So I have been busy with other projects for the last 18 months. But will be back shortly with some new articles and reviews.
Categories
8 Bit Christmas
First up is 8 Bit Chistmas. This is either Nintendo Nostalgia Product Placement Film #9002 or a knock-off Goldbergs Special dragged out to ninety minutes. Doogie Howser MD and his on screen daughter bond over a tale of 80’s computer gaming obsession. The story starts with Neil Patrick Harris and daughter arriving at his parent’s house where inexplicably his room is exactly the same as it was thirty years ago. He insufferably insists they play his Nintendo Entertainment System, which triggers a traumatic flash-back to the 1980s. Like a man suffering from PTSD, he begins to compulsively overshare about being a middle class brat who would go utterly monkey-shit over basic computer games. The irony of this is that his daughter really, really wants a phone of her own for Christmas in exactly the same way that he wanted a Nintendo way back when. Of course he doesn’t get her one because they are both cunts.
This film is full of rose tinted fuckheadeness like that God awful ‘Ready Player One’ film. Much like that particular slop bucket of 80s pop culture off-cuts, I don’t understand what audience this film is aimed at: Kids nowadays? Who only give a shit about the 80’s because they are told it was the last good decade in which we had a chance to save the planet. Their narcissistic parents? Who are trying to cling on to the cracked wood panelled dreams of their youth because it was last decade before they fucked it all up? Most likely it was some inner-child addled production executive snorting numbers on focus groups off his iphone.
Considering the whole film is free advertising for a Japanese console company it is interesting to see that all the onscreen computer games are not recognisable Nintendo game titles. I assume this is because Nintendo would not play nice with the rights to their marquee titles like Mario or Zelda. For example NPH boots up his classic up his console only to show his daughter ‘Paperboy‘, which was originally an ATARI title.
As I mentioned earlier ‘8 Bit Christmas’ feels like an overlong episode of the ‘Goldbergs’, albeit without the charm. The film tries hard to imitate that kind of tongue-in-cheek approach to the decade and unfortunately mostly misses the mark. Honestly if you want that see that kind of genre done properly just go rewatch the ‘Wedding Singer’. Although ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome‘ captures the spirit of childhood in the 1980’s better than anything else, as it mostly involved calling each other spastics and taping up Razzle and Fiesta centre-folds on the school bus windows. I’m sure we spent more time flinging rocks at buses or smaller children than actually playing computer games. When we did play Nintendo (or Commodore 64 or Atari or Sega) we played the good shit like Punch Out, Double Dragon 2, or Wrath of the Black Manta. We certainly didn’t suck up to richer kids for a token go on their machines as is central to the storyline here.
There are some mildly funny moments and it is entertaining if that is your absolute base requirement, but it is also sacharine, sanctimonious and the main kid is a fucking klutz. The moral of the film; that you should enjoy spending time with family (there’s originality for you), will be completely lost on your little brats. As it spends the last twenty minutes hammering this message hamfistedly down your throat, which is far too long. This means your little crotch goblins will have started playing some Minecraft on your ipad well before the end.
Speaking of which SPOILER ALERT!! Steve Zahn is shot to death while reading a magazine on the toilet by his Uzi weilding progeny. Oh no wait that’s Pulp Fiction. I rate it three Ninja Turtle Doves.
Christmas In the Pines. Sequel to Christmas In the Rockies *I think*.
Some of you may have partners, significant others or even be married. At times they may watch certain televisual entertainment genres that you might consider to be in poor taste. Possibly even trashy. Guilty pleasure shows like ‘1000 lb Sisters’ or even blander fare like ‘Love Bites‘.
Sometimes you can share in their vicarious pleasure. Revelling at finding some form of lowest common denominator to both indulge in. or maybe you’ll just wince convivially, before scuttling off to your own dark corner to watch the ‘Sisterwife League of Hillbilly Wrestling’. But then there are particular special interest films that you catch your partner watching and it is as if you have just caught them squatting in the corner, shitting uncontrollably over the carpet while bawling ‘I can’t help it!’. Christmas in the Pines is this film.
It is certainly family friendly but at what cost? This is the sort of film you find yourself watching after you have been emotionally gaslighted and am numb and bereft of all feeling. I was expecting a hunk and chick filled Hallmark Channel bean-flick and I am sorry to say that my low, low expectations were too high!
