard of The Mist, perhaps, but about on a par with It: Chapter One or the criminally overlooked 1408), as well as one of this year’s best horror offerings by far (at least for now). This may be the feature debut of directing double-act Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, but they both display a wealth of natural talent here, wrangling bone-chilling scares and a pervading atmosphere of oppressive dread to deliver a top-notch screen fright-fest that works its way under your skin and stays put for days after. Jason Clarke is a classic King everyman hero as Boston doctor Louis Creed, displaced to the small Maine town of Ludlow as he trades the ER for a quiet clinic practice so he can spent more time with his family – Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color, Stranger Things), excellent throughout as his haunted, emotionally fragile wife Rachel, toddler son Gage (twins Hugo and Lucas Lavole), and daughter Ellie (newcomer Jeté Laurence, BY FAR the film’s biggest revelation, delivering to the highest degree even when her role becomes particularly intense). Their new home seems idyllic, the only blots being the main road at the end of their drive which experiences heavy traffic from speeding trucks, and the children’s pet cemetery in the woods at the back of their garden, which has become something of a local landmark. But there’s something far darker in the deeper places beyond, an ancient place of terrible power Louis is introduced to by their well-meaning but ultimately fallible elderly neighbour Jud (one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from screen legend John Lithgow) when his daughter’s beloved cat Church is run over. The cat genuinely comes back, but he’s irrevocably changed, the once sweet and lovable furball now transformed into a menacingly mangy little four-legged psychopath, and his resurrection sets off a chain of horrific events destined to devour the entire family … this is supernatural horror at its most inherently unnerving, mercilessly twisting the screws throughout its slow-burn build to the inevitable third act bloodbath and reaching a bleak, soul-crushing climax that comes close to rivalling the still unparalleled sucker-punch of The Mist – the adaptation skews significantly from King’s original at the mid-point, but even purists will be hard-pressed to deny that this is still VERY MUCH in keeping with the spirit of the book right up to its harrowing closing shot. The King of Horror has been well served once again – it’s may well be ousted when It: Chapter 2 arrives in September, but fans can rest assured that his dark imagination continues to inspire some truly great cinematic scares …

8. PROSPECT – I love a good cinematic underdog, there’s always some dynamite indies and sleepers that just about slip through the cracks that I end up championing every year, and 2019’s current favourite was a minor sensation at 2018’s South By Southwest film festival, a singularly original ultra-low-budget sci-fi adventure that made a genuine virtue of its miniscule budget. Riffing on classic eco-minded space flicks like Silent Running, it introduces a father-and-daughter prospecting team who land a potentially DEEPLY lucrative contract mining for an incredibly rare element on a toxic jungle moon – widower Damon (Transparent’s Jay Duplass), who’s downtrodden and world-weary but still a dreamer, and teenager Cee (relative newcomer Sophie Thatcher), an introverted bookworm with hidden reserves of ingenuity and fortitude. The job starts well, Damon setting his sights on a rumoured “queen’s layer” that could make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, but when they meet smooth-talking scavenger Ezra (Narcos’ Pedro Pascal), things take a turn for the worse – Damon is killed and Cee is forced to team up with Ezra to have any hope of survival on this hostile, unforgiving moon. Thatcher is an understated joy throughout, her seemingly detached manner belying hidden depths of intense feeling, while Pascal, far from playing a straight villain, turns Ezra into something of a tragic, charismatic antihero we eventually start to sympathise with, and the complex relationship that develops between them is a powerful, mercurial thing, the constantly shifting dynamic providing a powerful driving force for the film. Debuting writer-directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell have crafted a wonderfully introspective, multi-layered tone poem of aching beauty, using subtle visual effects and a steamy, glow-heavy colour palette to make the lush forest environs into something nonetheless eerie and inhospitable, while the various weird and colourful denizens of this deadly little world prove that Ezra may be the LEAST of the dangers Cee faces in her hunt for escape. Inventive, intriguing and a veritable feast for the eyes and intellect, this is top-notch indie sci-fi and a sign of great things to come from its creators, thoroughly deserving of some major cult recognition in the future.

7. DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE – S. Craig Zahler is a writer-director who’s become a major fixture on my ones-to-watch list in recent years, instantly winning me over with his dynamite debut feature Bone Tomahawk before cementing that status with awesome follow-up Brawl On Cell Block 99. His latest is another undeniable hit that starts deceptively simply before snowballing into a sprawling urban crime epic as it follows its main protagonists – disgraced Bulwark City cops Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Tony Lurasetti (Cell Block 99’s Vince Vaughn), on unpaid suspension after their latest bust leads to a PR nightmare – on a descent into a hellish criminal underworld as they set out to “seek compensation” for their situation by ripping off the score from a bank robbery spearheaded by ruthlessly efficient professional thief Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann). In lesser hands, this two-hour-forty-minute feature might have felt like a painfully padded effort that would have passed far better chopped down to a breezy 90-minutes, but Zahler is such a compellingly rich and resourceful writer that every scene is essential viewing, overflowing with exquisitely drawn characters spouting endlessly quotable, gold-plated dialogue, and the constantly shifting narrative focus brings such consistent freshness that the increasingly complex plot remains rewarding right to the end. The two leads are both typically excellent – Vaughn gets to let loose with a far more showy, garrulous turn here than his more reserved character in his first collaboration with Zahler, while this is EASILY the best performance I’ve seen Gibson deliver in YEARS, the grizzled veteran clearly having a fine old time getting his teeth into a particularly meaty role that very much plays to his strengths – and they’re brilliantly bolstered by an excellent supporting cast – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’s Tory Kittles easily matches them in his equally weighty scenes as Henry Johns, a newly-released ex-con also out to improve his family’s situation with a major score, while Kretschmann is at his most chilling as the brutal killer who executes his plans with cold-blooded precision, and there are wonderful scene-stealing offerings from Jennifer Carpenter, Udo Kier, Don Johnson (three more Zahler regulars, each having worked with Vaughn on Cell Block 99), Michael Jai White, Laurie Holden and newcomer Miles Truitt. This is a really meaty film, dark, intense, gritty and unflinching in its portrayal of honest, unglamorous violence and its messy aftermath, but fans of grown-up filmmaking will find PLENTY to enjoy here, Zahler crafting a crime epic comparable to the heady best of Scorsese and Tarantino. Another sure-fire winner from one of the best new filmmakers around.

6. SHAZAM! – there are actually THREE movies featuring Captain Marvel out this year, but this offering from the hit-and-miss DCEU cinematic franchise is a very different beast from his MCU-based namesake, and besides, THIS Cap long ago ditched said monicker for the far more catchy (albeit rather more oddball) title that graces Warner Bros’ latest step back on the right track for their superhero Universe following December’s equally enjoyable Aquaman and franchise high-point Wonder Woman. Although he’s never actually referred to in the film by this name, Shazam (Chuck’s Zachary Levy) is the magically-powered alternate persona bestowed upon wayward fifteen year-old foster kid Billy Batson (Andi Mack’s Asher Angel) by an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounsou) seeking one pure soul to battle Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), a morally corrupt physicist who turns into a monstrous supervillain after becoming the vessel for the spiritual essences of the Seven Deadly Sins (yup, that thoroughly batshit setup is just the tip of the iceberg of bonkersness on offer in this movie). Yes, this IS set in the DC Extended Universe, Shazam sharing his world with Superman, Batman, the Flash et al, and there are numerous references (both overt and sly) to this fact throughout (especially in the cheeky animated closing title sequence), but it’s never laboured, and the film largely exists in its own comfortably enclosed narrative bubble, allowing us to focus on Billy, his alter ego and in particular his clunky (but oh so much fun) bonding experiences with his new foster family, headed by former foster kid couple Victor and Rosa Vazquez (The Walking Dead’s Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) – the most enjoyably