Stephen Theaker's Blog, page 4

Rollerball | review by Rafe McGregor

Rollerball,by Norman Jewison (20th Century Fox)

 

Another Golden Anniversary.

While Jaws turned fifty with much hype andfanfare last week, including hereat Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, it’s Rollerball’s turntoday, albeit without the bells and whistles. I’m not sure how, but inspite of being both a science fiction and James Caan fan and familiarity withthe premise, I’d never seen the film. I’ve always had a soft spot for Caan’sonscreen persona, an underrated, understated, effortless tough guy tough guy witha very distinctive style (he reminds me of John Wayne, though where Wayne isalways in the Old West no matter what part he’s playing, Caan is in a big citysomewhen in the nineteen seventies). Caan’s performances in all of TheGodfather (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Thief (1981), andMisery (1990) are inspired and Rollerball revolvesentirely around him as Jonathan E(vans), the first and only superstar of theworld’s most dangerous and popular game in 2018 (forty-three years in thefuture).

Rollerball’s screenplaywas written by novelist William Harrison, who developed it from a short storycalled ‘Roller Ball Murder’, which was first published in Esquire in 1973. Theworld of 2018 is a utopia rather than dystopia, a planet of plenty whereeveryone literally has everything they want and nation states have beenreplaced by multi-national corporations that coexist in a state of avariciousharmony following a little-talked about and possibly even erased event known asthe Corporate Wars. The competitiveness essential to unrestrained capitalismis, it seems, channelled into rollerball in an international tournament inwhich teams from various cities clash in a spectacle of bloody and vicariousviolence for the players and audiences respectively. The actual game is acombination of inline speed skating and Basque pelota with a couple of motorbikesthrown in and the rules are changed regularly to make it more brutal. Thetop-ranked team is Houston, courtesy of Jonathan’s skill and resilience, andthe inciting incident occurs when he is told to retire by the chief executiveofficer of the corporation running the game (if not the world), Mr Bartholomew(played by John Houseman), who is revealed as the narrative’s antagonist.

There are a couple of things that strike oneimmediately watching Rollerball fifty yearslater. First, the extent of the explicit critique of global capitalism with thegloves off. The capacity of the Hollywood film industry to make money fromapparently resisting a system of which it is such an integral part never ceasesto amaze me…and has been at work for a lot longer than I thought. Second, the sciencefiction trope of a utopia that turns out to be a dystopia as soon as thesurface is scraped is becoming rather dated. It is much easier, for example, toimagine the worlds of Mad Max (1979), BladeRunner (1982), Strange Days (1995), andChildrenof Men (2006) as or in our future than a land of plenty where we all keep ourselvesbusy with shopping, pill-popping, and rollerball.

Jonathan doesn’t want to retire and one is never sure why. His lavish lifestyle would not change at all, his existentialexploration of the conflict between comfort and freedom is somewhat limited, andhe must be nearing the end of his shelf-life anyway. The only plausibleexplanation is an obsession with the adoration of the bloodthirsty crowds, buteven this isn’t entirely convincing. The conundrum exposes one of the two flawsin the film, which may have accounted for a critical reception that did notmatch its commercial success and has left it with a fair 57% on RottenTomatoes: Jonathan is simply not a particularly sympatheticcharacter. (This is not one of Caan’s best performances.) The second is just asdamaging. Given that the genre of the film is some mix of action, thriller,sports, etc., the representation of rollerball is really poor. The cinematographyand stunts fail to convey the speed and danger of the game, which ends uplooking quite camp with its players modelling their rollerskates, leatherpants, and almost invisible cosmetic scars. I’ve watched ice hockey games on televisionthat look more dangerous and there isn’t a single missing tooth in Rollerball. The filmisn’t terrible, but it’s not great entertainment either.