The kindest thing I can say is it glossy sexless pap. It’s not even vanilla. I can only the imagine the audience for this is comprised of women (or men) of a certain mental age who will probably write a heartfelt post on reddit’s DeadBedrooms in the next couple of years. If ‘she’ is watching this then ‘he’ is probably in the other room painting Warhammer miniatures while fantasing about oiling up Space Ubermenschen while junior huffs glue in the garage. Then they kissed and everybody clapped. No seriously that is actually the ending. I give it a full Five golden ringpieces.
A Boy Called Christmas
Are you all sitting comfortably in a posh North London home, set for yet another flashback story? No? Well tough. ‘A Boy Called Christmas’ is a staunchly British excretion, shot much like a Waitrose or Sainsbury’s seasonal advert. You half expect to see animatronic carrots in mixed race relationships with parsnips discovering the joy of Xmas, one tinsel basted Turkey Crown at a time. In which case you’ll only be half disappointed.
Maggie Smith plays Aunt Sourpuss who is the baby-sitting tale spinner in this piece of Xmas schmaltz. Dame Maggie arrives to babysit her three oh-so-clean and impeccably dressed stage school grandkids. The story she tells them is about some brat who goes to hang with the elves in fifteenth century Finland aka Christmas land.
The cast is pretty star studded. With Michiel Huisman and Joel Fry who both seem to be in fucking everything these days, both showing up as respective dads. Jim Broadbent and Kristen Wiiiiig also put in cameos while Stephen Merchant does the voiceover for the CGI mouse. Which you don’t find out until your half an hour in. If you think that is a spoiler I’m afraid any film with a CGI mouse sidekick is already hitting a fairly high level of contrivance post Stuart Little.
There are some neat bits, the shadow animation near the beginning is rather good but that is all of two minutes long. That’s all I can say really say for it though, unfortunately. By the time Kristen Wiig as Aunt Cuntsmear turned up to bully the soulless ginger elf of a protagonist, I had gotten bored enough to actually do the vacuum cleaning.
If you want to stick on a film with Holly, snow and Christmas hats for your kids to yet again ignore in favour watching Elsa screw Spiderman in some bad parenting corner of YouTube while you do some housecleaning, then this one gets four Alan Partridges in a Pear Tree.
Thus concludes the list of this years Christmas films. My advice is do not patronise your children by sticking to ‘Family Friendly’ fare at Christmas. It doesn’t satisfy anybody. The Christmas films I remember most as a child of the 80’s were ‘Trading Places’, ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ and ‘Gremlins’. So watch grown-up Christmas films with your kids instead. They’ll actually pay attention to shit like ‘The Night Before‘ and you won’t feel like your slowly suffocating under false cheer. Which brings us to:
Black Friday
Technically a Thanksgiving film. But for the rest of the world who doesn’t celebrate genociding an indigenous population with extra Cranberry sauce, it counts as a Christmas movie. If you have kids they will watch the living shit out of it. The film is set in a big box toy store where the staff have to work all through the night on Thanksgiving until Black Friday the morning after.
It is every shitty job you see posted on r/antiwork with added monsters. The script is sharp and funny for most of the film and it has Bruce Campbell (the B movie Carey Grant dontchaknow) and Michal Jai White (Of Black Dynamite and Spawn fame). It starts with a cynically fake Sinatra song that you will half believe is real. Sure it goes a bit flabby in the third quarter but picks up again for the finale.
I am reasonably certain there is an obvious subtext about Black Friday shoppers being possessed by some splodgy alien intelligence that turns them into hyperviolent web spitters akin to Trump supporters or Q-Anoners. But I was too shitfaced on OVD rum and Yazoo banana milkshake to ‘get it’ by the end of the film.
I give it Eight Partridges drowned in a two litre bottle of Frosty Jack’s Pear Cider.
Merry Christmas.
Categories
Mad God
“And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.”
Leviticus 26:29 KJV
A floating ziggurat towers up into a storm cloud sky. Lightening cracks, blasting it’s pinnacle. From the sky a diving bell drops lower and lower. Sirens sound and cannon-fire rips across the screen. Inside the bell a rubber clad figure in a WWI gas mask desperately pulls levers and turns dials. From the smoothness of the motion it’s almost hard to believe that the model inside is animated, so realistically does his hands work the controls.