portions of the film, however, are when Billy explores the mechanics and limits of his newfound superpowers with his new foster brother Freddy Freeman (It: Chapter One’s Jack Dylan Glazer), a consistently hilarious riot of bad behaviour, wanton (often accidental) destruction and perfectly-observed character development, the blissful culmination of a gleefully anarchic sense of humour that, until recently, has been rather lacking in the DCEU but which is writ large in bright, wacky primary colours right through this film. Sure, there are darker moments, particularly when Sivana sets loose his fantastic icky brood of semi-incorporeal monsters, and these scenes are handled with seasoned skill by director David F. Sandberg, who cut his teeth on ingenious little horror gem Lights Out (following up with Annabelle: Creation, but we don’t have to dwell on that), but for the most part the film is played for laughs, thrills and pure, unadulterated FUN, almost never taking itself too seriously, essentially intended to do for the DCEU what Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man did for the MCU, and a huge part of its resounding success must of course be attributed to the universally willing cast. Levy’s so ridiculously pumped-up he almost looks like a special effect all on his own, but he’s lost none of his razor-sharp comic ability, perfectly encapsulating a teenage boy in a grown man’s body, while his chemistry with genuine little comedic dynamo Glazer is simply exquisite, a flawless balance shared with Angel, who similarly excels at the humour but also delivers quality goods in some far more serious moments too, while the rest of Billy’s newfound family are all brilliant, particularly ridiculously adorable newcomer Faithe Herman as precocious little motor-mouth Darla; Djimon Hounsou, meanwhile, adds significant class and gravitas to what could have been a cartoonish Gandalf spoof, and Mark Strong, as usual, gives great bad guy as Sivana, providing just the right amount of malevolent swagger and self-important smirk to proceedings without ever losing sight of the deeper darkness within. All round, this is EXACTLY the kind of expertly crafted superhero package we’ve come to appreciate in the genre, another definite shot in the arm for the DCEU that holds great hope for the future of the franchise, and some of the biggest fun I’ve had at the cinema so far this year. Granted, it’s still not a patch on the MCU, but the quality gap does finally look to be closing …

5. ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL – y’know, there was a time when James Cameron was quite a prolific director, who could be counted upon to provide THE big event pic of the blockbuster season. These days, we’re lucky to hear from him once a decade, and now we don’t even seem to be getting that – the dream project Cameron’s been trying to make since the end of the 90s, a big live action adaptation of one of my favourite mangas of all time, Gunnm (or Battle Angel Alita to use its more well-known sobriquet) by Yukito Kishiro, has FINALLY arrived, but it isn’t the big man behind the camera here since he’s still messing around with his intended FIVE MOVIE Avatar arc. That said, he made a damn good choice of proxy to bring his vision to fruition – Robert Rodriguez is, of course a fellow master of action cinema, albeit one with a much more quirky style, and this adap is child’s play to him, the creator of the El Mariachi trilogy and co-director of Frank Miller’s Sin City effortlessly capturing the dark, edgy life-and-death danger and brutal wonder of Kishiro’s world in moving pictures. 300 years after the Earth was decimated in a massive war with URM (the United Republics of Mars) known as “the Fall”, only one bastion of civilization remains – Iron City, a sprawling, makeshift community of scavengers that lies in the shadow of the floating city of Zalem, home of Earth’s remaining aristocracy. Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) runs a clinic in Iron City customising and repairing the bodies of its cyborg citizens, from the mercenary “hunter killers” to the fast-living players of Motorball (a kind of supercharged mixture of Rollerball and Death Race), one day discovering the wrecked remains of a female ‘borg in the junkyard of scrap accumulated beneath Zalem. Finding her human brain is still alive, he gives her a new chassis and christens her Alita, raising her as best he can as she attempts to piece together her mysterious, missing past, only for them both to discover that the truth of her origins has the potential to tear their fragile little world apart