Andrew Cartmel's Blog, page 16

Mom and Dad by Brian Taylor

I almost missed this because, from the anodyne title, I assumed it was a comedy. 

Actually it's an action thriller, or horror movie. And a comedy. A very dark comedy.

It's a flip on the conventional zombie movie — there's a whole sub-genre of films which aren't actually about the dead rising and eating the living, but are much the same set-up with a more plausible plot: like The Rage or Rabid, or perhaps even The Purge trilogy, in which ordinary humans are turned, en masse, into relentless killing machines and nowhere is safe.

But Mom and Dad has a uniquely inventive – some might say sick — twist on this. One day, for no explained reason, parents start killing their children. This gives rise to large quantities of the blackest of black humour and Nicolas Cage as the dad in the title really rises to the occasion. 

This is both horrifying and hilarious. It’s a fabulous conceit. There’s a terrifically disturbing and chilling bit where the camera just moves past a row of men staring with blank hostility through a window into the hospital area where all the babies lie in their cots.

The movie begins with a wide viewpoint, as we see the entire community and (through television reports) the nation at large descending into this kind of mob bloodshed. Then it narrows down to focus on just one family, consisting of Cage plus Selma Blair as the mom and Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur as the kids Carly and Josh. 

And it becomes a tightly contained cat-and-mouse game in their home with the parents seeking to slay their offspring, who are understandably none too keen on the prospect.
 
Mom and Dad is written and directed by Brian Taylor, formerly of Neveldine and Taylor, the screenwriting partnership who wrote the Crank movies and Pathology. (As a solo act Taylor directed Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which starred Cage.)  

Neveldine and Taylor were a writing team which specialised in lurid pulp adventures characterised by ferocious energy and unashamed excess. They were also, less appealingly, all too often characterised by a willingness to sacrifice their story concepts and logic for the sake of plot convenience and cheap thrills — as in the case of Pathology. And now Mom and Dad.

At the end of this movie there’s a splendid gag where Cage and Selma Blair are finally about to finish off their kids... and the doorbell rings. Mom and Dad look at each other. "It's your parents," says Blair. "They're coming over for dinner." "That's tonight?" says Cage, in a classic dismayed domestic exchange.

But of course, as soon as Grandma and Granddad are through the door they set about trying to kill Cage. Which saves the kids' bacon. Wonderful stuff, And very funny.

However, at this point Taylor loses sight of his own logic — or perhaps deliberately abandons it for short term gains. Because while granddad — Lance Henriksen — goes after Cage, grandma goes after Selma Blair, i.e. her daughter in law. 

Which makes no story sense at all. This murderous plague, whatever it is, only affects parents in regard to their own children.

Instead, while her elderly hubby is trying his level best to murder their son, Grandma should have been saying to Selma Blair, “Oh I tried that meat loaf recipe you gave me and it was wonderful.”

Nevertheless this is a standout black comedy/horror movie hybrid. As a social commentary it isn't remotely in the league of Get Out, but it's nevertheless an audacious, over-the-top, furious and bloodthirsty little gem. 

(Image credits: thank you Imp Awards.)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh

Mostly I post about movies I like. Sometimes I dislike a movie so much that I feel have to post about it. Other times, I dislike one so much that I decide just to ignore it.

This was the case with writer-director Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (a great title, by the way. Although henceforth it will be shortened to Three Billboards). 

But the movie has received such acclaim that I've become rather annoyed, and decided to state my case for the record.

Let me start by saying that I thought Sam Rockwell's performance, as dumb-ass deputy Dixon, was outstanding, and I was delighted that he won an Oscar for it.

What's more, throughout most of the film I thought I was watching a masterpiece. It was hilarious, disturbing, emotionally complex... But then towards the end it fell apart so completely that the entire enterprise collapsed.

And revealed that the movie was a big bag of emptiness. It pretends that it is serious and deep and profound. Only to betray the audience by turning out to be shallow, phony and nothing but a gimmicky show-off piece of junk.

And this betrayal is utterly fatal because the movie needs to be serious and deep and profound, since it is dealing with such grave material.

It tells the story of Frances McDormand as Mildred, a mother dealing with guilt and grief after the horrible fate of her teenage daughter ("raped while dying").