So begins Phil Tippett’s ‘Mad God’. A masterpiece of stop motion animation that has been over thirty years in the making. Quite frankly there is nothing else like it. Or rather there has been, the closest comparison is Richard William’s ‘The Thief and The Cobbler’. But that wonderful vision was betrayed and ultimately ruined by Disney. This one was not. To say the animation in either film is good is an understatement. They are both incredible.
In Mad God the detail of the model work, coupled with the lighting and subtlety of the motion control is particularly exquisite. A ‘simple’ walk cycle by the main character is sublimely hyper-realistic. With bulging rubber boots malformed by the weight of the foot as it crunches across a debris filled path. And that is just one little scene.
We follow the gas masked protagonist as he descends through a series of crumbling worlds that are post-everything-a-caust. Places where themes of decaying mutation and evolutionary violence abound. Dead world’s filled with fossils of our own making. Some of which are from Tippett’s earlier work. I spy ED-209 from Robocop amidst the ruins. It’s a trip that parallels Orpheus or Dante’s descent into their own respective Hell. As the figure navigates each one the map crumbles a little more..
Each one is a little more familiarly unfamiliar. A world of screaming giants strapped to electric chairs whose effluvia pours through a grate into the mouth of an even bigger beast. Who has been flayed and deconstructed, so that his organs, eyeball riddled and weeping, pump the bellowing workings of a great machine. Which in turn stamps out spindly figures, molded from dust and hair, born literally rotting to pieces into an industrial hellscape in which they are all too expendable. These figures labour to churn out metal blocks which zip through the air of this factory city. Crushing them as though they are of no consequence whatsoever.
Disney’s Fantasia this ain’t. It fact it’s a emphatic fuck you to all of that kind of schmaltzy classical Utopionist schtick. Like a Michelangelo made of plastic bags and dead seagulls, it is a parable comprised of Freudian offcuts from the grimmest of dark corners of human history. A howling glimpse of a future past that we are all complicit in. Which amidst our current pandemic and ecological collapse seems damn near prophetic.
This is reflected in the soundscape: Feet stomp. Babies scream. Bones crunch. Metal clangs. Amidst all this rotting shadow moments of poignancy do exist. One of the dust figures wants to escape and for a moment the person in the gas-mask holds out a hand.. It doesn’t end well though. There are just too many infantile heavy-footed monsters out there.
Several times the film seems to be heading towards an ending. Only to confound the viewer. One such moment takes places in a world of lost briefcases. Each one seemingly containing dynamite with a ticking clock that only requires winding. Time from this point on becomes a key theme.
This place we are journeying through is a place where time repeats itself. It slows. The hand ticks forward twice then back four time, stutters forward again then back. If mythology is set in ur-time then this one is is a rich expression of suffering time. The kind of time that happens when you break a leg or are having chemo. It drags on and all you can do is hope.
This is reflected in the scratched jerky effects of the film’s stock which turns fuzzy and static filled. Particularly as surgeon’s tear jewels out of the guts of the gasmasked hero, wrapped in gore and ichor, until they reach in to pull out the screaming spine of his or her inner child.
At this point you can make your own mind up about the direction of film. Though personally I found it rather cheering. What that says about me I don’t know exactly. I will say this was probably a sentiment not shared by my fellow cinema attendees. “What was that all about?” and “What a load of crazy shit!” Seemed to be a fairly common reaction as they staggered out of the auditorium. But then I’d shaved my ears, plucked my nose-hair and stolen a bag of donated clothes from outside a charity shop especially for this outing.
Mad God is released sometime soon hopfully. But will probably be showing at a film festival near you. Go and see it. Remember to take your kids too! They’ll love it.
Play the video. I spent a whole afternoon editing it. Now I hate myself.
In a world of White People Things this is the whitest goddamn thing you will ever see. André Rieu and his fucking orchestra is the kind of classical music beloved of your Aunty Tony and Uncle Pat who hold the Express and Mail tight and dear to their blackened shrivelled hearts. If you find the proms too hoity-toity then Andre Rieu & Friends is for you! Like Fox news keep your older parents well away from it.
Not so long ago I spoke to my mother who is 108 and she was raving about some concert she saw on TV.
“It was just lovely, heartwarming fun! I had a such a good time watching it!” She said with the kind of excitement you hear when people tell you that they’ve finally found Jesus whilst sitting on the toilet.