forever. The Maze Runner trilogy’s Rosa Salazar is the heart and soul of the film as Alita (originally Gally in the comics), perfectly bringing her (literal) wide-eyed innocence and irrepressible spirit to life, as well as proving every inch the diminutive badass fans have been expecting – while her overly anime-styled look might have seemed a potentially jarring distraction in the trailers, Salazar’s mocap performance is SO strong you’ve forgotten all about it within the first five minutes, convinced she’s a real, flesh-and-metal character – and she’s well supported by an exceptional ensemble cast both new and well-established. Waltz is the most kind and sympathetic he’s been since Django Unchained, instilling Ido with a worldly warmth and gentility that makes him a perfect mentor/father-figure, while Spooksville star Keean Johnson makes a VERY impressive big screen breakthrough as Hugo, the streetwise young dreamer with a dark secret that Alita falls for in a big way, Jennifer Connelly is icily classy as Ido’s ex-wife Chiren, Mahershala Ali is enjoyably suave and mysterious as the film’s nominal villain, Vector, an influential but seriously shady local entrepreneur with a major hidden agenda, and a selection of actors shine through the CGI in various strong mocap performances, such as Deadpool’s Ed Skrein, Derek Mears, From Dusk Til Dawn’s Eiza Gonzalez and a thoroughly unrecognisable but typically awesome Jackie Earle Haley. As you’d expect from Rodriguez, the film delivers BIG TIME on the action front, unleashing a series of spectacular set-pieces that peak with Alita’s pulse-pounding Motorball debut, but there’s a pleasingly robust story under all the thrills and wow-factor, riffing on BIG THEMES and providing plenty of emotional power, especially in the heartbreaking character-driven climax – Cameron, meanwhile, has clearly maintained strict control over the project throughout, his eye and voice writ large across every scene as we’re thrust headfirst into a fully-immersive post-apocalyptic, rusty cyberpunk world as thoroughly fleshed-out as Avatar’s Pandora, but most importantly he’s still done exactly what he set out to do, paying the utmost respect to a cracking character as he brings her to vital, vivid life on the big screen. Don’t believe the detractors – this is a MAGNIFICENT piece of work that deserves all the recognition it can muster, perfectly set up for a sequel that I fear we may never get to see. Oh well, at least it’s renewed my flagging hopes for a return to Pandora …

4. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD – while I love Disney and Pixar as much as the next movie nut, since the Millennium my loyalty has been slowly but effectively usurped by the consistently impressive (but sometimes frustratingly underappreciated) output of Dreamworks Animation Studios, and in recent years in particular they really have come to rival the House of Mouse in both the astounding quality of their work and their increasing box office reliability. But none of their own franchises (not even Shrek or Kung Fu Panda) have come CLOSE to equalling the sheer, unbridled AWESOMENESS of How to Train Your Dragon, which started off as a fairly loose adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s popular series of children’s stories but quickly developed a very sharp mind of its own – the first two films were undisputable MASTERPIECES, and this third and definitively FINAL chapter in the trilogy matches them to perfection, as well as capping the story off with all the style, flair and raw emotional power we’ve come to expect. The time has come to say goodbye to diminutive Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel, as effortlessly endearing as ever) and his adorable Night Fury mount/best friend Toothless, fiancée Astrid (America Ferrera, still tough, sassy and WAY too good for him), mother Valka (Cate Blanchett, classy, wise and still sporting a pretty flawless Scottish accent) and all the other Dragon Riders of the tiny, inhospitable island kingdom of Berk – their home has become overpopulated with scaly, fire-breathing denizens, while a trapper fleet led by the fiendish Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham delivering a wonderfully soft-spoken, subtly chilling master villain) is beginning to draw close, prompting Hiccup to take up his late father Stoick (Gerard Butler returning with a gentle turn that EASILY prompts tears and throat-lumps) the Vast’s dream of finding the fabled “Hidden World”, a mysterious safe haven for dragon-kind where they can be safe from those who seek to do them harm. But there’s a