It also delves deep into human suffering elsewhere, tenderly depicting the terminal illness and suicide of Sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson).

This is such serious subject matter that you can't afford to fuck it up. But fuck it up Martin McDonagh does, and pretty spectacularly, too.

The movie crashes off the rails when Deputy Dixon is apparently released from hospital a week after being admitted with serious burns. And it fails beyond redemption when Dixon and Mildred set off together on a cross-country revenge spree.

They're going to kill this guy who they know was not the attacker of Mildred's daughter. But they've decided he's a rapist — plus he beat up Dixon in a bar fight — so they're going to kill him anyway. 

Or maybe they won't. 

Who knows?

Certainly not Martin McDonagh who seems to have forgotten the first rule of screenwriting. Movies are all about endings.  
 
Indeed, some people believe that you should start writing a movie with the ending and work your way backwards.

That sure as hell didn't happen here.

What Three Billboards does succeed in doing — laudably and superbly — is setting up characters whom we expect to be unlikable and unsympathetic, and then utterly reversing our feelings towards them. It does it first with Willoughby and then, in spades, with Dixon.

Indeed the characters in the film are excellent, and McDonagh's ability to write characters — and dialogue — are his great strengths. What's more, I entirely agree with McDonagh when he says (in this interview) "The character begins from the dialogue."

Which makes it all the more of a pity that the movie fails to live up to its promise. I think the problem is simply that McDonagh leaned too heavily on his skill at dialogue and character (honed in his stage plays) and did too little work on the plot.

Millions of people like, revere — even love — Three Billboards. I was about to make a crack that none of them are screenwriters, though...

However, I realised that I know this to not be true. My dear friend Rona Munro is an amazingly gifted screenwriter. And she adores Three Billboards.

So maybe I'm completely wrong.

But I don't think so.

(Image credits: Seven billboards at Imp Awards.)

The Shape of Water by del Toro and Taylor

I've seen most of Guillermo del Toro's output: everything from his debut feature Cronos in 1993 through to Pacific Rim 2013. Then, after twenty years of disappointment, I pretty much threw in the towel.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. I really liked Blade II... But such widely loved and highly regarded works as The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth just left me cold. And I particularly detested the Hellboy movies (what a waste of Ron Perlman...).

I mention all this so you will know it was by no means a foregone conclusion that I'd love The Shape of Water. But love it I did.

The movie was written by del Toro in collaboration with Vanessa Taylor. Taylor has a background in television writing, ranging from Alias — an old favourite of mine — to Game of Thrones (which I currently think is the greatest TV series ever made). She also scripted Divergent, but we won't hold that against her.

Because The Shape of Water is terrific. It tells the story of... well, you know the story: basically a deaf female janitor at a secret government research facility falls in love with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who is being held captive there.

It's like a super-deluxe, full colour, full length version of a 1960s Outer Limits episode, made for adult audiences.

The janitor is Elisa, portrayed by British actress Sally Hawkins with great subtlety and considerable courage. She unflinchingly appears nude, and performs, ahem, acts of auto-eroticism in the bathtub in scenes which cleverly set up the film's theme of associating sexuality and water.

Octavia Spencer is great as fellow janitor (janitress?) Zelda. And Michael Stuhlbarg, who was splendid in Steve Jobs, is good as a sympathetic scientist.

The bad guy is military stooge Strickland played by Michael Shannon, who is very effective but is basically reprising his uptight fed from Boardwalk Empire, right down to making love to his wife with his socks on.

However, besides Sally Hawkins, it is Richard Jenkins who really impresses as Elisa's kindly neighbour Giles, a commercial artist whose cat Pandora gets eaten (with hideous skull-crunching sound effects) after they help the creature escape and give him sanctuary.

Oh, and the creature, called Amphibian Man, is played by Doug Jones in a superb monster suit which is iridescent, with beautiful colours. He also has really cool feline eyes (you'd have thought he could have spared poor Pandora out of intra-species loyalty...).

The film is set in the early 1960s and nominally takes place in Baltimore, but it was shot in Toronto (the Toronto crew came in for particular thanks at the Academy Awards ceremony). 

It's visually splendid, with a nice period feel and a lovely score by Alexander Desplat — who won an Oscar for it.

