The end of the road

Last Saturday night I went to a very very late show of 'The road', in a state of some anticipation. I read the book last summer in practically a single sitting, in fact sitting on a train when I should have been doing work, but somehow mesmerised by the spare stripped-back prose, economical and minimalist, but with occasional flashes of poetry, and occasional pretension.

When I heard about the film, all signs were good:

- Viggo Mortensen, a hell of an actor who redfined sensitive toughness you could absolutely believe in as Aragorn, enough to forget crap performances like 'Daylight' (well clearly not completely forgotten)

- director John Hillcoat, whose 'The proposition' was so raw and gritty you needed a shower after watching it, just like 'The road' should be

- music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, enough said


Bringing such baggage into the cinema, motly empty so with plenty of space to spread it around, it did not disappoint, and almost completely lived up to expectations and the book, to the extent that I could not imagine a more convincing bringing of McCarthy's blasted world to failing life. The actors were almost perfect, and some thoughts and slight issues are as follows:

1. The trailer is bizarre, or at least the first few seconds, which make it look like a Roland Emmerich film. The official trailer on Youtube is blocked, but I found a version with crap intro below. The first scenes are not even in the film, and come perilously close to explaining what must must muct not be explained. I heard an interview with Hillcoat on Mark Kermode's podcast where he said the studio did this and can only think - is that not illegal, immoral or just plain ill? Luckily I only saw the trailer after the film, but it could lure the unsuspecting into a false sense of what the movie is about.



2. The ending remains as problematic for me in the film as it was in the book. Obviously, the tale cannot have a conventional happy ending, and to end with a double death would be nihilistic in the extreme, as arguably would be the sight of the boy abandoned and alone. So, this is perhaps the only logical twist that could leave any residual hope (even if 5 - and a dog - are not all that much safer from the bands seen marauding than 2, and it is not like they had a map to Disneyland with them). However, it is still a little 'convenient', particularly in the film where time and geography are slightly compressed compared to the book. In another minor but significant change, the dog is not mentioned in the book, and a new referce to having followed them has been added, which lead to the question (due to the clarity of the incredible soundscape carrying barking sounds on several occasions) of how long they had been following, what they had seen and missed, and why they waited so long.

3. I have a niggling doubt about the boy, both in film and book. Somehow, I feel that he does not seem like he has not known anything else, and was born after 'the mysterious yet cataclysmic event'; I cannot help but think he too much of a sense of longing and missing which suggest knowledge of things being different, and that he would be somehow tougher and colder if all he had experienced was this awful world.

4. What does Viggo know about apocalyptic dental hygiene that Guy Pearce does not?

On a final note, I read where they found the boy in Australia and he is perfect, notwithstanding my comment above. The most amazing thing to me is how much he resembles the distinctive features of Chrlize Theron, emphasised when they wear the same hat - it cannot be accidental in the casting, and makes sure the father is carrying his family right through that long long road.

Anyway, enough nit-picking - a great book demanded a great movie which could not flinch from the source's grim and appalling vista, and on all fronts this was a success. Click Here to Read More..

Tindersticks: a name so good they kept on using it

What an album cover! I raved some months ago about the cover of Depeche Mode's 'A broken frame', and this is another stand-out, despite appearing incongrously as a picture in a character's house in Coronation Street some years ago. I haven't tracked down the original source. As well as the image, the word that appears is just wonderful.

What a name, and so beautiful it was not just used for the band, but also the album, and then their second album too. I must admit, if I had come up with a word so musical, so lyrical, so gentle, I would use it 'til it gagged too. I do have a theory that the name may have come from a Sude B-side, whose name escapes me but was on 'Sci-fi lullabies' some years ago (hilariously mislabelled by a Cork radio station at the time as 'Hi-fi melodies', which could not possibly be further from a likely Suede album title).

Anyway, this post is partly inspired by waiting for the new Tindersticks album, 'Falling down a mountain', but also by the fact that this must rank as one of my favourite debut albums ever. I have mentioned previously that I have a habit of buying each Christmas an album that appears on many critics' end-of-year best-of lists, and in this year (1992?) I bought Tindersticks on the basis of it's topping the now-gone Melody Maker's list. There are some albums which I can clearly remember my first hearing of, and this was one, as I bought it on casette in an underground (literally) record shop in Dublin called Freebird Records, and can recall slipping the tape into my walkman (it really was the dark ages) and letting 'Nectar' wash over me, sounding like nothing else I had heard to date, with the velvety hushed vocals and complex arrangements and warm dark atmosphere.

This is just an incredible album, sounding like no-one else (not even, to me, the Bad Seeds, to which it was most frequently compared), with huge ambition, long songs, and fragments and snippets, with it even being hard to match song names on the tape sleeve to actual tracks. It had (relatively) loud and angry bits (as discussed below) but its magic resides in the calm and still of songs like the astonishing 'Blood' (it has often hard to hear exactly what Stuart Staples is singing, but it may just contain the wonderful chorus line 'Where does the blood go, that runs away from broken hearts...'), 'Piano song' and 'Raindrops'.

