The Avengers - The Cybernauts Trilogy

Cool As Thwack!

The Avengers - The Cybernauts Trilogy
Airdates: 16th October 1965,
30 September 1967 & 2nd November 1976
Network - Zone 2 Blu Ray

Warning: Some spoilerage here.

When Network released this Blu Ray set a couple of years ago, I was hoping it would lead to a proper Blu Ray restoration of all the surviving episodes of various series of The Avengers in one massive boxed edition. Alas, that hasn’t happened yet but I’ve finally got around to watching this marvelous little mini set and, I have to say, they’ve done such a good job with these that they really should get onto doing a full restoration sometime soon (I see StudioCanal have got Blu Ray sets out for just three individual seasons but... that’s not enough and my respect for that specific company and their rights to release things in various territories and therefore blocking other labels has been steadily going downhill over the last few years).

The Avengers started in 1961 as a replacement show for Police Surgeon,  for the star of that series, Ian Hendry. This bizarre arm of the British Secret Service had Henry assisted in most episodes by a character called John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee. However, Hendry left the show towards the end of the first series which left Steed as the main character and he would continue on in that role in six more series of that show from 1961 - 1969, followed by the reincarnation of the show with two more series as The New Avengers from 1976 - 1977. During that time he had various assistants, all known over here in the UK as ‘Avengers girls’ (excepting in one obvious case) and they were Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, Diana Rigg as Emma Peel (played by Uma Thurman in a later movie adaptation), Linda Thorson as Tara King and, for The New Avengers, the duo of Joanna Lumley as Purdey and Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit. It’s of some interest to note that three of the four Avengers girls, with the exception of Linda Thorson, were also Bond girls. Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley even starred in the same Bond film, my favourite one, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) and, of course, Patrick Macnee would also have a large role in A View To A Kill (reviewed here). Alas, the vast majority of the Honor Blackman episodes are lost to history but I do remember seeing her in these (and catching all these old episodes) when they were repeated in the early 1970s on British television.

This Network release picks on the three episodes out of the entire run which have what is, for three episodes spaced apart over the course of 11 years, a surprising amount of connective tissue, not least of which is the main instrument of destruction of the main bad guy (who is different in each episode), the Cybernauts of the titles. The set also allows us to see three different periods of Avengers history too, in that the way those episodes fall we have one of the black and white Diana Rigg era episodes, followed by one of the colour Diana Rigg era episodes and then, finally, an episode from The New Avengers.

The Cybernauts are a lovely creation, actually, and you can see why they were reused a couple more times throughout the show’s history. In a pre-titles sequence in the first of these, simply called The Cybernauts, we meet the antagonist robots who really never change much over the course of the stories which feature them. They have no emotion or real reasoning, they just home in on anyone who happens to be carrying a certain homing pen (in the first one, this plot mechanism is changed for the next two), can bash their way through walls with their very distinctive ‘woosh... thwack’ karate chop sound and can kill or stun a person with one blow. After we first see them in action, we are presented with the title sequence of the time, which was static shots made into a montage (somewhat like a slow flickerbook) of Steed and Mrs. Peel striking poses to Laurie Johnson’s classic music.

We then get to the main plot and have a wheelchair bound cybernetic scientist, Dr. Armstrong, played by Michael Gough (who you may remember from a number of horror movies but who you might best remember these days as Alfred The Butler in the two Tim Burton Batman movies) and his assistant Benson, played by Frederick Jaeger. These two are murdering the ‘competition’ and are going to create a technological dystopia with their suspiciously scientific ways. Enter Steed and Mrs. Peel who eventually work out what’s going wrong and manage to get the two active Cybernauts to attack each other... Dr. Armstrong getting in the way at the wrong time and getting killed by them himself.

The next story, The Return Of The Cybernauts, sees a somewhat familiar opening scene as the previous episode to feature them two years prior. We also get, of course, that wonderful opening title sequence from this era with the beautiful, musical pre-amble to the main theme as Mrs. Peel uncorks Steed’s champagne bottle with a pistol shot. Wonderful stuff. This is pretty much the same kind of thing but it’s revenge that drives the story beats. Benson, who seems to have gone bizarrely unaccounted for in the last episode, is now assisting Dr. Armstrong’s surviving brother, played here by the wonderful Peter Cushing. They both want to kill Steed and Mrs. Peel and they once more use the Cybernauts in a very strange way... to kidnap scientists to devise a terrible poetic justice for the death of Armstrong. Lots of Dutch angles in this one but, even though the show once again features those killer Cybernauts with their deadly wooshing and thwacking... these episodes seem somewhat atypical for The Avengers as I remember them... they’re not nearly as surreal as they sometimes got, for sure.

The third story, The Last Of The Cybernauts?? (accept no substitutes on the IMDB, it’s definitely got a double question mark in the title) from The New Avengers has a slightly different plot variation in that a dastardly double agent is almost killed and left in a fiery inferno by the show’s three heroes. One year later, he uses the man who made the original cybernauts for Dr. Armstrong all those years ago (a character who was never mentioned in the previous episodes, alas) and uses them in a plot to avenge himself on Steed, Purdey and Gambit, who kind of instigated the car chase that led to him being disfigured and in a wheel chair. By the end of the show, though, he can walk again as he augments himself and turns into a human Cybernaut, only to fall at the first hurdle of his revenge plot. We also have, of course, The New Avengers title sequence with Laurie Johnson’s new theme which is steadily rooted in the base line phrase of the original music.

So, three great episodes which, I have to say, look crisper than I've ever seen anything like them looking before. Network have done an absolutely wonderful job here and seeing unexpected guest stars such as Burt Kwouk and John Hollis popping up in minor roles in an episode here and there is almost the icing on the cake but... not quite. Because there’s more...

My favourite part of  this disc is the option to watch these episodes with ‘the vintage experience’ switched on. Basically, Network have gone out of their way to restore vintage ads which would have been showing during the commercial breaks contemporary to each episode (seriously, the restoration on the ads is as good as on the episodes themselves) and although I tend to hate advertisements on principle, it’s kind of nice seeing adverts and hearing jingles from when you were a child which you had forgotten about over the years. That also means, of course, that you get the ‘bumper’ titles and music to separate the ads fro the show... which is also a very welcome addition.