My mother has always been fairly fussy about what constitutes good entertainment. Especially music as she’s always been a big Leonard Cohen and Marvin Gaye fan. I trusted her judgement.
“Great!” I said. “What was it called?”
“André Rieu and his orchestra! You simply have to watch it!”
So I did. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. By the end of it I was convinced that my mother was either in the grip of a cult or had had some kind of stroke.
André Rieu is a Dutchman with a Dutch face, long foppish hair like you’d see on a bust of Mozart or Beethoven and he is always holding a violin. Though it feels it he seldom plays it for more than thirty seconds. Preferring instead to wave his Stradivarius spasmodically around in order to conduct his orchestra. Which makes him look a bit like a drunk busker being attacked by hornets.
These schlocky, derivative classical musicians seem to crop up every few years. Liberace was kind of the archetype, Lang-Lang is another, Vanessa Mae, even Pavarotti and the Three Tenors in the 1990’s to an extent. In the same way Klaus Wunderlich (whom I adore btw) made a career rejigging popular tunes into Hammond organ schmaltz for Beer Hall Polka lovers, elevator enthusiasts, and electronic music fans, these seasoned pros ham up classical pops with extra tits and flourishes.
This case the orchestra are all in costumes. Every woman is in a big shiny Anastasia princess dress dripping in diamante. Every man is in tails and a cummerbund. Or better yet national costume. At the beginning of each concert Andre and his orchestra all walk out like he’s some kind of classical music Hulk Hogan. Seriously he high fives the audience as he marches out through the crowd to the stage.
Rieu’s thing relies heavily on Strauss, pageantry, chocolate box stage art and oodles of crowd shots. This latter thing seems to be the real key to his popularity. Each concert broadcast is at least 70% reactions shots from the general public and it is utterly ridiculous. He also films them in his home town so he’s guaranteed a good reaction. I find it pretty manipulative personally, especially when they zoom in on people crying.
Categories
The Midnight Gospel
The Midnight Gospel on Netflix* is the best animated show you are probably not watching. It is a beautifully drawn and thoroughly moving exploration of the human condition. You’ll either love it, hate it or both. Maybe you’ll ‘get it’ or maybe there is nothing there to get. It’s all in your head and what are you exactly inside there? Pulsating meat masquerading as sentience or something greater?
The show is about Death and the ‘primal reality’ thereof. It is also about guilt, acceptance and coming to terms with failure. Which is probably not entirely accurate but that was my impression. I’ve re-watched it a few times. It’s be one of those shows that densely packed with ideas and concepts where the interpreting could shift depending on how you feel at the time.
For instance if you watch it before doing something like going on holiday, with all the expectation of happiness that such an event brings, you might feel differently about the show. The circumstances when I watched it may have affected my slant. It is also very, very funny.
This Isn’t Really a Review.
I went home for Christmas on the 19th of December, hours before yet another lockdown was announced and ‘enforced’ in the UK. I’m not especially proud of it but it happened. Now the end is in sight maybe I can come clean. I do not have a big family and it seemed particularly important to go and see my mother who is elderly, as much as it pains me to say that. And whose short term memory is a long term worry for me.
It was a long journey from here to there. A good eight hours as the road flies. Doing it in the midst of a resurgent pandemic meant only a bare minimum of stops for petrol and the inevitable bio-break. I had tested negative. I had self isolated. I had spent a week worrying about it. I was committed to making the journey.
The coronavirus has challenged everyone slightly differently. It’s made us all redundant in one way or another. One big shared aspect of virus culture has been the slow existential dripping away of time. Isolated from solitary family members living distantly atomised lives. Silently contemplating all the worst of questions of ‘How Will I Cope If such and such dies?’ By pondering the immediate mortality of loved ones considered most vulnerable and considering the brute realities of this new era should they succumb.
How would you feel watching them slowly die via fucking conferencing software? Robbed of being 100% present in such an acutely important moment. Remember all those great things you intended to do together over the last year? It’s now a road to your own personal Hell. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
Am I Part of the Problem?
I took to that road at the last minute. Sensing lockdown was about to hit like a rake to the face, I threw everything I didn’t need into the back of my 22 year old import. Along with a cantankerous cockatiel and a half ounce of very strong weed called Stardawg. Once I was out there my carefully planned smuggler’s route over the high ground seemed silly in hindsight.
