Kubrick Unchained: From Lolita To the Droogs

On By ArthurIn Comedy, Drama, Fiction, Movies & Television, Science Fiction, Stanley Kubrick, Video Nasties3 Comments

Stanley’s Kubrick as a director can be split into two halves: his early work up to Spartacus, and his post-Spartacus work. Kubrick’s first few movies were lean, low-budget noirs – the first two of which (Fear and Desire – later yanked from distribution by Kubrick because he wasn’t satisfied with it – and Killer’s Kiss) were financed by friends and family, the third of which (The Killing) was made on a modest $300,000 budget from United Artists who wanted to see what Kubrick and producer James B. Harris could do.

His fourth project, Paths of Glory, was an anti-war movie starring Kirk Douglas, with triple the budget of The Killing. Spartacus was a Kirk Douglas pet project, produced by his own Bryna Productions company, which is how Kubrick ended up on the project in the first place; Anthony Mann had originally been slated to direct, but after the early phases of shooting Douglas fired him from the project and summoned Kubrick to salvage the production. Kubrick and Douglas would never collaborate again – Douglas having taken against Kubrick for various reasons – but Spartacus was an absolute monster hit, raking in $60 million at the box office (just as well, given the $12 million budget).

Once you have a success like that on your hands, all manner of doors open for you in Hollywood. Spartacus was the only production of Kubrick’s where he didn’t have full creative control as director, and he never let it slip out of his hands again – but this time, production companies were glad to fund his visions. Even the most modest of his later production had budgets comfortably over $1 million, and budgets in the tens of millions were the norm. Freed both from studio interference and from the compromises which inevitably result when the budget won’t stretch to accommodate your ambitions, Kubrick would then turn out the body of work he’s most widely remembered for today, and it all began with – content warning – a whole load of child sexual exploitation.

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PC Pick-and-Mix: Owlsgard, Deathbulge, and the Last Express

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, CRPGs, Fantasy, Fiction, JRPGs, PC, PC Pick-and-Mix, Point-and-Click Adventures, Science Fiction, VideogamesLeave a comment

It’s time for another in my occasional series of short reviews of PC games. This time, I’ve got a recent point-and-click game powered by the Adventure Game Studio engine, a Western-developed JRPG-style musical extravaganza, and a major landmark from the fading days of the point-and-click golden age.

Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard

Finn is a happy-go-lucky young roebuck boy who returns to his homeland of Velehill after a long time away – but he finds his parents’ log cabin shattered into pieces, with mysterious footprints leading away. As he seeks aid, he learns that across the region other animals have disappeared or been attacked under similarly mysterious circumstances. Everyone blames the wolves – the one group of animals who have been shut away in their own part of the forest, ever since a costly civil war generations ago between the wolves and the prey animals.

Yet are the wolves truly to blame this time? The strange machines Finn encounters here and there certainly don’t look like anything the wolves make for themselves – too much metal and flashing lights, not enough in the way of animal skins. After one encounter with the wolves, Finn ends up meeting Gwen, a pint-sized martial artist owl, who tells him a story of how hundreds of years ago the great library of the owls was consumed in a conflagration, but the wolves were suspected of making away with ancient owlish lore in the midst of the chaos.

Could they now be making use of that information? Is that’s what bringing forth the machines? Or are they, too, unaware of just what is happening to the animals’ cozy little world? Finn and Gwen will eventually find the answers… Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard.

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Latro, From the Wars To the Games

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Fantasy, Fiction, Gene Wolfe, Historical3 Comments

As I recounted in my review of The Book of the Long Sun, for that series Gene Wolfe drew extensively on Roman-style civic religion for the culture he was presenting, right down to animal sacrifices read for omens by haruspices. This didn’t come completely out of the blue; in the late 1980s gap between tying off The Book of the New Sun and catching sight of the Long Sun, Wolfe put out two novels about Latro, a Republican-era Roman travelling through Ancient Greece whilst dealing with a memory issue.

In 2006 he’d come back to Latro with Soldier of Sidon, a book I liked at the time but which, ironically, I remember very little about, and which doesn’t seem to be especially widely discussed compared to the first two Latro books, which are much more of a cohesive whole when taken together, forming a Grecian Myth-themed duology much like The Wizard Knight would eventually provide a duology inspired by Scandinavian Mythology and classic medieval fantasy tropes. Indeed, the pair are most conveniently obtained anthologised together as Latro in the Mist.

Because of the aforementioned memory issues that Latro struggles with, his stories are regarded as some of Wolfe’s most challenging – I’d say only Peace pushes ahead in terms of sheer enigma. But are they any good to revisit? It’s been long enough since I read them that my memories are faded – which means they’re ripe for revisiting.