Talking of ‘terrible’…Rollerball was remade byJohn McTiernan and released in 2002. Coming from the director of Predator (1987), DieHard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), TheThomas Crown Affair (1999), and Basic (2003), Iwas surprised to see the film’s impressive 3% on theTomatometer. As if that isn’t bad enough, the Los Angeles Times also claimed it was one of the biggest commercial failures of all time. The remake starred ChrisKlein, LL Cool Jay, and Jean Reno, all of whose performances I usually enjoy, butKlein was fresh from his role as a lacrosse player in AmericanPie (1999) and American Pie 2 (2001) sothat might be the first clue to avoid it. I’m glad I watched the firstRollerball, but I won’t be wasting seventy-eight minutes of my life on thesecond.**

Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50! – Rafe McGregor

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws(1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industryand its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype andfanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as weall know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine andapproaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me,on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good)in my reviewof Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of thathere. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in myopinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirelydeserving of its 97% on theTomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce,the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Brucemoves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whippingthrough the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only oneto have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent articlein the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of theshark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artisticconsiderations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being hisbirthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up inmenace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughtsabout recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few monthsago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which thefilm is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novelsuffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but isotherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched ahost of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlightsinclude John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2:The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), allof which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in filmfranchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on theTomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively iscompletely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.)I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s DangerousAnimals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended,but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar toChristian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deservesdishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animalsis being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched MartinWilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous;Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and JoachimHeden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with avery generous 30%.Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. Iblame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades ofwatching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more sothan the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate andreinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now,with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth(or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’tjust apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises,such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the JurassicPark (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth,the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land,sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I alsowonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t havereplaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are muchbigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroachingon human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’resmiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though,which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with onebut might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time torevisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’sbest.

Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50!

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws(1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industryand its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype andfanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as weall know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine andapproaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me,on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good)in my reviewof Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of thathere. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in myopinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirelydeserving of its 97% on theTomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce,the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Brucemoves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whippingthrough the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only oneto have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent articlein the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of theshark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artisticconsiderations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being hisbirthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up inmenace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughtsabout recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few monthsago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which thefilm is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novelsuffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but isotherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched ahost of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlightsinclude John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2:The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), allof which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in filmfranchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on theTomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively iscompletely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.)I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s DangerousAnimals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended,but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar toChristian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deservesdishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animalsis being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched MartinWilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous;Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and JoachimHeden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with avery generous 30%.Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. Iblame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades ofwatching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more sothan the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate andreinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now,with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth(or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’tjust apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises,such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the JurassicPark (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth,the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land,sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I alsowonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t havereplaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are muchbigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroachingon human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’resmiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though,which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with onebut might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time torevisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’sbest.

Game of Thrones | review by Rafe McGregor

Game of Thrones

HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99(monthly subscription rate)

 

Fantasy at its finest.

 

I’vebeen wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) for awhile now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to theseries late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. ThenCOVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfecttime to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). Iwatched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then wewatched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does,that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans wereparticularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is completenonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better thansome. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longerwait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another isprobably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on whichit was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of sevennovels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers weredissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one isforcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic ortelevisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justifiedaccusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sensein which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the finalbattle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so thenarrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences.To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films andthe books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather thanexpecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the sameapproach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyedthem too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences whatwe desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it bothdeploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been theHollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a richarchitecture of allegorical meaning.

GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).

In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.

GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t bedisappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way Idid.****           

The Spectral Link | review by Rafe McGregor

The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

SubterraneanPress, 94pp, £11.80, June 2014, ISBN 9781596066502

 

Thisreview was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49,following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (athree-year hiatus).

IfThomas Ligotti is not the only contemporarypractitioner of weird fiction, the genre that emerged as an epiphenomenon ofliterary modernism, then he is certainly the most accomplished. This slimvolume comprises a two-page preface and a pair of short stories which, like hisentire oeuvre to date, resist interpretation and exemplify the recondite. Ligotti’sacquaintance with the perennial problems of the disciplines constituting theWestern tradition of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics– is striking and his work exploits the failure of repeated attempts to answer crucialquestions about existence, knowledge, and morality. The suicidal narrator of “MetaphysicaMorum” might be speaking for the author when he registers his ‘scorn for thesaved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe’because Ligotti appears convinced that all is not right in the universe and continually revisits the fearful consequencesof this conviction in his strange, singular, uncanny stories. There is a strongimpression, for example, that “Metaphysica Morum” is nothing more than a slow,sustained unravelling of the meaning of the word ‘demoralization’, which is exposedas having implications beyond personal concerns with the terminal.