If you’re interested, I noted down all the ads in the order they appear and they are as follows: Birds Eye Beef Burgers, ESSO Extra, Tempo Frozen Garden Peas, a Polo advert which is quite unintentionally sexual and therefore very funny (what with various talking heads going on about how much they enjoy sucking them), Birds Eye Fish Fingers, Benson And Hedges cigarettes (I’d forgotten how televisions and cinemas were full of what are now illegal tobacco adverts back in the day), Kellog’s Corn Flakes, Mr. Kipling's exceedingly good cakes, Martini, a different Birds Eye Beef Burgers ad, Gale’s Choc-Nut Spread, Gillette razor blades, After Eight chocolate mints, Biological Radiant (for a purer white), the ESSO Tiger ad, Terry Wogan bestowing the virtues of Bovril cubes, KiteKat cat food, Reliant Robin, John Le Mesurier not saying much of anything to sell Castella Court Cigars, Orson Welles telling us about Domecq Sherry, Diana Rigg travelling by British Airways, Ready Brek (central heating for kids), Castrol GTX and Hai Karate aftershave (which I was just getting into for a couple of years before it retreated from the market place).

And that’s that for The Avengers - The Cybernauts Trilogy. Three mostly wonderful episodes (the dialogue isn’t great in The New Avengers episode, to be fair but... the chemistry between the actors is phenomenal) brought to us by Network and, seriously, if they’re reading this, they really need to get cracking on giving the full series a shot at Blu Ray box set heaven, before the horrible world of streaming tries to take over the marketplace. Can’t do much more than recommend this trilogy heavily for people who like this period of British espionage television. It’s a wonderful thing and you should grab it before it goes.

Batman The Golden Age Vol 1

Bat Out Of Hell

Batman The Golden Age Vol 1
by Bob Kane, Bill Finger + Various
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1401263331

Okay, so I enjoyed my little jaunt into the Golden Age tales of Wonder Woman so much recently (reviewed here) that I decided to maybe start familiarising myself (and refamiliarising, to a certain extent) with some of the early strips of other characters in the DC universe. So it’s onto Batman and, though I’d read a fair few tales of the early Batman comics as part of one of the expensive The Batman Archives collections, the big stumbling block of those old, very pricey editions was that they were fixated on just one title... in that case the Batman stories that appeared chronologically in Detective Comics. However, when various superheroes became popular, fairly quickly at the dawn of the phenomenon (Batman is kind of an honourary superhero because, in fact, he has no super powers at all), there was often a second title brought out dedicated solely to the title character and also the odd special issue of something else. So, for example, Wonder Woman would have self contained stories running concurrently in Sensation Comics and, later, Wonder Woman.

When I read The Batman Archives Volume 1 around a decade ago, this really foxed me because when The Joker popped up in the Detective Comics reprints, it was clear that he’d already had at least one (it turns out a fair few) appearance against Batman before, which weren't part of that same reprint tome. What these new Golden Age reprints do is to republish the stories involving the title character from all the comics which carried them in a chronological order... so if something refers back to a previous story (as I know it will here in a specific story in volume 2 or 3 when they get to it), you’ve definitely already read that one. So Batman - The Golden Age includes chronological reprints from Detective Comics, Batman and, in this case, a story featured in a promotional comic of collected stories to tie in with the 1940 New York Worlds Fair showcasing various DC heroes. Batman - The Golden Age reprints all the Batman stories from roughly the first year of his appearance, spanning 1939 - 1940.

Now, a few years ago people on Twitter were getting kinda irked that the version of Batman at the cinema was not a kid friendly version... that he was a darker character. Well, kid friendly these days is a very relative term and I got quite annoyed by people saying this stuff on Twitter (they didn’t feel they could take their kids to see movies like Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice... reviewed here) because my memory of Batman was that he always was the dark, vigilante of the DC universe and it was people like Frank Miller in the 1980s (with his much celebrated The Dark Knight Returns) who were merely trying to return him to his roots.

Now let me make something clear here. The other day I was thinking about all the stuff which used to be pitched to general family audiences on 1970s TV and I realised there’s no way on Earth half of the stuff I watched as a youngster would get passed by the censors these days, when everything at the moment seems to be veering towards a much more prudish, dreadfully PC and somewhat Victorian set of values (underground reaction and alternatives to those values, also, it seems). And it strikes me when I read something like pulp novels written in the 1930s or, indeed, these old Batman comics from the 1940s, that kids back then were even less bothered by, or mollycoddled to, the bleak, violent realities of life... which were obviously plundered for their entertainment value and reflected back in the art form. So these comics were more than kid friendly enough... they were just very grim and violent (for a while, there’s a big sea change within the first year here) and... maybe that’s the way things should be today. Who knows? However, somebody obviously didn’t think these were good reading for youngsters (in more than a decade before the comic book witch hunts of the 1950s which would lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority) as you’ll see when I get to the introduction of a certain character. It all makes for very interesting ‘in between the lines’ reading though...

In Batman's very first appearance in Detective Comics Issue 27, we have a somewhat different looking character from the one most audiences are more familiar with these days. The masked head is more rounded with longer ears and a generally more sinister, edgy and well defined look to him. This look would remain for around half a year or more and it’s easily my favourite version of the character. This isn’t an ‘origin’ story in any way, shape or form... with the writer wisely deciding to hit the ground running to see if the character was successful before going into the more convoluted origins, I would expect. Actually, I wish this practice of eschewing where the character came from was something more modern movies did with these kinds of figures. After all... nobody seems to have much trouble accepting antagonists with no explanation in zombie movies.

It’s not until his seventh appearance in November 1939, The Batman Wars Against The Dirigible Of Doom, that we get the first crack at his origin story... which doesn’t really differ much from modern retellings (as it does with some famous comic book characters) although he definitely had no Alfred The Butler around to help him in this instance. That character doesn’t appear at all in this first year.