The film also won — astonishingly — Best Picture. I say astonishingly because the Academy is notorious for its dislike of science fiction del Toro got Best Director and Paul Austerberry won for Production Design.

Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins were all nominated for Oscars but failed to win. Spencer lost to Allison Janney in I, Tonya and Jenkins to Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In both cases I'd go along with that.

Hawkins lost to Frances McDormand in Three Billboards, and here I beg to differ. Not least because Three Billboards is so much weaker than The Shape of Water.

And del Toro and Vanessa Taylor were also nominated for their original screenplay, but lost to Jordan Peele for his script to Get Out. And in this case I can't fault the academy. 

Both are wonderful movies, but Get Out is deeper, more important and profound and subversive.

The Shape of Water has moments which are silly and unbelievable, but this mattered not a jot because the movie was so appealing and won me over so completely. And I'm going to give you a soft spoiler here by telling you that it has a happy ending.

Grisly cat-eating scene aside, I enjoyed every minute of The Shape of Water. It's a lovely movie, touching, exciting and satisfying.

(Image credits: just a handful (with webbed fingers) of posters available from Imp Awards.)

Triggerman by Matz, Hill and Jef

Triggerman, like Peepland, is another entry in the outstanding new Hard Case Crime series of graphic novels. It's drawn by Jef and co-written by Matz and Walter Hill.

Walter Hill is a highly regarded director and screenwriter. As a writer he had a hand in creating the Alien franchise, but he is better known for his work on Westerns (Deadwood) and particularly crime dramas (48 Hrs.).

In 2012 he directed a thriller set in New Orleans entitled Bullet to the Head. The movie wasn't particularly memorable, but it was based on a French graphic novel (Du plomb dans la tête). 

And on the set of the film Walter Hill met Matz (a pseudonym for Alexis Nolent) who had written Du plomb dans la tête.

Hill recalls that Matz "asked if I had any scripts or stories that could transfer to comic book form. I told him I had about thirty of them."

And Triggerman is the result. Set in America in the 1930s, it is a vivid, violent and compelling tale of Depression era crime. A classic story of Prohibition and gangsters, it focuses on a gunman called Roy Nash.

Nash is a hardened criminal and a hired killer — a standard character from film noir and pulp fiction. 

What makes him distinctive is that he is on a quest — for a woman from his past. He is motivated not by money or the thirst for revenge, but by love.

This a simple and strikingly effective plot device, but I don't recall it ever having been used before. Hill himself says, "The story is driven by Roy's nostalgia for a lost love. I thought that was an interesting departure point for a gangster character and story."

It certainly is, and thanks to the exemplary art by Jef (aka Jean-Francois Martinez, aka Nino), Triggerman comes powerfully to life. Jef's illustrations are gritty, dynamic and strangely elegant. 

In particular I was knocked out by the magnificent shots of the launch heading out to the gambling ship. This sequence is all the more effective for being entirely wordless. Indeed, the use of silent images is one of the great and distinctive strengths of Triggerman.

Jef contributes to the sense of period which heightens the pleasure of this tight, terse action thriller which is populated by intriguing characters. 

(There's one called Eddie Marz, which must be a cheeky homage to Chandler's The Big Sleep, which features a crook called Eddie Mars, who runs a beach side gambling house.)

Triggerman was pure pleasure for me. Dark, terse, grim and relentless. But also beautifully drawn and tremendously evocative.

As a comic book writer myself, though, I have to add that during the grave robbing sequence on Page 99, Panel 5, I think the word balloon is wrongly positioned. I think it should be coming from Roy, who is out of shot.

I really like these Hard Case graphic novels. I can't get enough of them. More, please.

(Image credits: Once again thanks to Will O'Mullane at Titan for providing all the art.)

The Beguiled (the novel) by Thomas Cullinan

The Beguiled makes for a fascinating case study. It is a 1966 novel which has been filmed twice.The 1971 movie, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood was a classic.

The 2017 remake was directed by Sofia Coppola with Colin Farrell in the Eastwood role, and I've said some rather harsh things about it.

Not least concerning the way it marginalised the author of the original novel — Thomas Cullinan — who doesn't even get credit on the poster.