Despiteits innocuous title “The Small People” is perhaps the more philosophical of thetwo tales, exploring one of the most pervasive questions in metaphysics, thedifference – if any – between things as they really are and things as we perceivethem; or, alternately, the extent to which human concepts reflect the realityof the natural world. Here, the narrator finds disturbing evidence of amismatch and realises that he is one of the few possessed of ‘a type ofinstinct that actually forced me tosee things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I couldget by in life.’  He experiences asystematic disintegration of reality when the ‘small country’ he perceives iscontrasted first with the ‘normal country’ and then the ‘big country’ until theborder between small and big is breached by ‘halfers’. If neither “small” nor“big” map on to the world, do “self” and “other”?  As the narrator penetrates deeper into the mysteryof small and half-small people, he is less and less able to “get by” and runsthe risk of that ultimate undoing…demoralization. Ligotti is a writer of weird tales and these two will not be toeveryone’s taste: their weirdness overflows and unsettles.

 

TheSpectral Link sold out almost immediately on publication and is unfortunatelynow only available at exorbitant prices on the used books market ($99 and £189respectively on Amazon US and UK at the time of writing).

Mr Mercedes | review by Rafe McGregor

MrMercedes by Stephen King

Hodder& Stoughton, 416pp, £20.00, June 2014, ISBN 9781444788624

 

Theaker’sQuarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absencefrom the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

 

InJune 1999 Stephen King was run over by a Dodge minivan while on his daily four-milewalk. Three years later, he was still unable to sit down for long periodswithout severe pain and announced his intention to stop writing. Eight yearslater, he wrote that ‘the force of my invention has slowed down a lot’, a tragicadmission for a prolific author whose work has ranged across the horror,science fiction, fantasy, crime, and thriller genres. Mr Mercedes is King’s sixth full-length novel since his accident. Likesome of his best work – Rita Hayworth andShawshank Redemption (1982) and Misery(1987) to name but two – there is no supernatural element at play and thenarrative follows a retired detective’s attempt to catch a spree killer beforehe strikes again. Like Duma Key(2008), the novel is subdivided into very short numbered sections and the eightnamed parts are really chapters, varying from one to forty-three sub-sections each,which (a few excepted) tell the tale from either the protagonist orantagonist’s point of view.

Mr Mercedes does not plumb the existential depthsof Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,nor is it likely to have the popular appeal of The Stand (1978) or TheShining (1977), but it isn’t the work of a writer whose inventive force is flaggingeither. From the dramatic yet restrained opening, in which a grey Mercedesemerges from the fog in as frightening a manner as any mythical monster, to theplausible handling of the various plot twists, there is no evidence that King’screativity is on the wane. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mr Mercedes is its intra-textuality, King’s explicit and implicit references to worksprevious and forthcoming, with recurring symbols and motifs from his extensive oeuvre.The murder weapon recalls, of course, both Christine(1983) and From a Buick 8 (2002) andthe killer’s disguises as a clown and ice cream vendor, It (1986). The final stage of the story, which places the detectivein an unlikely trio of crime-fighters, is reminiscent of The Dark Tower series (eight books published from 1982 to 2012). Thereare also at least two allusions Revival,King’s next novel, which is due for publication in November. Mr Mercedes is, to some extent, a homageto King’s own work, but with such an illustrious career upon which to draw, thegesture is long overdue rather than self-indulgent.

 

MrMercedes features the first appearance of Holly Gibney, who subsequentlybecame a serial character and is the protagonist of King’s latest novel,Never Flinch, which was published last month.

The Earth No Longer Exists by Ben Fitts (Alien Buddha Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Pessimism smothered in absurdity with a dash of hope: short story collection substantiates future bizarro heavyweight

Ben Fitts’s bizarro collection The Earth No Longer Exists is custom-made for the media-weary twenty-first-century reader. The writing is clear, concise, and above all, original. The paragraphs are short. The language is modest. Fitts admirably avoids any writerly pretension, and with each entry not only entertains but also tackles contemporary issues with a jocular pessimism that occasionally leans toward hopefulness. Moreover, despite their simplicity, all his stories leave room for interpretation.  