And, in his first story, his secret identity is kept a complete secret from the reader for a while, building up the mystery until, on the very last panel of the last page, he is revealed as Bruce Wayne. And, for some reason, it’s very rare in the stories that, once Batman is knocked unconscious (as he often is), anyone thinks to take his mask off and see who he really is. It just doesn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind at this point. But there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going on with this ‘dark’ character in this and subsequent stories...

In the first issue, for example, the villain accidentally falls backwards into a vat of acid and, while The Batman is not exactly responsible for his death this time around, he does make the comment that it was... “A fitting end for his crime.” In his second story, he casually summersaults an attacking villain off a rooftop to his death. In another adventure he deliberately throws one heavy onto another bad guy’s sword to kill him. In yet another story, he is feigning unconsciousness and is left with a guard while the main villain brings a disintegrator gun to melt him. When he is alone with the guard, he knocks him out, changes costumes with him and deliberately allows the guard to be melted to death in his place. So, yes, this is a much darker avenger than even people like Frank Miller in the 1980s were getting away with for a while.

As you would expect, various elements of the Batman mythos we recognise today are either not present or are not yet fully formed. It takes a fair few issues, for instance, to name the police chief as Commissioner Gordon. Another missing component is the Batmobile, as it came to evolve into. Here, he seems to sport a number of different cars, over the first year, of differing colours... often alternating between red and black. In Batman’s fourth appearance, the red car is drawn a little longer and is referred to as... “his specially built, high-powered auto.” So they were getting there.

Oddly enough, he had a batplane from very early on but, directly contradicting the accompanying text, the plane was more often than not a helicopter or autogyro. It took a little while over this first year for the Batplane to be rendered as... well... a plane. That being said, the way he uses his helicopter is somewhat questionable in regards to the story dynamics. For example, in a completely cloudless sky, he sets his ‘plane’ to hover above the villain’s lair and ‘disguises’ it by billowing a big black cloud of smoke to hide it. Conspicuous much? The villains react thusly... Villain 1: “A black cloud.” Villain 2: “Yeah, looks like rain.” Oh... so that’s alright then.

There’s also a Metropolis Insane Asylum rather than Arkham Asylum and the city is not once referred to as Gotham City as yet. Given the name of the asylum, one wonders if these early stories were meant to be set in the same city as Superman or whether that was merely a coincidence and the writers were just looking at an alternative term for a city.

Even from fairly early on, the art and practice of the early comic book industry, where I guess they thought people really weren’t paying that much attention and throwing them out after reading them, is in evidence. They’re already recycling exact poses copied from earlier issues several times in that first year, and placing them in panels in new stories. Also, the first two pages of Batman Issue 1 is a complete steel, being a straight reprint of the origin story already run in Detective Comics but with different colours used.

Another take away from this first year is that the earlier stories were full of non-scientific phenomena. For instance, we have a monk who keeps a giant gorilla and pet werewolves. We have a shape shifting vampire villain. We have a man with literally no face at one point and, when Batman enters the gardens of the villains who have stolen this man’s face, he sees flowers with living human faces on them. So I think it’s fair to say that these stories were not written with a worry about straying from a good, scientific foundation... which is something Batman was more known as in later decades... something of a ‘science detective’ like Doc Savage.

And then, in Batman’s 12th appearance, we have the first story featuring Robin The Boy Wonder and the tone of Batman comics are completely changed. Someone must have thought these things were getting too mean spirited because, once Robin becomes a regular feature of the strip, it’s not just the look of the Batman character which changes into something more like the Batman we know today. This is a Batman and Robin team with a big commitment to not taking life where possible... so a complete sea change for the character, it seems to me (although, to be fair, Robin does kick a guy off a metal girder to his death at one point, in self defence). Sometimes the violence still does happen and Batman seems somewhat contradictory in his responses. After happily letting two asylum patients maul each other two death earlier in the same issue, he later states at one point... “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary.” What the heck? This is from a story where Batman is gunning down a giant man with a very strong cultural reference to the ending of King Kong. Interestingly, this is a solo Batman story which had been advertised a few issues before but was delayed for publication until after the addition of Robin, by the looks of things. It’s one of the few post-Robin stories here without The Boy Wonder in it. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that bizarre character contradiction comes from adding different text in the speech bubble to what had originally been in there for the original scheduled publication.

I hate to use the language of the Batman’s foes here but this newer, conscientious version of the Batman really was a boy scout. In Batman Issue 1, he breaks the fourth wall to deliver to the readers this message... “Well, kids. There’s your proof. Crooks are yellow without their guns! Don’t go around admiring them. Rather, do your best in fighting them and all their kind.”  Which is definitely a comic with a strong moral message methinks. I also found it very interesting how the writers keep pushing the idea of building gyms and other community centres for youths to keep them occupied and stop them getting into crime. This is exactly the same kind of thing I’m hearing now in London as the crime rate rises over here due to various issues... spend more money on keeping the kids occupied and focused (not that there’s any money left to be able to do that with over here).

Actually, the breaking the fourth wall thing becomes more of a thing too, on occasion. For example, at the end of the story in the 1940 New York Worlds Fair Comics issue, Bruce and Dick talk directly to their readers to urge them to visit the New York World’s Fair. The power of 'in-panel' advertising.

Funnily enough, one of Batman’s most vicious villains also makes his debut in Batman Issue 1. The Joker is, by my count, the third regularly occurring villain in these comics, after Hugo Strange and Catwoman. Actually, Catwoman is known only as 'The Cat' in early issues and she hasn’t yet acquired the name of Selina Kyle (or any fixed identity, it has to be said). Funnily enough, even from The Cat’s first appearance, Batman was already ‘accidentally’ letting her escape and making his sexual attraction to her known to the readers. Which is much earlier than I’d expected. In her second appearance she also manages to make an enemy of The Joker, which is kinda interesting.