wrinkle – Grimmel has a new piece of bait, a female Night Fury (or rather, a “Light Fury”), a major distraction that gets Toothless all hot and bothered … returning witer-director Dean DeBlois has rounded things off beautifully with this closer, giving loyal fans everything they could ever want while also introducing fresh elements such as intriguing new environments, characters and species of dragons to further enrich what is already a powerful, intoxicating world for viewers young and old (I particularly love Craig Ferguson’s ever-reliable comic relief veteran Viking Gobber’s brilliant overreactions to a certain adorably grotesque little new arrival), and like its predecessors this film is just as full of wry, broad and sometimes slightly (or not so slightly) absurd humour and deep down gut-twisting FEELS as it is of stirring, pulse-quickening action sequences and sheer, jaw-dropping WONDER, so it’s as nourishing to our soul as it is to our senses. From the perfectly-pitched, cheekily irreverent opening to the truly devastating, heartbreaking close, this is EXACTLY the final chapter we’ve always dreamed of, even if it does hurt to see this most beloved of screen franchises go. It’s been a wild ride, and one that I think really does CEMENT Dreamworks’ status as one of the true giants of the genre …

3. US – back in 2017, Jordan Peele made the transition from racially-charged TV and stand-up comedy to astounding cinemagoers with stunning ease through his writer-director feature debut Get Out, a sharply observed jet black comedy horror with SERIOUS themes that was INSANELY well-received by audiences and horror fans alike. Peele instantly became ONE TO WATCH in the genre, so his follow-up feature had A LOT riding on it, but this equally biting, deeply satirical existential mind-bender is EASILY the equal of its predecessor, possibly even its better … giving away too much plot detail would do great disservice to the many intriguing, shocking twists on offer as middle class parents Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Black Panther alumni Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) take their children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), to Santa Cruz on vacation, only to step into a nightmare as a night-time visitation by a family of murderous doppelgangers signals the start of a terrifying supernatural revolution with potential nationwide consequences. The idea at the heart of this film is ASTOUNDINGLY original, quite an achievement in a genre where just about everything has been tried at least once, but it’s also DEEPLY subversive, as challenging and thought-provoking as the themes visited in Get Out, but also potentially even more wide-reaching. It’s also THOROUGHLY fascinating and absolutely TERRIFYING, a peerless exercise in slow-burn tension and acid-drip discomfort, liberally soaked in an oppressive atmosphere so thick you could choke on it if you’re not careful, such a perfect horror master-class it’s amazing that this is only Peele’s second FEATURE, never mind his sophomore offering IN THE GENRE. The incredibly game cast really help, too – the four leads are all EXCEPTIONAL, each delivering fascinatingly nuanced performances in startlingly oppositional dual roles as both the besieged family AND their monstrous doubles, a feat brilliantly mimicked by Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker and teen twins Cali and Noelle Sheldon as the Wilsons’ friends, the Tylers, and their similarly psychotic mimics. The film is DOMINATED, however, by Oscar-troubler Nyong’o, effortlessly holding our attention throughout the film with yet another raw, intense, masterful turn that keeps up glued to the screen from start to finish, even as the twists get weirder and more full-on brain-mashy. Of course, while this really is scary as hell, it’s also often HILARIOUSLY funny, Peele again poking HUGE fun at both his target audience AND his allegorical targets, proving that scares often work best when twinned with humour. BY FAR the best thing in horror so far this year, Us shows just what a master of the genre Jordan Peele is – let’s hope he’s here to stay …