However, the Coppola film did at least have the effect of bringing Cullinan's book back into print and allowing me to re-read it. (My battered paperback tie-in of the Eastwood movie is long since history.)

My first impression of the novel was that it was amazingly self assured, extremely well written and shaping up to be a fascinating hybrid of True Grit and The Lord of the Flies. 

It was the way it so strongly evoked its female narrators which reminded me of Charles Portis's True Grit.  

And the connection with William Golding's Lord of the Flies arises at the beginning when Mattie (Matilda), the slave, reflects on the schools inhabitants. "I didn't have any notion then how much evil we got in us, all of us."

Unfortunately, as I continued to read, these strongly positive reactions began to ebb away and I came to see that Cullinan's book was considerably weaker than the first film adaptation... and indeed the second one.

Fundamentally the same material is here in all cases, but there's an utterly decisive shift of emphasis. The movies are about a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by a girls' school in the South. 

The book is about a girls' school in the South which takes in a wounded Union soldier. 

This is a crucial shift of emphasis. In the book the soldier McBurney is a peripheral figure — a catalyst. To Cullinan this novel is all about the girls and women; the denizens of the school.

For a goodly portion of the book (about 70 pages) McBurney is comatose. Supine and unconscious, he is a blank slate on which the females can project their fantasies.When he finally does wake up, so does the novel, which frankly had become rather dull.

It's a long book, nearly 400 pages, and unfortunately dullness sets in again. Just over the halfway mark we have the essential event of the story: the brutal, and quite possibly unnecessary, amputation of McBurney's leg.

In the film this was the cue for a rapid and dramatic escalation of drama, heading downhill to a murderous conclusion.

But in the book, McBurney's initial horror and anger abates, and he becomes resigned to his mutilation. The story plateaus for a long while before he rather arbitrarily recaptures his rage and resentment, and precipitates the events which lead to his downfall — crucially, the killing of Amelia's pet turtle.

This faltering stop-and-start pacing and the endless digressions into the backgrounds of the school's womenfolk are the fatal flaws of the novel. Of course, Cullinan wouldn't see it that way. He loved his characters and wanted to bring them fully to life.

Yet I'd argue it was possible to do that and still also tell a taut and gripping story. Which is actually what the book's editor should have demanded — by tightening the pace and cutting about a hundred pages out of the book.

No doubt Cullinan would have been about as pleased with that as McBurney was with the removal of his leg. But it could have turned the novel into a masterpiece. As it is, it's a rather shapeless and frustrating volume, the often excellent writing and potentially explosive plot going to waste.

However, when the Hollywood scriptwriters got to work on it, The Beguiled ended up transformed into the powerful and unforgettable Gothic drama it always had the scope to become.

There is much to admire in this book. The characterisation is often sharp and amusing: "Alice... she's really not too mean as long as you don't provoke her."

And Cullinan also clearly knew an immense amount about the Civil War, conveying a firm sense of the period with its odd beliefs ("all this cannon fire would surely bring on rain"). 

His descriptions are also often brilliant, as when Amelia first finds McBurney lying wounded in the woods, "one arm around a fallen log, just clinging to it like it was his mother or a raft in deep water." 

Or much later in the book when Harriet hears McBurney coming ominously upstairs with "the measured thump of his crutches."

But ultimately Thomas Cullinan's The Beguiled is an object lesson in a novel which only realised its full potential when it was adapted for the screen.

(Image credits: Thank you, Good Reads.)

Hostiles by Donald Stewart and Scott Cooper

By an interesting coincidence when I saw this film I had just been reading about the terrible atrocities perpetrated on native Americans by the white settlers. So the shocking opening sequence of Hostiles had a strange effect on me...

Or rather no effect. I watched the family of Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) being wiped out by Apaches, including her small children. And I was stonily unmoved — because I knew all too well how much evil had been done the other way around.

"This movie has really missed the mark with me," I thought. But I was completely wrong...

Because, to its enormous credit, that is exactly the intention of Hostiles. It deliberately begins with this argument so it can set about refuting it. Or at least balance it.

Thus, having established the appalling suffering of Rosalie, it then neatly reverses our sympathies, by showing the even worse suffering of the Indians.