One of the great things about reading these early comics is trying to catch the cultural references of the time and how they influenced the strip or were cherry picked to be a part of them. I’ve already mentioned the King Kong homage in one issue but when a character called Boss Zulch is introduced, he seems to finish almost every sentence he utters with the word “see?” which is obviously picked up from Edward G. Robinson’s character in the film Little Caesar. Also, one reaction to a pirate radio broadcast by The Joker goes thusly... ““Haw! That’s just a gag - like that fellow who scared everybody with that story about Mars the last time. Ha! Ha! Pay no attention to it dear.” So Orson Welles’ ground breaking documentary style radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds, which panicked half of America, was obviously still very much on everybody’s minds at the time.

Also in regard to influences, you can see just how one of my favourite pulp characters, Doc Savage, directly impacted on and influenced the Batman character by this point, as the supernatural stuff is mostly dropped and scientific stuff starts. Mention of brain surgery to cure criminal ways, for instance, or using an infra red lamp to read invisible markers left on a villain’s footprints to trail him. This would eventually lead to Batman’s later title as The World’s Greatest Detective, at some point, I guess... was that the 1970s or before then? I can’t remember.

Anyway, that’s the first year or so of Batman encapsulated in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 1 and, honestly, if you’re a Batman fan and want to know more about the character’s roots and how he evolved and changed, even in his first 12 months, then this is a really good place to start. Essential reading for me and I shall definitely be picking up the second volume at some point to re-read one of my favourite Batman stories from that era (which I have reprinted in an old 1970s Detective Comics Giant)... The Case Of The Carbon Copy Crimes.

The Juliette Society

50 Shades Of Grey

The Juliette Society
by Sasha Grey
Sphere
ISBN: 978-0751551587

Warning: This review is of a book which deals with material of a graphic sexual nature. Therefore, at certain points, for example when quoting the work, I will need to use language which reflects this. If words can offend you when used in this manner, please don’t read on.

Disclaimer: I am not in any way ashamed of the title of this review although, I am a little embarrassed, perhaps, at how I’ve leapt on the most obvious title for this piece. My only defence is that, when all is said and done, since this book at some times explores similar territory to the more well known title I invoke above, when coupled with the writer’s name, it seems like almost a criminal act not to use that title. 50 Shades of Grey is a book I’ve never read due to the consistent attitude I’ve encountered that it’s both quite badly written and ultimately a little condemning of the lifestyle it uses as its currency... The Juliette Society, for the record, is very well written, as I’ll go on to say in my review.

I suspect Sasha Grey is a name that will be familiar to a certain segment of the readers of this humble blog but, just in case her rising star managed to pass you by somehow, I should probably give you a very quick and dirty character sketch of her career thus far.

She was a very famous porn actress, many might say notorious (although I’d personally replace that term with warrior-like), who has done, on camera, pretty much almost everything sexual it’s possible for two (or many more) humans to do with each other. In her five years (I think I’ve got my sums right?) in the industry she made around 278 pornographic films (at least two as director) and retired from the business at the age of 21. She has always been an advocate of her career choices and waxed intelligently about the nature of working in this environment in an upbeat and joyful manner. She is probably the least person to come across as, in any way, exploited in anything, other than on her own terms, as anyone you're likely to meet.

She then pursued a succesful musical career while also acting in mainstream movies, including working as the main lead for Steven Soderbergh in his film The Girl Friend Experience (which I reviewed here). She then released a photographic book entitled Neü Sex and has followed that up with this debut novel, The Juliette Society.

What this all says to me is she must be a pretty amazing person and I was expecting something really special from this book... a novel which surprised me on some levels, it has to be said.

The story, such as it is, is told in “first person” by a central protagonist called Catherine, a film student who foreshadows the opening of the book with a quick lead into what The Juliette Society actually is, in the fictional world she inhabits. An underground, mobile world of sexual extremes catering for the jaded tastes of the rich and powerful. Since I’ve always believed these kinds of “clubs” existed in the shadows of society anyway, it wasn’t a big step for me to embrace the ‘reality’ of this proposition.

Actually, story is not the best way to describe this work because it’s a novel which is more interested in the detailing of sexual incidents and the exploration of ideas than it is in actual narrative. When I at first found this disappointing because of my prediction of the denouement of the story, I soon realised that I’d had such a good, easy ride getting to that point anyway, because Grey is an extraordinarily good writer, that it didn’t really matter anymore anyway and, certainly, Grey had warned me through her character right near the start of the book that story was not the most important thing to her. Regular readers of mine will know of my insistence that film does not have to be rooted in story and the character of Catherine ruminates from early on in the narrative about the most artistically successful and popular films being subservient to the creation and maintenance of “character” above all else. And she’s right... this is the hook that people respond to in pretty much all film (unless it’s something like, say, Koyaanisqatsi, which has no characters in it at all).

The book tells of Catherine’s sexual desires towards both her boyfriend and to her film studies lecturer... and the spiral into the sexually extreme world of her friend Anna, who gives gives masochistic performances for the BDSM crowd on an extreme website called SODOM, and who is attracted to all the sexual explorers that she finds in life.

Throughout, the book’s various and interesting topics... such as Catherines attitude to the size and potency of a man’s genitalia, the taste and texture of sperm, the gravitation towards certain sexually charged words over others... are peppered with amazingly cine-literate observations which often seem to fit puzzle-like and snugly into whatever erotic shenanigans the character is engaged in, at one level or another, at the time. Grey is an obvious admirer of French New Wave cinema, for example (hey, who isn’t) and both Godard and Truffaut are regularly returned to during the text of the novel. I quote directly from the text here by way of example...

“Does Marcus ask Anna to lick his balls while he deconstructs The 400 Blows?”

Godard’s muse from his 1960s period, Anna Karina, comes up more than once in the text (which is also a pseudonym Sasha Grey used early on as her performance name in the porn industry, if I’m not mistaken) and there are so many brilliant references to all genres of film too numerous to mention... all brilliantly laid out. Here are just a few...