2. CAPTAIN MARVEL – before the first real main event of not only the year’s blockbusters but also, more importantly, 2019’s big screen MCU roster, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and co dropped a powerful opening salvo with what, it turns out, was the TRUE inception point of the Avengers Initiative and all its accompanying baggage (not Captain America: the First Avenger, as we were originally led to believe). For me, this is simply the MCU movie I have MOST been looking forward to essentially since the beginning – the onscreen introduction of my favourite Avenger, former US Air Force Captain Carol Danvers, the TRUE Captain Marvel (no matter what the DC purists might say), who was hinted at in the post credits sting of Avengers: Endgame but never actually seen. Not only is she the most powerful Avenger (sorry Thor, but it’s true), but for me she’s also the most badass – she’s an unstoppable force of (cosmically enhanced) nature, with near GODLIKE powers (she can even fly through space without needing a suit!), but the thing that REALLY makes her so full-on EPIC is her sheer, unbreakable WILL, the fact that no matter what’s thrown at her, no matter how often or how hard she gets knocked down, she KEEPS GETTING BACK UP. She is, without a doubt, the MOST AWESOME woman in the entire Marvel Universe, both on the comic page AND up on the big screen. Needless to say, such a special character needs an equally special actor to portray her, and we’re thoroughly blessed in the inspired casting choice of Brie Larson (Room, Kong: Skull Island), who might as well have been purpose-engineered exclusively for this very role – she’s Carol Danvers stepped right out of the primary-coloured panels, as steely cool, unswervingly determined and strikingly statuesque as she’s always been drawn and scripted, with just the right amount of twinkle-eyed, knowing smirk and sassy humour to complete the package. Needless to say she’s the heart and soul of the film, a pure joy to watch throughout, but there’s so much more to enjoy here that this is VERY NEARLY the most enjoyable cinematic experience I’ve had so far this year … writer-director double-act Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck may only be known for smart, humble indies like Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind, but they’ve taken to the big budget, all-action blockbuster game like ducks to water, co-scripting with Geneva Robertson-Dworet (writer of the Tomb Raider reboot movie and the incoming third Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie) to craft yet another pitch-perfect MCU origin story, playing a sneakily multilayered, misleading game of perception-versus-truth as we’re told how Carol got her powers and became the unstoppable badass supposedly destined to turn the tide in a certain Endgame … slyly rolling the clock back to the mid-90s, we’re presented with a skilfully realised “period” culture clash adventure as Carol, an super-powered warrior fighting for the Kree Empire against the encroaching threat of the shape-shifting Skrulls, crash-lands in California and winds up uncovering the hidden truth behind her origins, with the help of a particular SHIELD agent, before he wound up with an eye-patch and a more cynical point-of-view – yup, it’s a younger, fresher Nick Fury (the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson, digitally de-aged with such skill it’s really just a pure, flesh-and-blood performance). There’s action, thrills, spectacle and (as always with the MCU) pure, skilfully observed, wry humour by the bucket-load, but one of the biggest strengths of the film is the perfectly natural chemistry between the two leads, Larson and Jackson playing off each other BEAUTIFULLY, no hint of romantic tension, just a playfully prickly, banter-rich odd couple vibe that belies a deep, honest respect building between both the characters and, clearly, the actors themselves. There’s also sterling support from Jude Law as Kree warrior Yon-Rogg, Carol’s commander and mentor, Ben Mendelsohn, slick, sly and surprisingly seductive (despite a whole lot of make-up) as Skrull leader Talos, returning MCU-faces Clark Gregg and Lee Pace as rookie SHIELD agent Phil Coulson (another wildly successful de-aging job) and Kree Accuser Ronan, Annette Bening as a mysterious face from Carol’s past and, in particular, Lashana Lynch (Still Star-Crossed, soon to be seen in the next Bond) as Carol’s one-time best friend and fellow Air Force pilot Maria Rambeau, along with the impossible adorable Akira Akbar as her precocious daughter Monica … that said, the film is frequently stolen by a quartet of ginger tabbies who perfectly capture fan-favourite Goose the “cat” (better known to comics fans as Chewie). This is about as great as the MCU standalone films get – for me it’s up there with the Russo’s Captain America films and Black Panther, perfectly pitched and SO MUCH FUN, but with a multilayered, monofilament-sharp intelligence that makes it a more cerebrally satisfying ride than most blockbusters, throwing us a slew of skilfully choreographed twists and narrative curveballs we almost never see coming, and finishing it off with a bucket-load of swaggering style and pure, raw emotional power (the film kicks right off with an incredibly touching, heartfelt tear-jerking tribute to Marvel master Stan Lee). Forget Steve Rogers – THIS is the Captain us MCU fans need AND deserve, and I am SO CHUFFED they got my favourite Avenger so totally, perfectly RIGHT. I can die happy now, I guess …