The motorways were just a big series of empty lanes, HGV’s and low level paranoia. The spectre of police patrols sweeping up drivers in between road blocks, checking and fining every car traveling beyond a certain distance on the ANPR cameras was just that: a spectre. A big bellowing paper tiger roaring from all forms of mass media. ‘Stay home! Save lives!’ (except in this case).
I saw only two cop cars on the whole journey. They were pulled up having a chat and a coffee at a popular services on the A1. Inside the building a naked woman screamed at her coven of teenaged children from the doorway of the ladies toilets. For their sakes I wish I had made that up. But I just walked right past them pretending I saw nothing. Eight hours later I drove into a deserted tier 4 city. Eyes bleeding, head thrumming with the cosmic vibrations of a radial tyres thumping four hundred odd miles over tarmac and hardcore.
I was happy to be back. Happy to see the dog, the cat, the parrot. The messiness of home. To be present with my mother and sharing memories once more. I took up residence in the basement in a bed next to the wine rack. Eager to be diminished by soft drugs and alcohol over Yule. I plugged in my eight year old laptop to the TV and HDMI’d my ambitions away until mid January.
The show I started with was The Midnight Gospel.
I’d been saving it for months for this moment. Like I hoard all animations, good or bad, on a special hard drive committed to animated piracy. Four terabytes of brightly coloured escapism of varying quality and theme. Series, feature films, one offs. The collected works of Jan Švankmajer and hundreds of film festival shorts rubbing shoulders with Tom & Jerry, Ugly Americans, Pingu and Thingu. It’s my own little Erebor and like the hoard under that particular hill, it has driven me more than slightly mad.
I’ll say this; I don’t remember much about watching the entire run the first time. I interspersed it with cycling fast, thrashy laps around Regent’s park. Still stoned of course. Then I went back for more. I don’t think I knew how to feel about it at first either.
The show is about a some dood called Clancy Gilroy who lives a dimension called the Chromatic Ribbon. He owns an unlicenced computer thingy that grants him access to multiple worlds in multiple universes. He visits these worlds to generate content for his podcasts. Clancy has a single loyal subscriber for his podcasts, though he never questions whether they are worth doing. Of course they are. How else can he escape the pain of existence? Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
Due to Operator Error there are No Longer Living Things on This Planet.
While I watched and rewatched I had a lot of questions. Are the podcasts real podcasts? (They are sort of, being adapted from episodes of the The Duncan Trussell Family Hour). Was the whole thing an exercise in Pendleton Ward‘s slow slide into guru led fart-sniffing whimsy? (No it isn’t) Why did it feel so fucking ‘Californian’? Was it some new age religious bullshit masquerading as philosophy? Why was I simultaneously annoyed and overjoyed by it? Halfway through I got the theme. I shrugged. I wrestled with it. I felt uncomfortable. I went out for another bike ride. I poured another drink.
I am not fan of podcasts. They aren’t a part of my cultural diet. There’s something about the format that I find self-indulgent and it doesn’t chime with me. Which is more than a little hypocritical. Though I understand the appeal and have listened to a fair share of them second-hand: Lore, Marc Maron’s podcast, Behind the Bastards, a bit of Louis Theroux. Maybe it’s because I’m full of rage and jealousy. So it’s weird I would enjoy The Midnight Gospel when other people I know who love podcasts do not like it. At all. I think because it’s almost a pseudo fake podcast backed by really good fucking animation that I managed to initially get on board with it.
I could also see a fair bit of myself in Clancy. His rejection of the multiverse simulator as a economically viable workhorse. His unsuccessful podcast. His quixotic dedication to escapism and his embrace of the moment. His clutter. His souvenirs. His solitude. Not that these are all positives. Just similarities.
The second time around I watched odd episodes out of order. The ones I remembered thinking that I enjoyed watching. The ones where I began to realise the whole series was about the grim experience of trying and failing to cope with the inevitability of Death. These were episode four: ‘Blinded By My End’ and episode five: ‘The Annihilation of Joy’.
When I say failing to cope. I mean that in a partial sense. We all fail. It’s a condition of life. How ‘well’ you deal with it is a phenomenological question. You can be an emotional wreck and still bring home the bacon and or a zen bum without a pot to piss in but living a rich existence. What you make of existence is subjectively your life to live.