During the pages she makes mention of the subtext of Vertigo, retreads the almost legendary story of the term Rosebud in Orson Welles Citizen Kane being a less than sly and provocative reference to William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for his lover’s clitoris, while fully embracing the cinematic art of Luis Bunuel. In particular, Bunuel’s Belle De Jour catches the eye and mind of her lead character and this ties in with the title of the society tangentally referred to in this work, which gives the novel its monicker, being named not after any Shakespearian reference but by being an allusion to Juliette, the corrupted sister of the title character in the Marquis De Sade’s novel Justine (aka The Misfortunes Of Virtue).

I love the way her central protaginist also mixes up several movie references within the same sentence, such as...

“The path I’m on, you can’t see it. It’s not a yellow brick, the lost highway or a two-lane blacktop.”

When she started referencing stuff like this, along with Godard’s Made In The USA and De Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom within the first 20 or so pages of the novel, I knew I was in for an interesting ride and I was right. Not because I was 100% interested in where the narrative was going, but because the way she writes about such subjects shows her skill and intelligence in the way she can convey complex issues with a fairly sparse but enjoyable turn of phrase. This one was a very easy read and my respect for the writer as a person has further risen after reading this debut.

Where she really had me though, apart from with her stance that large screened cinemas are the only place to really “see” a movie (I neither agree or disagree, dependent on the nature of the movie, on that one), is when she tackles Stendahl syndrome, a condition that not a lot of people seem to have heard of, for some reason. Named after the author Stendahl, author of The Red And The Black (Scarlet And Black etc.), it’s a condition where a person is overwhelmed physically by a degree of symptoms as a response to great works of art, often paintings. What really endeared me to Sasha Grey here, though, is that she’s also familiar with famous Italian director Dario Argento’s movie The Stendahl Syndrome, which stars his daughter Asia and uses the condition as a plot device to kickstart one of his trademark giallo movies. Grey describes the opening sequence of that film in the early stages of this novel and that really got me on her side.

As I said, the book reveals a quite extreme intelligence behind the writing and while the wordage is quite erotic and graphic, it never really goes full tilt into the physical aspects of the sado-masochistic world it hints at in the earlier parts of the novel, instead concentrating on Catherine’s discovery, acceptance and ultimately aroused curiosity about that world in, what I can vouch for, seems to be a constant pattern when shifting into the world of extreme sexuality... a lady friend or two of mine have had a similar experiences over the years and the raw quest for the exploration of these extreme passions as depicted in The Juliette Society gells quite well, and in some cases quite uncannily, with my own observations and explorations of these things in real life. It’s a cannily realistic book in some ways, if you happen to be a person who has explored such dark and uplifting corners, but also might seem a bit tame, too, for those who have trod that path and become better people for it.

So do I recommend this book?

Well, my dissapointment that the writer chose this particular subject matter for her debut novel (because she runs the risk of people stereotyping her to that kind of output, I suspect)  is tempered by the observation that she is writing exactly what she wants to be writing about and, also, by the fact that the simplicity of her raw intelligence imbues every page with a certain power. So yeah, it’s one I think a certain amount of my readers may enjoy, with the warning that it is, at heart, an erotic novel, and that you need to take into account the subject matter before you start reading it. In fact, Sasha Grey’s opening tease, which starts the novel and is also reprinted on the back cover of the English edition of the book, is as much of a warning too, for fear that those of a feint heart when it comes to matters of talking about sexuality in a frank manner, may have an allergic reaction to the contents. Plus... she obviously well knows the kind of rites of passage challenge behind this particular opening shot.

So my final conclusion on this one would be... if you are into movies and you are into sex, and you don’t mind reading about both, then probably give The Juliette Society a go. I’m glad to have read it, myself, and I’m expecting even greater works from the writer, over the years. Let’s wait and see if I’m right.

You can follow Sasha Grey on twitter here.

Jodorowsky's Dune

Dune And Dusted

Jodorowsky's Dune
2013 USA
Directed by Frank Pavich
Screening 12th October 2013 at the London Film Festival

Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of those directors who seems to violently split people when his name comes up in conversation. There are those who think he is quite mad and find his films too challenging to stick with and will let you know about that in no uncertain terms. And there are others who relish the directors own style of creative madness and embrace his films as the great works of art that they should, like all great art, be perceived to be.

Having said all that, I tend to have a more muffled and jaded reaction to his work than most people I talk to on the subject, who seem to be pretty much outspoken either for or against his films... which I think says something in that, at the very least, Jodorowsky’s work has effected them to that extinct (which I personally feel is a good thing). I know that I myself, while having no real shocks or surprises from this director’s works (nor many others in recent years) do, nevertheless, enjoy his movies and speak of them in a positive manner. And, certainly, I remember heading off to the Metro cinema in London (now sadly lost to us) with my friend Kerry back in 1989 to see the movie which was to be my personal introduction to this director’s work, Sante Sangre. I loved that movie a lot, with it’s comfortable and seductive blend of high art and trashy b-movie sensibility... and this has carried through over the years in a more sedate manner as I’ve seen his earlier works such as Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain. In fact, my friend Kerry bought me a box set of this man’s first three movies as a Christmas present a few years ago... for which I am grateful.

Back in about 1979/80, when I would have been about eleven or twelve, I was in one of my favourite comic/book stores (Forbidden Planet) and spied in the “art books” section, two very expensive tomes by the person who would soon become one of my favourite artists... H. R. Giger (Necronomicon and Necronomicon II). I can’t remember if the text was in English on those original editions but I suspect not. When I received these two books for Christmas and birthday, I fell in love with the bleak artwork in the pages and was astonished to see a photograph of the artist, H. R. Giger, sitting around in a desert with my other art hero of the time, Salvador Dali. It was pretty amazing and, from what I could work out from the text (yeah, it must have been in a language foreign to me, I reckon) the two had been collaborating on conceptual designs for a movie version of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic Dune. As it happens, I was wrong about the nature of the collaboration, but I’ll get to that soon.