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Mad Max: From Toecutter To Joe

On By ArthurIn Action, Fiction, George Miller, George Ogilvie, Movies & Television, Science Fiction8 Comments

George Miller’s had a weird old career. He started out in medicine, and for much of the 1970s balanced a career as a doctor (in which he found himself treating a notable number of injuries from car accidents on Australia’s highways) with participating in the indie filmmaking scene in his native Australia – eventually, he became a respected Hollywood director with major releases like Happy Feet and Babe to his name. How did he get here from there?

Well, the road to that led directly through those car crash mutilations, because between that and losing friends to traffic accidents Miller was left with a healthy appreciation of just how lethal the open road can be- and how much scope it has for drama. Frequently working without a permit, he and his crew took to the road with some seed capital, some cars, and a fascination with violent mayhem, and they turned out Mad Max. If the shoot went wrong, well, George would have had a busy day at the emergency room – but it went gloriously, spectacularly right, creating an action movie archetype that was the making of his career as well as his lead actor, infamous antisemite Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson’s gone from the franchise now, and George Miller is back – a pay dispute between him and the studio over the mega-successful Fury Road having resolved – and he’s treating us to Furiosa: A Mad Max Story later this month, a prequel further exploring the pivotal co-protagonist of Fury Road. This makes it a good time to go back over the series and see where the road’s taken us so far, wouldn’t you say?

Mad Max

In the not-too-distant future, social order is on the verge of breaking down. A losing battle to conserve what is left of it is being fought by the Main Force Patrol, an elite police division that combats road bandits with a ferocity comparable to that used by their quarry. One of the best of the bunch is Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), who proves to be the only MFP officer able to cease the rampage of escaped convict the Nightrider (Vincent Gil), in a pursuit which culminates in the Nightrider’s death. That’s a problem, because the Nightrider was a long-time member of a motorcycle gang ruled over by the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a Charles Manson-esque figure who urges his underlings into ever-greater acts of violence.

When the Toecutter’s gang arrives to collect Nightrider’s body, nobody is safe – not Max, not his best buddy on the force Goose (Steve Bisley), and not Max’s wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) or his child Sprog (Brendan Heath). As the violence escalates and the Goose gets cooked, Max contemplates quitting the force so he and his family can keep their head down and look out for each other – but when the Toecutter and his cronies ruthlessly destroy any hope of that, Max takes the souped-up Pursuit Special that the department commissioned for him specifically to keep him on the force. Justice is no longer an option – but maybe there’s a chance of revenge for Mad Max…

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Wes Craven’s American Culture Shocks

On By ArthurIn Comedy, Fiction, Horror, Movies & Television, Video Nasties, Wes Craven2 Comments

Time for more movie reviews! We’re dipping into video nasty territory again – content warnings for rape and abuse themes apply – as I take in three Wes Craven movies. There’s his 1972 debut feature which ended up on Section 1 of the infamous “video nasty” list (comprising movies which were prosecuted for obscenity), his second effort from 1977 which was a so-called “Section 3” video nasty (not prosecutable for obscenity but prone to be confiscated), and a 1991 effort which wasn’t touched because it came out after the moral panic had largely run its course.

Each of these movies was written and directed by Craven, and each of them plays on a recurring theme of his – that of characters hailing from different subsets of American culture ending up in a life-and-death conflict, a culture clash within US society playing out in starkly violent terms. Eventually, Craven would take this theme and hone it to a fine satirical point, but his first go-around on the topic was somewhat crude, and legendarily brutal with it…

The Last House On the Left

Serial killer and rapist Krug Stillo (David A. Hess), his heroin-addicted son and accomplice Junior (Marc Sheffler), sexual abuser and murderer Fred “Weasel” Podowski (Fred Lincoln), and the sadistically cruel and frighteningly erratic Sadie (Jeramie Rain) are a gang of fugitives – Krug and Weasel having escaped from jail with the help of the others. As they hole up in an apartment in the city, the tension between wanting to get to somewhere a bit less busy where they’re less likely to be recognised and wanting to indulge their nasty habits increases.

Meanwhile, Mari (Sandra Peabody) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are two teens from a rural area who head out one night to catch a concert in the big city. When they make the mistake of approaching Junior to try and buy marijuana, he ends up luring them to the apartment, which begins a hideous nightmare of gang rape, torture, and violence which will ultimately leave both Mari and Phyllis dead. By the end of the ordeal, the gang are out in the countryside; when their car breaks down, they swing by the home of Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, billed as Gaylord St. James) and his wife Estelle (Eleanor Shaw, billed as Cynthia Carr), passing themselves of as travelling salespeople.