Of course visually its a real treat. Gorgeously drawn and wonderfully psychedelic and surreal with oodles of charm and neat little animated stories occurring in the background. Each illustrating in a way the underlying theme of each episode, though in some episodes this is more enigmatic than in others. Aesthetically it resembles Superjail, although thinking about it is maybe it’s more like the lesser known King Star King. Which are produced by Titmouse studios (I actually said ‘Chirp’ from their ident when I first saw the opening scene of the first episode.) Who over the last 10-12 years have really carved out their own stylistic ouevre in animation.
As I said before, The Midnight Gospel is show about death and coming to terms with it. This isn’t a hidden theme. Clancy interviews the grim reaper in one later episode but it also isn’t entirely apparent from the earlier episodes.
What struck me most was how well it deals with the both the practical and dysfunctional aspects of grief. The former is much more up front, especially in episode 7: Turtles of the Eclipse, where Caitlin Doughty explains how important and cathartic it is to simply take time to sit with a loved one once they have died. She also outlines how exploitative the funeral industry is in this regard too.
The themes of dysfunction and of how loss can make you behave in certain ways it is much more implicit in the character arc of Clancy. Especially as more of his backstory is revealed. The final episode it very moving. Although I don’t want to give anything away that might spoil it. In this manner I found it sort of similar to ‘Flowers’, which is another brilliant dark’ comedy’ about dysfunctional, traumatised people pursuing what others might deem to be irresponsible dreams. Rather than dealing with the tedious nitty-gritty of life.
As Dr Wong said in another popular cartoon: “..[T]he bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.”
January came and I had a birthday that I tried desperately to run and hide from. On the day I was blixxzd. Haunted and nervous. I sang karaoke and was red wine sick all over a floor. I laughed about it later while I was hungover. But was I really present for it?
There’s a saying my mother has: ‘guests are like fish, after a week they stink.’ After three weeks I really stank out the whole joint. It was time to head North again. Lockdown was still ongoing, still is in fact. But a viable vaccine seemed to be just around the corner and it wasn’t like I had options.
I drove back up with the cockatiel on my shoulder, shitting on me all the way. Shared memories are important and it had been reassuring for everyone to have a moment we could look back on and say remember what happened over pandemic Christmas? I really feel for those who haven’t been able to have that. For now at least the thought of that inevitable loss was one that I could push aside and make smaller for the time being.
I hope I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t think I did. But who the fuck knows.
Categories
The Plenary Speech
Ronald’s teeth had gone numb. He crouched by the front door in the gloomy hallway of his flat, staring up at the cornicing three meters above him. It was very, very dusty. His flight was in two hours and his keynote speech for UNESCO’s World Humanities Conference was in sixteen. He had yet to write it.
“I’ve got to land that fucking plane on the fucking mountain. That’s all.” He said to himself.
“That’s all.” His voice dropped off. His eyes unfocused. He turned inward.
Ronald sat there for ten minutes before bursting into tears.
He was two bumps from running dry. The little Tupperware container that he kept in his fridge now lay on the kitchen floor. For the umpteenth time he licked his finger and ran it around the small plastic oval. Ronald tried not to think about the reserve; a little foil wrap in the inside pocket of the suit jacket he used for black tie events.
He would get into that just before the taxi to the airport. The evening flight would cheese-grate his soul otherwise. In the next hour Ronald was determined to land that plane right on top of that snowy plateau. He would write that keynote. This was the plan. It was meant to be.
Fifteen minutes later Ronald tore apart the lining of his dinner jacket hunting for the wrap. It had fallen between a seam. He could feel it. His fingers burst the inner pocket trying to reach it, fraying the Bemberg silk. Ronald caught the packet between two fingers and held it up. There was no wrap. Just a paper clip around a small plastic pouch containing a spare button.
Jet engines screamed in his ears. The plane in his imagination swooped down low over granite peaks. The undercarriage perilously close to the jagged seracs of a huge glacier. It was losing engine power.
There was nothing else for it.
Ronald went into his kitchen and opened the third drawer down. It was filled with dead batteries, empty lighters and Prosecco corks. In the very back was a scuffed cassette case of the Bee Gees greatest hits. Inside that was a folded silver baggy labelled ‘Plant Food: Not for Human Consumption’.
Ronald rolled the bag between his fingertips. He could feel a hard crystalline knot inside it. Last time it had felt like salt grains. Last time hadn’t ended well either. That was why it was still here.