It does this through Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a captive Cheyenne leader, and his family, who are being grudgingly (very grudgingly) escorted back to their ancestral homelands by Cavalry Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) — a professional soldier with a lifelong hatred of all things Indian.

As their trek commences they find the traumatised Rosalie and take her along with them, on a journey of discovery in which deeply held beliefs on all sides are challenged and profoundly changed.

This is a gripping, moving and highly intelligent movie which has something tremendously important to say, and it does so in the shape of an action packed Western, easily qualifying Hostiles as an important film and one of the best of the year. 

It is directed by Scott Cooper, who previously directed Black Mass, the Johnny Depp Boston crime story. Cooper also wrote the screenplay (he previously wrote Crazy Heart, about Jeff Bridges as a washed up country singer).

The film has an intriguing genesis — Cooper's script is based on the work of the late Donald Stewart, a distinguished veteran screenwriter with a fascinating career.

Donald Stewart started out writing exploitation movies for Roger Corman (Jackson County Jail, Deathsport) then worked on the radical classic Missing for Costa-Gavras — and won an Oscar and a BAFTA for it — before moving into the commercial mainstream and working on all the Jack Ryan spy thrillers, starting with The Hunt for Red October.

Hostiles was clearly a labour of love by Donald Stewart, because it was painstakingly researched. The credit on the movie reads "based on a manuscript by", so it's not clear if he wrote a novel or a screenplay, but whatever he created it was the basis for an outstanding film.

Stewart's widow gave the manuscript to Scott Cooper who saw the potential to make a movie about "all of the things we as Americans need to better understand to make this country heal."

The picture has a structural flaw — it effectively stops halfway through and then starts again — but other than that it is beautifully made by Scott Cooper and clearly is a heartfelt work.

And I'm delighted to report that Hostiles, after harrowing and terrible losses along the way, has a marvellous ending.

(Image credits: all four posters from Imp Awards.)

All the Money in the World by David Scarpa

I have not hesitated to be harsh to Ridley Scott in the past — check out my post on Alien: Covenant. Indeed, I'd pretty much written him off. So it is with enormous pleasure that I report that All the Money in the World is the best film he's made in decades.

Maybe his best ever.

It tells the true story of what happens when the teenage grandson of the richest man in the world is kidnapped. And the richest man in the world, John Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) refuses to pay the ransom...

Now, of course there are cogent arguments in favour of not paying a ransom — if you do so, you just encourage further kidnappings. But that isn't why Getty refuses.

He just doesn't want to spend the money.

This is an amazingly tense and compelling story. The kidnapped kid, John Paul Getty III (played by Charlie Plummer, no relation) is an appealing and resourceful character and we are utterly caught up in his plight.
 
And also the plight of the kid's mother, wonderfully played by Michelle Williams in what is easily her finest role. We feel her agony as she is swept up in the monstrous machinations of the kidnapping.

We even begin to sympathise with one of Paul's kidnappers, Quintana, played by Romain Duris.

The person we feel no sympathy for is the cold, hard, rich old man, as so magnificently depicted by Christopher Plummer.

In the company of these (literally) great actors I was preparing to wince when Mark Wahlberg enters the story as the ex-CIA hostage negotiator hired by Getty. But Wahlberg does a fine job.

This movie had a troubled history. It was filmed once with Kevin Spacey in the role of the old man, then had to be extensively re-shot, recast with Christopher Plummer, when Spacey was caught up in accusations of sexual harassment and abuse.

The re-shoots reportedly cost $10 million, with the actors who'd already done their scenes once returning for rock bottom fees — except for Wahlberg, who demanded $1.5million. 

Then, sensing a PR disaster (guess what Mark, you just appeared in a movie which condemns a heartless rich man who only cares about money...) Wahlberg hastily donated that fee to a legal fund for victims of sexual harassment... and made the donation in the name of Michelle Williams.

Enough gossip... Written by David Scarpa from a book by John Pearson, this is a terrific film,  and you should definitely see it. 
 
I was familiar with the case from press reports at the time, so I knew a lot of what was coming. If you're not familiar with what happened, you're really in for a roller coaster ride.

Great movie. Enjoy.

(Image credits: Some really lovely posters at Imp Awards, although I've refrained from using one which foolishly reveals a major plot development.)