Although absurdity permeates them, these pieces are not merely weird for weirdness’s sake. Fitts’s characters ¬¬– sometimes foolish, sometimes silly, and often flawed – operate from a viewpoint of misunderstanding. Political leaders think that replacing the world’s dead superheroes with janitors is a smart move. A man decides he’s going to become the world’s third-sexiest matador… so he can get with a woman. An artist born into privilege becomes so obsessed with the idea that a successful artist needs to be destitute that he loses sight of what he’s creating and what art is. In an insightful exploration of empty sexual encounters versus lasting love, a young man discovers something unexpected in the shoebox of his new lover.

“Raspberry Heart,” an indictment against the chauvinism that still permeates corporate America, introduces a raspberry interviewing for a job. The raspberry grows agitated because its would-be employer is focused not on its qualifications but rather on the fact he’s interviewing a raspberry. 

Clearly influenced by COVID and current political conflicts, “On the Back of an Octopus” involves a city on the back of a giant octopus. When a shark supporting another city approaches, the politicians and scientists of Octopolis go into the highest tower and debate an appropriate response. The idea of getting along is, if you’ll pardon the pun, unfathomable to them. Leaders refuse to see somebody else’s perspective… and the public suffers. 

The volume’s only non-bizarro work, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” is strong enough to be in a high-end literary journal. After an antisemitic message is scrawled on her son’s locker, a Jewish mother decides to move her family from the U.S. to Israel. Her teenage son resists, partly because he’s terrified of being forced to fight in the Israeli military. This fear plays out in the role playing and video games the young man plays. The story stirs up emotion on many levels, particularly animosity toward the mother, who steamrolls her son’s concerns. 

Several stories cover romantic relationships – some elicit sadness, while others end on a more positive note. The man who falls in love with “The Cactus” suffers because of their relationship. Perhaps the physical pain the man feels is a stand-in for the emotional pain that comes with bad matches. That’s the negative side. On the positive side, if a spouse sticks beside a spouse no matter how much pain, that shows love. Regardless, the story punctures the reader with one irrefutable message: love is painful.

In “My Winter Lips,” another relationship-based tale, Fitts takes the current fascination with body modification to the next level by skilfully introducing a new world while avoiding expository dialogue. People can, for instance, get jacked arms or replace their fingers with something that looks like snakes. Unlike many of his peers, the first-person narrator goes to the “parts store” merely to replace his chapped lips with another pair of normal lips. The employee reveals the store is out of human lips, and what transpires is a humorous conversation and a resolution the narrator does not anticipate. The new lips aren’t just lips — they symbolize how openness to new ideas and personal change can allow one to see others in a more positive light. 

The treasures in The Earth No Longer Exists confirm an emerging author’s potential to rise as a leading voice in the bizarro subgenre. Fitts’s stories grasp the reader and refuse to let go; he knows how long each entry needs to be before it starts losing its potency, and he never gets preachy or pontificates. Douglas J. Ogurek*****   

Sugar | review by Rafe McGregor

Sugar

Apple TV+, 8 episodes, April 2024, £8.99(monthly subscription rate)

Genre-bending neo-noir.

JohnSugar (played by Colin Farrell) is a man with a mission, a private investigatorwho is very good at one thing and one thing only: finding missing persons. Heis also a film buff and his reflections on the progress (or lack thereof) ofhis cases are cut with shots from classics of the Golden Age of Film Noir (asfar as I could tell, anyway), which must have cost Apple a fair bit (I supposethey can afford it). Sugar loves movies so much, he might almost have used themto teach himself his trade, in a similar manner to that in which his friendHenry (played by Jason Butler Harner) might have taught himself to be anacademic by reading campus novels.

Forme, Farrell has taken over from Denzel Washington as the archetypal private eyeor latter-day (urban) cowboy, a tough guy with a code and perhaps even a heartof gold if you can penetrate the layers of muscle. Like Washington, I nevertook to Farrell’s onscreen persona (just a little too smug for me), but he isan actor of such versatility that I was soon swayed by his performances in MiamiVice (2006), London Boulevard (2010), and True Detective 2(2015), just as Washington blew me away in Out of Time (2003), Man onFire (2004), and Déjà Vu (2006).