The album's most high-profile (again, in relative terms) song (not sure if it was actually a single) is the great 'City Sickness', which encapsulates much of the albums faded grandeur, inherent sadness of purpose, and orchestral ambition (fully realised in later years by the band, as will be explored in later posts). I think I remember hearing in an interview at the time that they had a small number of strings which they recorded over and over (or something far more technical) to achieve the sound of massed violins, but however they did, it sounds great:

The nastier, dirtier side of the album (which I don't love as much at extremes like 'Paco de Renaldo's dream' and 'Her') does come across very effectively in the film noir menace of 'Jism':

I will finish with the quite breathtaking sound of 'The not knowing', which must be simply the most unexpected song to appear on an album by any band who could be even loosely said to be related to the genre known as rock music. This sounds like the clash between my music and classical music to me.

Obviously, debut albums by any band have the huge significance of capturing what it is that made them want to be in a band, and capture their life experience and ambition to that point, a far greater span than between any subsequent albums which also bear the baggage of their earlier work's reception and any fan's expectations. The debut, on the other hand, is like fresh snow and unspoiled, and sets out their stall. What a stall Tindersticks set out here, which they rarely topped in subsequent years, although their next albums (all 7?) all contain moments of beauty and wonder (they had not even discovered how incredibly they could duets, for example, in their first album), as I will come back to. Click Here to Read More..

2009 on screen

I have blogged recently about how 2009 was not (in my own opinion) a particularly great year for music, but it was probably a much better year for movies and TV than several of the last few have been. In movies, I got to the cinema quite a bit, and enjoyed the following:

'Star Trek' - even as a fervent 'Wars-not-Trek' person I found this huge fun
'Terminator salvation' - I actually enjoyed, with pretty cool se4ttings and action, but not up to those that preceeded (even the third)
'The hurt locker' - hugely powerful, but perhaps not as overwhelmingly great as many critics said
'District 9' - very good but not in a huge rush to see it again (my review is here)
'In the loop' - favourite of the year, and much more below
'Up' - sweet, funny and really well done
'Avatar' - actually really liked it but for the Aliens-nostalgic scenes more than anything
'Public enemies' - very good but not as good as the book from parts of which it was taken
'Inglorious basterds' - liked quite a lot and reviewed it here

I did find 'Paranormal activity' very effective and scary and just different to the usual type of horror movie of recent years, and was a very good value use of the coffee budget on 'Avatar':

As usual, Mark Kermode's podcast guided me fairly well through the morass of movies to that which was worth the money, even if I ignored him sometimes. For example, I did find '2012' to be big bumb fun, because that, in some ways, are what movies are for - jaw-dropping moments where things are shown to you or thrown at you which are so far from everyday life that you cannot help but go 'wow', even as your inner brain knows it is crap; special effects can do stuff, and sometimes that stuff can be simultaneously incredibly stupid but yet gut-clecnchingly escapist, and that's got its place too, surely?

On DVD, the move of the year was 'In bruges', on which I will have a separate blog post soon. Other movie highlights were 'Doubt' (really surprised me as I was expecting worthy but dull and found it really intense and watchable), 'Fifty dead men walking' (a good thriller), 'Frost/Nixon' (liked a lot but not sure how badly I would want to see it again), 'Slumdog millionaire' (yes, yes, I know I should have seen it in the cinema), 'Gran torino' (that man is just class, let's face it) and 'State of play' (both the BBC original and the inferior but still decent remake). I watched 'Man on wire' on a flight to Australia and was just blown away by it, and rewatched on DVD.

Overall, though, the big moments of the year for me were actually made for the small screen, as I tackled several box sets. I did not make much progress on 'Weeds' or 'Jericho', but plan to return one day, and am most of the way through series 1 of 'The wire'; in that case, I can see what is great about it, but do find it occasionally slow and confusing, but will persist regardless. Hell, I had no idea what was going on in most episodes of 'The west wing' and it was still incredible! I also watched a lot of 'Battlestar galactica', which I really like, although I do really feel it got a little too abstract, dark and pretentious for me somewhere around the start of the third series.

However, the big discovery of the year was 'The thick of it' (all episodes, plus the specials, plus 'In the loop', and all several times over) which is quite simply brilliant. The writing and acting are just incredible, and Malcolm Tucker is one of the most intensely immense creations ever. It is amazing how few people know and appreciate it, but maybe that just makes it that little bit more special.

On-screen moment of the year (any screen, any programme) has to be episode 7 of series 2 of 'The thick of it' when Tucker is out-manoeuvered and fired, and suddenly the laughter fades and intensity threatens to burn a hole in the TV screen. The last 5 minutes of that show must be among the most incredible acted scenes I have ever seen, with so many details (Nicola's confusion and indecision at being there at the moment, the Sky news btreaking news ticker tape behind Tucker's back, his secretary's tears, his storming out of Downing Street) - truly astonishing stuff which simply sucked my breath away and left me in a state of shock, albeit without a single computer-generated special effect involved. Now that is class! Click Here to Read More..