On the flight Ronald had a window seat. A family embarked and stood over him.
“Hey! HOWYADOIN?!” Ronald said too loudly. The father took one look at him and changed seats with his wife.
For the rest of the flight Ronald could feel the tightness in the man’s jaw and he nodded and nodded and nodded and nodded.
Down in the hotel reception Ronald felt like he presented a clear and concise case as to why he should receive a room upgrade. Beforehand, as Ronald strode off the aircraft, he had been a well oiled machine. His suitcase whirring by his side. The wheels thrumming out a staccato rhythm as though it were a snare drum announcing his presence through each domain; arrivals terminal, shuttle, hotel. Only upon entering his hotel room had grit been flicked into the bearings and Ronald raged all the way back down to the lobby.
Ronald held up his phone to the receptionist yet again. She looked nonplussed.
“There! Right there! Do you see it? What is that?”
He pointed to the photo he had taken of the vague smear on the wall next to the bedside lamp.
“I don’t know, sir.” The receptionist monotoned.
“Exactly! Exactly! You get it! Right?” Ronald stepped back, lips quivering.
He noticed the time.
“By the way your clock is fast. I can’t have been here two hours already.”
The receptionist shot him a black look as she pushed a new key card across the marble counter.
Ronald spent the next three hours leaving scathing one star reviews of the hotel on every travel website he could find. He made a point of mentioning the receptionist by name in every one, along with an obscene description of her coupling with the hotel chain’s corporate mascot. They all finished with the phrase “Needless to say I had the last laugh”.
At three thirty a.m. Ronald sat on the toilet in the bathroom of his suite. Now he could finally write that damned keynote that he was due to give in four hours.
And write he did! A brilliant call to arms about the current state of the social sciences concerning the unequal relations of power between researchers and their subjects. It would set the theme for the conference. It would be referenced at every plenary thereon and mentioned in every workshop. It would, Ronald felt, affect the very fate of the Humanities as a scientific endeavour. He couldn’t believe it. It just flowed out of him like magic. A tour de force.
The engines of the plane roared as it circled around for another pass over the massif. This time it would land. He could see the runway lighting up on the high plateau. It was clear.
Just after seven a.m. Ronald collapsed for roughly half an hour and woke up screaming.
At quarter to nine the doorman held the door to a taxi open for him. Ronald did not say thank you because his hair felt too wet.
The words of the chairperson of UNESCO’s WHC committee blah-blahed through the PA system. Ronald heard his full name and title and stood up to applause which echoed around the auditorium. The hall was at capacity. Roughly eleven hundred sets of eyes watched him. A tech clipped a microphone to his lapel and a transmitter to his belt. Ronald drank it all in. The theatre hall was a beautiful space. A modernist take on La Scala in whirling strips of undulating wood that flowed seamlessly over the walls and ceiling. Juxtaposed decorative panels marked the staircases that travelled Escher-esque between the galleries and balconies. People were still filing in. Some had to stand against the walls.
A videographer filmed him as he made his way across the plushly carpeted stage to the lectern. Ronald riffled his papers as he placed them just so. As the committee head took her seat, Ronald inclined his head in gratitude at the panel. All well respected Stone Head professors. The finest minds and shapers of the fields of sociology, anthropology and psychology. The applause swelled as he mumbled his thanks and then Ronald stood back and smiled as he surveyed the room yet again.
This was is it. He had made it. The high point of his career.
“Excelsior.” Ronald whispered under his breath.
Suddenly there was a huge explosion overhead. Ronald ducked and grabbed ahold of the lectern, clinging on to it tightly for dear life. He looked up, startled and bewildered. But there was nothing there. The wooden mosaic was still in place on the ceiling. Everyone was still watching him. Hadn’t they heard it? He looked over at the panel. They had not. A droplet of sweat dripped onto his notes. Where had it come from? He wondered. He felt cold. Someone coughed loudly. Then silence.
Ronald smiled, took a deep breath and looked down at his speech.
“You’re all a bunch of fucking parasites, studying fleas in a circus..” read the first line.
“SHIT!” Ronald almost shouted. Instead he coughed and brought a balled fist up to his mouth. He dimly heard a second explosion as the aeroplane’s wreckage impacted the stony slopes of a non-existent mountain valley. Trying hard not to flinch this time, he bit down on his knuckles.