Whyam I reviewing a neo-noir television series for TQF? Because, like Tony Scott’swonderful Déjà Vu, Sugar has a genre-bending twist, albeit onethat is revealed late in the series. (I won’t say which genre, so as to avoidspoilers, but you can be sure it’s one of science fiction, fantasy, or horror).There are in fact two twists, an unusual change of category and a more common,but nonetheless delightful, reversal of fortune as the narrative charges to itsconclusion. Does the change of category work? I’m not sure. It certainly didn’truin what had gone before, but ultimately I found it a little gratuitous.Meaning that the series would have been at least as good without it and perhapsbetter.

The case itself is standard PI fare, with Sugar hired to find the missing grandchild of movie mogul Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell). Farrell is at his best since HBO’s True Detective 2 and there are outstanding performances by Kirby (formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste, playing Sugar’s handler, Ruby) and Amy Ryan (playing Melanie Matthews, a retired rock star). The denouement is not at all predictable and even rather tense so in spite of a lost star for squeezing two genres into one narrative, I’d say it’s definitely worth watching.***           

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | review by Rafe McGregor

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, by Christopher McQuarrie (Paramount Pictures)

Better onthe big screen.

The cinematic experience has changed a lot… andI mean since the COVID-19 pandemic, not over my lifetime. Vue, which has beenmy local ‘provider’ for some time now, recently refurbished all of its cinemas sothat every seat is now what would have been called ‘luxury’ pre-pandemic. Thismust have cut the number of seats that can be squeezed into each theatresignificantly, but I suppose it’s good business as fewer and fewer people ventureforth from the comfort of their living rooms. At the same time (and probablyfor the same reasons) it has become increasingly difficult to find a cinema screeningwhat one wants to watch, as my three most recent choices reveal: MI8 (atmy local Vue, but only for a single week), Warfare (straight tostreaming as far as I can tell), and The Return (apparently releasedlast year, neither screening nor streaming in the UK).
By its eighth and final instalment, the MissionImpossible film franchise is firmly in the science fiction genre, with theantagonist of seven and eight (a single narrative divided into two parts) beinga sentient AI program called the Entity that has inspired its own death cult, membersof which have infiltrated various levels of America’s (and other nations’)governments and militaries. (Though perhaps the bit about members of a deathcult infiltrating the government isn’t quite science fiction if one reads thenews at the moment – I digress.) The franchise is of course based on the verysuccessful Mission: Impossible television series, which ran from 1966 to1973 and was revived for two seasons in the next decade. It was in fact lessthan a decade after this revival when the film series started as Mission:Impossible (MI1) was released in 1996. Since then, MI hasemerged as something of an American version of the James Bond franchise, withTom Cruise in the leading role of Ethan Hunt. Following a six-year hiatus atthe beginning of the century (between MI2 and MI3) there has beenan MI film every two to five years, a roll that even the pandemiccouldn’t break.
The running time of MI8 is 170 minutes andmy only real criticism of the film is that this is about 30 minutes too longand just a little too self-indulgent from Cruise (who is heavily involved inproduction), director Christopher McQuarrie, or both. For example, there issome very pedestrian exposition at the beginning that could easily have beenshaved off. The scene (or sequence, if you’re a filmmaker) is both too lengthy– an attempt to remind audiences of not only the events of MI7, but thatthis is the culmination of the whole film series (it includes flashbacks to allof the other films) – and pointless. Pointless because the plot is so complex(and implausible, but this is science fiction so I won’t quibble) that I’dcompletely lost track by the time the explanation ended, in spite of havingwatched MI7 relatively recently.
Cruise is now 62 and remains determined to show usthat with dedication and a few hundred million in the bank one can stay inpeak condition in one’s seventh decade, spending much of the film with hisshirt off (even in the Bering Sea – look it up on Google Maps). One thing thatdid strike me, though, was that for all of Cruise’s flexing, the franchise hasbecome very child friendly. It’s always been fun and full of over-the-topstunts, but MI1 and MI2 (the latter in particular) had scenes andthemes aimed at an adult audience. There is only one scene with extremeviolence in MI8, which all occurs offscreen, and when Cruise does gethorizontal with co-star Hayley Attwell (playing Grace, a former thief) it’s fora chaste cuddle in a decompression chamber. Which is fine, but the flashbacksto the earlier instalments reminded me that those films had a little moreappeal for grown-ups. Notwithstanding, if you’ve watched one or more of the firstseven, I recommend seeing how the story ends and, if you can find one screeningit, seeing that ending at the cinema. ***

Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning | review by Rafe McGregor

MissionImpossible – The Final Reckoning, by Christopher McQuarrie (Paramount Pictures)

 

Better onthe big screen.

The cinematic experience has changed a lot…andI mean since the COVID-19 pandemic, not over my lifetime. Vue, which has beenmy local ‘provider’ for some time now, recently refurbished all of its cinemas sothat every seat is now what would have been called ‘luxury’ pre-pandemic. Thismust have cut the number of seats that can be squeezed into each theatresignificantly, but I suppose it’s good business as fewer and fewer people ventureforth from the comfort of their living rooms. At the same time (and probablyfor the same reasons) it has become increasingly difficult to find a cinema screeningwhat one wants to watch, as my three most recent choices reveal: MI8 (atmy local Vue, but only for a single week), Warfare (straight tostreaming as far as I can tell), and The Return (apparently releasedlast year, neither screening nor streaming in the UK).
By its eighth and final instalment, the MissionImpossible film franchise is firmly in the science fiction genre, with theantagonist of seven and eight (a single narrative divided into two parts) beinga sentient AI program called the Entity that has inspired its own death cult, membersof which have infiltrated various levels of America’s (and other nations’)governments and militaries. (Though perhaps the bit about members of a deathcult infiltrating the government isn’t quite science fiction if one reads thenews at the moment – I digress.) The franchise is of course based on the verysuccessful Mission: Impossible television series, which ran from 1966 to1973 and was revived for two seasons in the next decade. It was in fact lessthan a decade after this revival when the film series started as Mission:Impossible (MI1) was released in 1996. Since then, MI hasemerged as something of an American version of the James Bond franchise, withTom Cruise in the leading role of Ethan Hunt. Following a six-year hiatus atthe beginning of the century (between MI2 and MI3) there has beenan MI film every two to five years, a roll that even the pandemiccouldn’t break.
The running time of MI8 is 170 minutes andmy only real criticism of the film is that this is about 30 minutes too longand just a little too self-indulgent from Cruise (who is heavily involved inproduction), director Christopher McQuarrie, or both. For example, there issome very pedestrian exposition at the beginning that could easily have beenshaved off. The scene (or sequence, if you’re a filmmaker) is both too lengthy– an attempt to remind audiences of not only the events of MI7, but thatthis is the culmination of the whole film series (it includes flashbacks to allof the other films) – and pointless. Pointless because the plot is so complex(and implausible, but this is science fiction so I won’t quibble) that I’dcompletely lost track by the time the explanation ended, in spite of havingwatched MI7 relatively recently.
Cruise is now 62 and remains determined to show usthat with dedication and a few hundred million in the bank one can stay inpeak condition in one’s seventh decade, spending much of the film with hisshirt off (even in the Bering Sea – look it up on Google Maps). One thing thatdid strike me, though, was that for all of Cruise’s flexing, the franchise hasbecome very child friendly. It’s always been fun and full of over-the-topstunts, but MI1 and MI2 (the latter in particular) had scenes andthemes aimed at an adult audience. There is only one scene with extremeviolence in MI8, which all occurs offscreen, and when Cruise does gethorizontal with co-star Hayley Attwell (playing Grace, a former thief) it’s fora chaste cuddle in a decompression chamber. Which is fine, but the flashbacksto the earlier instalments reminded me that those films had a little moreappeal for grown-ups. Notwithstanding, if you’ve watched one or more of the firstseven, I recommend seeing how the story ends and, if you can find one screeningit, seeing that ending at the cinema.***