Now, I’d not read Dune at that time in my life but, as a child growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost as impossible a book to escape as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. It, and it’s sequels (I think there were only three sequels at the time but, as I’m sure you know, there are many more now) were all over British bookshops for many years and, even had they not been, there was usually a copy hanging around the house as my dad was a big fan at the time. When the David Lynch version of the movie got made I was not all that impressed with it, to be honest (neither was Jodorowsky, in one of the funniest and most memorable scenes in this film). Perhaps if I revisited it nowadays I might be more receptive to it but, to me, David Lynch was the spirit of Eraserhead... not the version of Dune that ended up on the big screen and underwhelmed audiences at the time.

Frank Pavich’s new documentary film, Jodorowsky's Dune, tells the story (of which there have been many rumours in the past) of the time when Jodorosky wanted to make an epic version of the movie... and how it all fell into place and then, after a long time in pre-production, got thrown away in favour of a version which was simpler to understand by the suits in control of Hollywood. And as you may expect from anything associated with Jodorowsky... it’s a mad tale.

H. R. Giger was, indeed, invited to do some of the conceptual art for one of the planets, which he did and which was pictured in those Necronomicon books I was given as a teen. Another major designer on the film was Chris Foss, the illustrator who many will remember had a gift for paintings of highly detailed starships which graced the covers of almost every science-fiction book going in the seventies and eighties. If you see a Chris Foss starship design, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. His work is so distinctive. What the documentary doesn’t mention, and I’ve no idea why, is the other thing that Fosse is equally well known but actually less famous for. The black and white illustrations in the original best selling editions of The Joy Of Sex.

The tale of the movie gets more and more brilliant and less and less likely as Jodorowsky talks extensively for the documentary. He recruits Dan O’ Bannon’s services for the film (after saying no to one of Hollywood’s leading special effects men, Douglas Trumbull) and then secures the services of, among others, Salvador Dali to play the Emperor, Orson Welles to play the Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as somebody who I completely forget and Pink Floyd to do the music for one of the planets. They are Jodorowsky’s “Dune warriors”. He even gets his son trained in various combat styles to ready him for the part of Paul.  And as crazy a mix as that all sounds, Jodorowsky’s stories of how, for the most part, these people just turned up in unlikely places when he had no idea how to find them and then said yes, is even crazier. And the way he courted both Dali and Welles is absolutely amazing and something I don’t think I’d heard before.

The documentary culminates in the famous, rare book which was put together to sell the project (honestly, I can’t describe this here, you just have to see this movie) and  finishes by showng the influences on cinema resulting from the pilfering and reusing of the concepts created by Jodorowsky’s extended “Dune family”. Some of which are easy to see and others... which are not great examples, I would have to say.

Pavich’s film is absolutely fascinating and rivetting, using mostly talking head footage by Jodorowsky, Foss, Giger and others close to the production, but also from the underused director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) and Jodorowsky’s good friend, the director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). There’s also some animated sequences where the director brings some of the storyboards and designs for the film to life and, as I was very relieved to discover in the Q & A session with the director after the screening, the people in question had been very careful to just breathe a little life into the original drawing and paintings for the animations, rather than add their own baggage into the mix.

The whole thing sails along at a pace which is a reflection of Jodorowsky’s own unique personality and enthusiasm for the project and it also has a kick ass score by Kurt Stenzel, which is quite “in your face” but catchy and appropriately mixed into the film. It’s a bit reminiscent of the small scale chamber works of Philip Glass but it is quite distinctive and hypnotic and although it strikes you right away as you’re watching, the music doesn’t distract from the people who are talking on screen and is very mindful of the job it needs to be doing.

So there you have it.

Jodorowsky's Dune is a great documentary made by a director who knows when to step back from the material when needed and who knows well enough when to add a bit more to it to make it interesting without intruding on the hearts, minds and words of the people being interviewed on screen. It also brings us the full tale of one of the classic unmade films in movie legend, which is something we should all be grateful for. So, if you want to know about all this stuff then you should definitely try to see this movie. It’s worth the price of admission just for the late Dan O’ Bannon’s description of his first, drug tinged meeting with Jodorowsky. Don’t miss out on this one.

The BFI/Sight And Sound 100

Great Expectations

The BFI/Sight And Sound 100

A few weeks back, when the British Film Institute’s Sight And Sound magazine made public the results of it’s “once every ten years” poll of, and I quote, “The Greatest Films Of All Time”, there was a much greater backlash from people about the choices that were on the list than I remember ever hearing about before in my spell of being a regular, yearly subscriber. My understanding was that the “en masse”  link clicking to the site after the list was officially “released” caused a lot of trouble for the BFI servers and, kind of, broke them for a while (something I read at Ain’t It Cool News before I’d even tried the clickety-link myself). This was followed, from what I saw of the celluloid battlefield that took place digitally on the internet during the aftermath, was a fairly large, almost collective condemnation of the list by a great number of people. Maybe it’s just the crazy kinds of people I follow. ;-)

I first started subscribing to Sight & Sound magazine around about 23 years ago, so I’ve now seen three of these polls published in fresh issues of the magazine over the years... but there’s never been the technology in place to reach these levels of audience figures before. There could, in fact, be various reasons for this “en masse” criticism of this decades list, but I suspect the biggest problem this year is that the reporting and subsequent reaction to this has been so much more easier and all encompassing than it has for previous lists (not that many would see that as a problem, of course). You have the reactions to the list hitting you from all the social media sites and blogs on the internet, which is one factor in the incredible “buzz” on this year’s poll... but there’s also the fact that the list itself was now freely available to anyone with a web connection... and not just confined to us poor, traditional souls who dutifully renew our yearly subscription charges or buy the magazine over-the-counter.

What this meant was that, for a couple of weeks, the internet became full of people running to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress and Blogger to air their opinions and generally make the most silliest comments about the list they could think of which ranged from complaints as to why their favourite films weren’t on the list, accusatory questions as to why the “bunch of academics” who had contributed to the list were watching such “old timey” films like Vertigo and Citizen Kane rather than “newer stuff” and, for me the capper, why isn’t Roger Corman’s Deathrace 2000 (reviewed here) at the number one spot. I promise you I’m not making that one up... I saw someone tweeting it.