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

I first read this science fiction landmark when I was a kid and I have to confess I retained virtually no memory of it, except a general sense of the great flow of events through the vast spaces and long history of a galactic empire, with intrigue aplenty.

Actually, that's not a bad thumbnail sketch of this novel, and indeed the three-volume classic it kicks off.

I was motivated to give the Foundation Trilogy a much overdue reappraisal when I received a beautiful boxed set of Folio Society hardcovers for Christmas. (Thanks, Barb.)

I dived into this first volume about a week ago, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. In fact I found it addictively readable.

Asimov, at least at this stage in his career (1951), is no great literary stylist. But in some ways this is an advantage. 

His prose is so neutral there's no danger of it getting in the way of the story. And it's so colourless that there's little danger of it dating.

What has dated is the technology — I ask you, microfilm? — and the dialogue, which is sometimes stilted sci-fi speak at its worst ("Great Galloping Galaxies";  "I don't care an electron").

But let's cut Mr Asimov some slack. He is also capable of some striking and memorable descriptions, particularly when he's taken by the visionary excitement of space and he speaks of "the hard brilliance of the stars" or "the broken edge of the galaxy."

The Foundation trilogy tells the story of the collapse and rebirth of a vast galactic empire. The gimmick is psychohistory — a science which enables the future to be predicted, not in the sense of anyone's individual destiny, but in terms of mass movements and populations.

Hari Seldon (Asimov is good at names — we also have Sennett Forell and Salvor Hardin) is the master of psychohistory and he has worked out that the Empire will descend into chaos and barbarism for 30,000 years.

The collapse is inevitable, but the duration of collapse isn't. If he makes the right moves a new empire can arise in a "mere" thousand years. So he establishes the Foundation of the title...

The story proceeds at a headlong pace in a series of vignettes (the novel was reworked from eight short stories) with the protagonists using first science, then religion, then commerce to drive the galaxy back towards a new beginning.

Asimov was inspired by Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and there's something intoxicating about the scope of his vision. And he has a knack for conjuring suspense and creating satisfying situations in which the bad guys are bested.

What he doesn't have is any women. The first female character turns up about one hundred pages in, and she's effectively a secretary who answers the phone. 

Another hundred pages along we get a sparky and troublesome queen of a planet (her title is actually  "commdora").

But she's immediately pacified when her husband gives her some fab fashion accessories...

Great Galloping Sexism aside, Foundation was compelling fun and I'm looking forward to volume two of the trilogy, Foundation and Empire. Stay tuned.

(Image credits: The Folio Society edition is from their website. The Gnome Press original hardcover (blue spaceships on a black background) was from an ABE book dealer, Heartwood Rare Books. The Weidenfeld UK original (blue spaceships on a purple background) is from another ABE dealer, Currey, L.W. Inc. The other covers are from Goodreads. I've given pride of place to the Avon edition with the lovely cover painting by Don Ivan Punchatz. This was the one I grew up with, but it isn't mere nostalgia which moves me to single out this striking design.)

The Last Jedi by Rian Johnson

What a relief... I am always up for a good Star Wars movie, and I utterly rejoiced in The Force Awakens. Or The Franchise Reawakens, as I like to think of it.

Then along came Rogue One. It was a big hit and beloved by millions upon millions of people worldwide (and indeed many people I know personally). What can I say... I hated it.

So I was braced for a disaster when The Last Jedi came along. But it was simply terrific. It gripped me from the first moments when the good guys (the Resistance) are getting their asses kicked in a space battle.

In particular there's a nail-biting sequence as the last of the Resistance bombers — their final hope — get shot to pieces as Paige Tico (Veronica Ngo) pilots it on a suicide mission. I won't tell you what happens...

At the other end of the movie there is a lavishly wonderful ground battle on a snowy* world called Crait where the war machines gouge up streaks of bright red dirt as if the planet itself is bleeding.

So the Last Jedi is visually ravishing, and it's also expertly plotted. Whenever the Resistance seems about to succeed, they get knocked back. This gives the film a dark tone which is deliberately reminiscent of the second instalment of the first trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back (another favourite of mine).