There’s just one problem: the Collingwoods are Mari’s parents. And when they see through the malefactors’ ruse and realise what they have done, they go to extreme lengths to take a brutal revenge. Krug, Junior, Sadie, and the Weasel will rue the day they visited The Last House On the Left…

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A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: A Later Peak

On By ArthurIn Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Fiction, Movies & Television1 Comment

I’m nearly out of Coen Brothers movies in my collection, and that means my deliberately incomplete cross-section of their work is nearly done. I’ve covered some of their early breakthroughs and their first really big peak, now it’s time to cover their second peak from the mid-2000s.

No Country For Old Men

One day whilst hunting in a remote spot in West Texas, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) encounters a bizarre sight – a circle of pickup trucks, with corpses scattered around them. Investigating, it becomes apparent that he’s stumbled across the sight of some sort of organised crime rendezvous gone horribly wrong; the slain men died clutching their weapons in the midst of a hideous firefight. Tracking down the one that got away, Moss finds him having bled out under a tree where he’d sought shelter, along with the thing he fled with – a thick briefcase stuffed with cash.

Moss thinks he’s got it made – just leave with the suitcase and there’s nothing to connect him to the incident, at least as far as any law enforcement investigation is concerned. Yet his conscience tickles him – for there was one survivor left at the crime scene, too wounded and incoherent to walk or drive away, begging him for water. Moss makes the fatal error of returning to the scene with water – only to find that the survivor is dead, and to get himself spotted at the scene by some interested parties. The backers of that deal want their money back – and to get it they hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hitman who unleashes all the hideous violence he is capable of for the sake of finishing the job – beginning by killing his employers so he can ultimately keep the cash for himself. Is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) equal to the task of taking down Chigurh? Has the modern world become too depraved for Bell’s folksy values? Or is it the case that the American West has been haunted by generations of cyclical violence, that facing it is a young man’s game, and this is No Country For Old Men?

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A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: Peak Coen

On By ArthurIn Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Fiction, Movies & Television8 Comments

So far in the Coen Brothers segment of “Arthur uses his blog reviews to decide what media to keep in his collection”, I’ve covered Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink, three movies which took the Coens from scrappy indie filmmakers punching above their weight to filmmakers who were gathering respect and applause from critics and peers alike. For this article, I’m going to cover a trio of movies which between them cover their first big career peak and its immediate aftermath, beginning with the movie which cemented their rise to Hollywood royalty…

Fargo

It’s 1987 in Minnesota, and Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is a thieving sack of shit who, desperate not to be exposed as a thieving sack of shit, is about to become an even worse sack of shit.

Specifically, Jerry’s been embezzling money at the car dealership he works at, which is owned by his fearsome father-in-law Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell). The shenanigans he’s been running to cover the shortfall are wearing thin, and if he’s exposed Wade will have no mercy and Jerry’s wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) will surely take a dim view of Jerry shitting the bed at the job Wade was nice enough to give him. Jerry needs money, fast, so he cooks up a scheme in which he contacts North Dakota’s sleaziest dirtbags-for-hire, Carl Showater (Steve Buscemi) and Graer Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), and get them to kidnap Jean, the idea being that Wade will pay a handsome ransom for her, a chunk of the ransom money will go to Jerry to pay off the gap, and Carl and Graer get to keep the rest.

It’s a bad plan, not least because it requires trusting Carl and Graer to hand over the money afterwards – but Jerry’s prone to bad choices, and things will go awry well before Jerry has to worry about his cut of the ransom. Soon enough, the caper has a body count, and Brainerd, Minnesota’s police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) – is on the job. Can Marge untangle the twisted strands of Jerry’s scheme and capture a killer, all whilst juggling meeting up with an old school friend and dealing with being heavily pregnant in a chilly northern Midwest environment replete with authentic “Minnesoda” accents? You betcha!

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The Virgin New Adventures: Luciferian Blood and Rising Heat

On By ArthurIn 7th Doctor, Andy Lane, Books and Periodicals, Christopher Bulis, Cthulhu Mythos, David A. McIntee, David Banks, Doctor Who, Fiction, Historical, Horror, Jim Mortimore, Nigel Robinson, Peter Darvill-Evans, Science FictionLeave a comment

The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…

Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore

The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.

In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.

Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…

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Operation Ares: A Stray Wolfe Best Left Alone

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Fiction, Gene Wolfe, Science FictionLeave a comment

Wolfe’s debut novel, hailing from 1970, takes place in a dystopian society where, after mass rioting from “urban” folk – note the dogwhistle – a leftist dictatorship has been established in the United States, the Constitution having been suspended due to the breakdown of order and the continuity government being run by bureaucrats formerly in charge of the welfare system. This government, because it is run by drab leftists who hate innovation, is opposed to technological innovation – and particularly hostile to the colonies on the inner planets established by scientific expeditions prior to the breakdown of the United States. John Castle, a physics teacher, must walk a careful line in his day job to avoid political persecution – especially since he and a few others have been picking up signals sent from the Mars colony, who are transmitting the technical knowledge necessary to establish a resistance movement…

Look, this just isn’t very good. Nobody thinks it is. Not even Gene himself liked it – he chalked up a lot of its plot points (like the, shall we say, mildly hostile attitude to urban populations) to him being much more of a “doctrinaire conservative” when he wrote it, and seems to have regretted being persuaded by Damon Knight to turn it into a novel in the first place (since it was originally a short story Wolfe submitted for one of Knight’s Orbit anthologies – an important venue for Wolfe’s earliest published tales). In interviews he would express the view that he simply was not ready to tell a novel-scale story at this point in his writing career.

This is all the more apparent when you drill down further. Wolfe originally submitted the tale to Damon Knight in 1965; this puts it at comfortably older than any of the tales in his first short story collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (the title story hails from 1970 and is the earliest tale), or for that matter from any of the other Wolfe collections I own. Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days – collected in Castle of Days – has material spanning from 1968 to 1980, Storeys From the Old Hotel has picks from 1967-1988, and Endangered Species from 1967 to 1988 – and that’s it as far as Wolfe material of that vintage in my collection.

The expanded Operation Ares was picked up by Berkley Books, but only in 1967 – meaning that Wolfe was trying to write a full-length novel before he’d even thrown together any of his better-regarded short stories. Then it appears that Berkley got cold feet a little; after all, waiting 3 years to publish a book isn’t something a publisher does if they are enthusiastic about its prospects. The book was further mangled by an editing process which hacked out some 20% of the material, Wolfe having gone long.

What you end up here, then, is the gutted remnants of a novel that Wolfe knocked out before he really knew what he was doing as a writer; it’s no surprise, then, that it’s kind of rubbish. As well as the political axes that Wolfe is loudly grinding, the characterisation is limp, there’s none of the playful mystery we associate with Wolfe, and it’s all very straight-ahead; the sort of thing Robert Heinlein could have written in his sleep before he got older, hornier, and weirder. Unlike more or less all of Wolfe’s other novels, this has seen no reprints and nobody seems to care to keep it in circulation – a state of affairs Wolfe seems to have been absolutely happy with for the remainder of his life, and since he lived for well over four decades after this turkey saw the light of day that’s saying a lot.

Whilst creative people are often the harshest and least forgiving judges of their own work, in this case Wolfe is 100% right: Operation Ares is an embarrassingly bad novel and it would do Wolfe no favours to revisit it. Better all round if we all agreed to just treat The Fifth Head of Cerberus as his debut – it’s more mature (in the best sense of the word) in terms of his craft, in terms of his worldview, and in terms of the ideas it brings to the table.

We, the People…

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Fiction, Yevgeny ZamyatinLeave a comment

In a distant future, the totalitarian OneState purports to be the final perfected version of human society. With its people assigned numbers instead of names, housed in a vast city surrounded by a vast glass wall to isolate them from the natural world, and accommodated in glass-walled apartments in which there is no privacy outside the state-mandated rationed sexytimes, when you can put the blinds down, the people labour under the watchful eye of the Guardians and the ruler of OneState, the beloved Benefactor.

D-503 is pretty keen on all of this. His assigned duty is as lead designer on the Integral – OneState’s first starship, which is intended to begin the propagation of its ideology throughout the known universe. When the authorities encourage the population to make creative works celebrating the glories of OneState to be used in the Integral‘s payload of propaganda, D-503 diligently begins writing an account of his life in OneState, enthusing about the glory of this perfected totalitarian system.

As work progresses on his diary, however, a discordant note slips in. Sexual partners are assigned by the state; D-503 is one of the partners allocated to O-90, a nice enough person who harbours a desire to bear a child – without necessarily seeking permission, despite such an act carrying a death sentence. D-503 is oblivious to this, and is perfectly happy with O-90 as his companion… but then he encounters I-330, a mysterious woman who seems to delight in covertly flouting the law. What is I-330 up to? What is the conspiracy she seems to be a part of? And what are these strange emotions which stop D-503 simply reporting her to the Guardians until it is too late not to implicate himself? Can D-503 overcome the temptations of “I” by himself, or will it take an extraordinary intervention to bring him back into the warm bosom of We?

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