So I thought I’d like to take a stab at defending the 2012 BFI/Sight & Sound List from some of the sillier criticisms and maybe get people to think a little bit about why some of those same films are up there on these lists, decade after decade. Also, I’d like to take the opportunity to air my own little criticism of the list because, although I prefer Vertigo as a movie over Citizen Kane (although I’d happily be watching either), it throws up the question of when and why does a personal favourite film suddenly become, in one person’s eyes, a “great” movie. I love Vertigo to bits but there’s no way, I feel, that it should be placed above Citizen Kane. More on that later, though.

If I hate one thing about late 20th and early 21st Century magazine and blog writing it’s the popularisation of the “list article”. When people first started doing them they used to be quaint and addictive and people could have fun with them... but then everyone and their dog started doing them. The downside on these kinds of articles is that they’re damned easy to write and they’ve become, for the most part, just a lazy summation of personal opinion in an easy to swallow format. I even did one myself on here once (see here) and I can’t deny the popularity of these articles and their power to garner more readers (as the BFI web server found out too late, I fear... although I’m sure they’ll benefit greatly from the popularity). It probably won’t be the last one I do because I, too, want readers, just like the next blog waiting in line, but I try not to make a habit of concocting them like some websites seem to do. Lists are pretty impossible to compile honestly anyway... and the fact that they’re based solely on the subjectivity of the writer (in the case of non-voted lists) means that not many people are going to agree with it 100%... which is often the point when a thoughtful list comes to light, to provoke discussion.

Sometime in either the late seventies or early eighties, in my early teens, I decided to do a top 20 favourite films list and I think this demonstrates the intransigent and changeable nature of these kinds of dubious attractions. As I started writing down a list of all my special favourite movies I couldn’t live without, it started growing extremely long. After an hour or so I realised I’d written down over 700 “absolute favourite” films and was still going strong. I gave up on it there and then as a waste of my time and never looked back when it came to making lists... even the list of my top 30 favourite movies on the right hand side of this column and down a bit was questionable as soon as it went live. How could I, I thought to myself, write down all those movies in my top 30 without even putting one of my all time favourites, It’s A Wonderful Life, somewhere on there?

This incident from my formative years serves to demonstrate two things when it comes to compiling lists. One is that a person can keep going on for pages and pages, whittling down to a number of favourites that are always going to be too long a list for people to comfortably look at and consider anyway. Secondly, of course, since this list I made as a kid was a snapshot of my mind at the time, it’s unlikely that all the same titles would come up again... especially with all the fantastic toot that’s being released on DVD and other home video formats since I first tried to compile one. It’s a changing landscape and so not much use to anyone as more than a quick summary of someone’s mind at the time of writing.

Of course, the regular one-poll-per-decade approach adopted by Sight & Sound for its lists means that the editors are, at least, acknowledging the constantly shifting tide which represents the celluloid battlefield, as the tastes and range of the nearly 1000 critics who got their personal top tens to the magazine before their deadline (846 critics, this year, to be precise) is changed by constant exposure to new (to them) celluloid masterpieces. It also, one would hope, means it’s forcing those same critics to distinguish as to what they think a great film is, as opposed to their favourite on-screen entertainments. I think that this is a very important distinction to make and, in my opinion, a critic should not base a review they write solely on whether they like a film or not, but rather on the various technical skills and criteria met or exceeded by a film too. This should help bring a certain amount of balance and credibility to a review and will hopefully instill enough trust in a reader to use the review in the best possible way... whatever that use may be to a specific reader. I personally, for instance, sometimes recommend films on this blog to readers which I didn’t personally enjoy. However, I make it clear if I don’t like a film and try my best to convey, when I am having a good day and am skilled enough to do so, the difference between my gut-reaction to a film and the technical merits of it. Just because I didn’t like, doesn’t mean to say it isn’t worth watching.

So lets have a look at a couple of the backlash complaints I’ve seen about the list and figure out if they have a valid point or not.

Why aren’t “my” favourite films on the list?
Well, to be fair, you weren’t asked to supply a list were you? Well yeah, alright, some of you reading this might have been but ultimately, just because your “personal” favourites aren’t on there... it doesn’t in any way invalidate the films that made it to the top 100. This list wasn’t compiled by voting from a selection of nominations, don’t forget. That would then give you all the problems of a person or a team of people limiting you to a specific selection of movies that they think are worthy. It’s just not the case here, thankfully (or I wouldn’t even be giving this list the time of day, quite frankly). What you have here is various critics (and also directors) sending in their lists and the frequency of films appearing repeatedly generating a score for that film... at least that’s my understanding of it.


Why are all these old-timey films like Citizen Kane and Vertigo on the list?
Seriously? Old timey? The art form of the motion picture has only been  around for a little over 100 years. Some of you might reach that age before dying if you’re lucky (or unfortunate, depending on your view). Criticising the age of a movie is stupid on all kinds of levels, not to mention the fact that the age of a film doesn’t in any way play a factor in the quality of the final product. Unless, perhaps, you just like themes and trends which are fashionable to you right now on the silver screen, and damn anything you’re not personally in tune with. Is that it? Well... if that’s the case then I do feel sorry for you but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it because you’re obviously not really into the art of film. Go eat your popcorn.

As far as the people polled for this survey go... nobody has told all these people to put films like Citizen Kane and Vertigo on their list. They love these movies, and rightly so (because they’re damned good movies), but they also (one hopes) admire them on a technical level and feel inspired by them to the point where they believe this makes them among the greatest movies out there. And these people all come from different walks of life here... it’s not like they’re all in the same club or something. People respond to art in a very personal manner (on some levels) and these kinds of movies, the ones that have made it into the poll, are well loved and well watched pinnacles of motion picture history. So the obvious question I’d have to ask any of the people making these kinds of criticisms here are... “Have you actually seen these movies? If not, try watching one before complaining. You’re in for a treat.”