Last Jedi is written and directed by Rian Johnson. Yup, just one name on the screenplay, which is pretty amazing. Johnson has made some notable films, starting with Brick, a Dashiell Hammett style crime story recast as a high school movie which I loved. 

He also wrote and directed the time travel thriller Looper and directed several episodes of the TV series Breaking Bad. Johnson brings a fresh and intriguing sensibility to the Star Wars canon.

The cast of the Last Jedi features some fine performances. I am increasingly impressed with Daisy Ridley now that I've seen the range of her acting (she was excellent in Murder on the Orient Express). Here she continues to light up the screen as Rey, a luscious tomboy with a light sabre.

In Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), the franchise has hit the jackpot in terms of a truly great villain. There is a sequence where Rey and Kylo Ren have a sword fight in a bright red throne room and the place ends up ripped to pieces with burning cinders falling through the air. It's amazing.

But the most surprising performance is from as Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. His mature and embittered depiction of Skywalker has real depth.

He's not my favourite character in the movie, though. That honour goes to Benicio Del Toro as DJ, a complex figure — you don't know whether to like him or hate him — and probably the only pragmatist in the entire story.

There also some fun alien animals. You can hardly have missed the cute porgs — big eyed, stubby birds. In one cherishably funny scene they almost convert Chewbacca to vegetarianism.

However, my favourite exo-fauna are the tinkling crystal critters on the planet Crait.

The Last Jedi has its flaws. On second viewing the clumsy dialogue began to grate — is it supposed to be a homage to some of the awful George Lucas writing of yesteryear? If so, it's a miscalculation.

But let's not end on a down note. The Last Jedi is magnificent. And spectacular. And great fun.

Oh, and here are the box office receipts for the three recent Star Wars films. Rogue One is in third place. So there is some justice in the world...

(*Yes, I now know it's not snow on the planet's surface but salt. But I don't give a shit.)

(Image credits: No less than 67 posters to chose from at the indispensable Imp Awards.)

Peepland by Faust, Phillips and Camerini

I've previously written about Hard Case Crime, who publish an outstanding range of crime novels with beautiful retro trappings but often cutting edge content. 

One of the first of their books I read was Money Shot, by Christa Faust, a memorable modern reinvention of the hardboiled thriller. 

Now Hard Case have broadened their output to include graphic novels. And judging by the first few titles, this is going to be an exceptionally high quality project. 

Among those first titles is Peepland, scripted by Christa Faust in collaboration with Gary Phillips, a writer experienced in both the world of prose and comics.

As a former sex worker, Christa Faust knows well the seedy world of 1980s New York and the Times Square peep show booths which are the setting for the story. 

She says it's "by far the most autobiographical project I've ever written... I had Gary to teach me how to think in panels."

The art is by Andrea Camerini — who's a guy, and Italian. Camerini has an edgy, angular style which is highly suited to the period and milieu of the story. 
 
I particularly like his silhouette of a scared cat on page 108. (Incidentally, the cover illustrating this post is by Fay Dalton, not Camerini.)

The plot for Peepland is inspired by a real life crime — and a scandalous miscarriage of justice — known as the Central Park Five. 

And the shadow of Donald Trump falls chill and wide across the story. (Oddly, I had just read about that incident, and in connection with Trump, in the London Review of Books.)

The thing which struck me most forcefully about this graphic novel was the ferocious ruthlessness of the plotting. The writers are willing to kill anyone, in the most brutal and merciless way. This is grownup stuff, and disturbing in the right sort of way. It aims to show us the dark side of life, and succeeds.

I do have some issues with Peepland, though. There's a secondary character who I at first  thought was the victim of an atrocity, then I discovered he was the perpetrator — as you can see on the pages here.

I assume this ambiguity was deliberate. But I'm not sure it added much to the story, other than confusion. 

And there's also a deus ex machina ending in which the heroine defeats her assailant by pulling out a knife we've never seen before.

But these are minor quibbles. Peepland succeeds amply, on its own terms. It's a gritty and distressing 1980s noir about the sleazy side of urban life.

So far all of the Hard Case graphic novels I've encountered are worth reading, and some are simply dynamite. More on these soon.

(Image credits: All of the art was provided by Will O'Mullane at Titan. Thank you, Will!)