1. AVENGERS: ENDGAME – the stars have aligned and everything is right with the world – the second half of the ridiculously vast, epic, nerve-shredding and gut-punching MCU saga that began with last year’s Avengers: Infinity War has FINALLY arrived and it’s JUST AS GOOD as its predecessor … maybe even a little bit better, simply by virtue of the fact that (just about) all the soul-crushing loss and upheaval of the first film is resolved here. Opening shortly after the universally cataclysmic repercussions of “the Snap”, the world at large and the surviving Avengers in particular are VERY MUCH on the back foot as they desperately search for a means to reverse the damage wrought by brutally single-minded cosmic megalomaniac Thanos and his Infinity Stone-powered gauntlet – revealing much more dumps so many spoilers it’s criminal to continue, so I’ll simply say that their immediate plan really DOESN’T work out, leaving them worse off than ever. Fast-forward five years and the universe is a very different place, mourning what it’s lost and torn apart by grief-fuelled outbursts, while our heroes in particular are in various, sometimes better, but often much worse places – Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffallo) has found a kind of peace that’s always eluded him before, but Thor (Chris Hemsworth) really is a MESS, while Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) has gone to a VERY dark place indeed. Then Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) finds a way back from his forced sojourn in the Quantum Realm, and brings with him a potential solution of a very temporal nature … star directors the Russo Brothers, along with returning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have once again crafted a stunning cinematic masterpiece, taking what could have been a bloated, overloaded and simply RIDICULOUS narrative mess and weaving it into a compelling, rich and thoroughly rewarding ride that, despite its THREE HOURS PLUS RUNNING TIME, stays fresh and interesting from start to finish, building on the solid foundations of Infinity War while also forging new ground (narratively speaking, at least) incorporating a wonderfully fresh take on time-travel that pokes gleeful fun at the decidedly clichéd tropes inherent in this particular little sub-genre. In fact this is frequently a simply HILARIOUS film in its own right, largely pulling away from the darker tone of its predecessor by injecting a very strong vein of chaotic humour into proceedings, perfectly tempering the more dramatic turns and epic feels that inevitably crop up, particularly as the stakes continue to rise. Needless to say the entire cast get to shine throughout, particularly those veterans whose own tours of duty in the franchise are coming to a close, and as with Infinity War even the minor characters get at least a few choice moments in the spotlight, especially in the vast, operatic climax where pretty much the ENTIRE MCU cast return for the inevitable final showdown. It’s a masterful affair, handled with skill and deep, earnest respect but also enough irreverence to keep it fun, although in the end it really comes down to those big, fat, heart-crushing emotional FEELS, as we say goodbye to some favourites and see others reach crossroads in their own arcs that send them off in new, interesting directions. Seriously guys, take a lot of tissues, you really will need them. If this were the very last MCU film ever, I’d say it’s a PERFECT piece to go out on – thankfully it’s not, and while it is the end of an era the franchise looks set to go on as strong as ever, safe in the knowledge that there’s plenty more cracking movies on the way so long as Kevin Feige and co continue to employ top-notch talent like this to make their films. Ten years and twenty-two films down, then – here’s to ten and twenty-two more, I say …

#movies 2019 #glass #glass movie #pet sematary #prospect #prospect movie #dragged across concrete #shazam!#alita battle angel #how to train your dragon the hidden world #us #us movie #Captain Marvel #avengers endgame #awesome sauce

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