Okay... so now that’s off my chest, I’d like to just like to say something about Citizen Kane, since people seem to be so incredulous and non-understanding as to why it would even be on the list in the first place, let alone dominating the top spot for all but two of those “once a decade polls” (the first poll and the most recent one where Vertigo broke its winning streak and knocked it off the top spot). Citizen Kane is a great film. It might not entertain a certain segment of the population but, even if it doesn’t, it still has to be acknowledged as a great film. The reason for this is that there is so much “hidden ingenuity” to be found lying just beneath the surface, that one can’t help but applaud the technical brilliance of just what is going on here.

For example, there are shots in this where the camera goes places where a camera just couldn’t go... especially when this movie was made. Parts of a set or model were designed to break away once the camera eye had passed them so the operator could keep going past a place where the “real world” would not let him go.

Or, as another example, what about that shot where Welles is sitting in the office typing and in the background, opposite Welles and watching from afar, is Joseph Cotton... and both are in sharp focus. Oh sure. A great example of a deep focus lens being used to keep everything nice and crisp right? Wrong! A deep focus lens wouldn’t be able to handle that shot... at least not then it couldn’t. So what did they do... yeah, they ran a matte split mask and spliced two shots together so it looks like one shot. And the majority of viewers, myself included, wouldn’t even notice it was two seperate bits of footage spliced together. Good grief people! They were inventing stuff just to get the shots in the way they wanted them. And when they weren’t inventing them...

 Well... I’m not saying that every single dash of brilliance in this film was an original, technical innovation. There were some, but a lot of this stuff goes back to the days when D. W. Griffith was inventing (some say stealing) the DNA of cinematic syntax. The visual shorthand which everyone almost immediately picks up from their earliest days of watching films and which is forever branded into the braincells as the absolutely most instinctive way of decoding the moving visual image. You know what I’m talking about... stuff like two people individually framed, saying a line and then cutting to the other saying their line as a visual shorthand for two people having a conversation. It grew very quickly from there in terms of innovative and subtle manipulations of the human brain and a lot of it is to be found all in one place by 1941... and that place is Citizen Kane.

Every technique in the book, it seems like, was used for Citizen Kane and the movie is a summation, a showcase if you will, for all the brilliant ways of depicting a story through film that had ever been seen up until this point. And that’s why it’s so brilliant... it’s a text book of delights from which people can take inspiration and learn. It deserves every accolade it gets.

Which is why I’m kinda upset myself that Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) didn’t also make it into the top 100... preferably the top ten. Because, like Citizen Kane before it, Amelie also showcases the absolute state-of-the-art of the technical possibilities of its time and I would have thought that for this reason, it would have rated a bit higher in the general critical consciousness (if there is such a thing). Also, like Welles esteemed treasure, Amelie has some very innovative ideas in it which I’m not aware of being done before this film. One of them involves the way sound is used in two sequences a different points of the film which relies on the viewers subconscious memory of the audio sections of one point to make a hidden connection. And the other involves a visual echo of something which isn’t really happening. I don’t want to go into too much detail as I want to review the film on this blog someday, but I will point out that these innovations probably wouldn’t even be noticed by 95% of an audience who are there to be engrossed in a movie. They don’t deliberately draw attention to themselves in any way and are used purely as a way of moving the narrative forward... this is a brilliant way to use film. And, of course, there’s other more standard stuff going on with the CGI effects, of which there are a surprising amount in Amelie... not that many people realise it though. Things such as lamps being added and changed a different colour to balance the tone of a different, dominant colour in the scene. Object and props which could easily have been real, found items for a set but which were added in post production. Stuff like this shows a true mastery of the form and I think Amelie should be somewhere on that list... but that’s just me griping now. Although I’d like to think I’ve backed up my reasons somewhat.

And what of Vertigo? Well, as I said, I love it. It’s my favourite Hitchcock and, yes, it does have some great innovations in it. Like that kiss in Kim Novak’s hotel apartment near the end where they had to build a split set and put the camera on a turntable with the actors so the scene could completely change behind them as they kiss to a completely different environment and return through a full 360 degree pan. Or, of course, the famous shot in Jaws of Brody on the beach where the camera is pulled back from his face while simultaneously zooming in on it at the same speed the camera is being pulled back. That was invented for those wonderful, downward looking shots in the bell tower during the two climbs in Vertigo... actually done with a model set too, no less. So you would never had got that shot in films ike Jaws (and dozens of other movies) if Vertigo hadn’t done it first... I suspect.

So yeah, Vertigo should be on there but, should it be at number one? Well I could watch it all week (something I couldn’t do for Citizen Kane I suspect) but I have to admit that Welles opus is a much greater showcase of innovation and art than Hitchcock’s greatest masterpiece... although, as I said earlier... personally I prefer Vertigo, so I can’t be too upset that it’s now number one.

All in all, it’s not a bad list they’ve come up with. I look forward to the next one in the hopes that NIghts Of Cabiria will find a place above the Fellini movies that already appear on it. And it’s good to see, also, that 6 of those movies on the list were all scored by the same composer... my favourite composer, the remarkable Bernard Herrmann. Not only that but the top two films, Vertigo and Citizen Kane were both scored by him... so that’s something to shout out about. But the list also reflects his achievements at both ends of his career. Citizen Kane was the first actual film he scored... he was the regular composer for Welles’ Mercury Theatre radio show (including the mentioned conductor on the notorious War Of The Worlds transmission) and Welles brought him with him to Hollywoodland to work on the film with him. Similarly, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which is also in the list, was Herrmann’s last score. He died within hours of the final, extended recording session on the approach to Christmas 1975.

I’m grateful that Bernard Herrmann has been, quite serendipitously, honoured in this way. It makes the list something very special for me as a die hard Herrmann listener. This is a good list, the 2012 BFI/Sight & Sound List and, to paraphrase one Mr. Travis Bickle from the 32nd spot... “those were good choices.”

The BFI Sight & Sound Poll can be read here.