So many faces all looking at him. Waiting.
Ronald looked up to the heavens.
From the auditorium ceiling a giant flea dressed in a singed airman’s uniform drifted gently down, swinging from a parachute harness. Their eyes met. It saluted him.
Ronald looked back down at his notes and began to read his plenary speech.
Categories
Rip It Up and Start Again
A sharp pain in his rear molar and Todd was tumbling through pitch black space. A hard wooden board hit him across the ribs a moment before his arms and knees impacted the carpet. Winded, Todd slid off the end table and curled up at the foot of the ottoman. Three feet to his right and it would have been a soft landing. He tried to breathe but could only manage a gurgle, though the pain in his chest distracted him from the sharp needle of hurt in the back of his mouth. Todd rolled to his knees and crawled to the corner of the room. Feeling for the edge of the porcelain sink in the dark, he used it to haul himself up to his feet and then tore down the blind.
Daylight flooded the cabin and Todd clutched his cheek. He reached for the kettle shelf, with all the fixings for hot drinks, and pulled down the jar of sugar. Muscovado. It was always muscovado with him. Some things he would not change. Todd packed the sticky brown sugar around the offending molar, two teeth from the back of his mouth, and felt instant relief. Outside the cabin’s porthole a large pink toad sat naked, reclining in a deckchair and smoking a cigar. Seeing movement it rolled it’s massive golden eyes over to him and grinned. It’s hand reached down to it’s crotch and though Todd couldn’t see it, he knew it had begun to masturbate. It’s knees wobbled. It’s massive mouth cooed into an ‘O’.
It was a Relic. He had a word for it now. Though he couldn’t quite remember what it had started as, he sure as hell wasn’t going to deal with it at this moment.
Turning away from the porthole Todd reached for the garments strewn around the cabin floor. He flicked off the dog ends that had burned holes in his wetsuit tunic and wrestled his way into it. Todd liked the way it felt tight around his torso. His fingers lingered, probing the crisp edges of the burn holes, brushing the skin beneath. After this he bulldog clipped a thin, hard towel around his waist. It didn’t quite fit all the way around him and left a split along his thigh right up to his hip. Todd didn’t mind. He’d shaved that leg especially. Then Todd put on one Wellington boot and one Flip-flop. Open and closed rubber was a consistently interesting sensation.
Todd stepped out into the garden. The relic was still at it. Todd glanced askew at the big pink toad then did his best to ignore it. Whatever desire the Relic had begun life as was now a puzzle to him. He could have consigned it to nothing but his curiosity kept it hanging around. Todd knew the answer was somewhere within himself. But like the solution to a Snakecube or a Rubix Decahedron, when Todd got to a certain point in figuring out the beast he just kept making the same bad twist.
The Relic shifted position and began doing something lewd and unspeakable. Todd frowned disapprovingly. All he could think of as he watched it was his father. He was pretty sure that was not it’s origination but damned if he get away from the thought now. Todd hurried out of the garden in need of distraction.
He looked up to the sky and considered a party and there it was. But only so he could walk through it on his way to somewhere else. He decided on a firehouse for that ‘somewhere else’. With big red shutters and a pole. Way out on a strip of land where a lighthouse would normally stand. Todd began the trek out to it.
The party was a Block party. People appeared and fell into place. Slotting neatly into a cool scene. Odd pieces jumbled up on the dance floor. Todd revelled in wilfully ignoring them as they waved and called out to him. Then he thought about what usually came next in this iteration.
Ah yes.
He would imagine her face and then he would make her so. Just to get her approval. That was all he wanted. Then he would want her gone. It was always the way. It had happened countless times since. Not only her, his sister, his brother. Everyone he had known at one stage. The Wrongs he had righted. The Scores he had settled.
Time was All Time inside the Ecived. It did not flow unceasing any longer but was instead bottled up in a cistern with Todd’s hands metaphorically manifest on the spigot and the sluice. Time for Todd was no longer unanticipated. His molar jabbed him under the sugar poultice. He winced and sucked on the tooth, testing it for hurt. Pleasure was dull numbness. Pain let him know he was still existent.
Todd was over the party now and he threw his drink into the face of the nearest guest. A stunned hush fell over the gathering. Todd smiled as the crying started behind him. He walked through a copse of plastic marijuana trees and he could not hear it any more.
Cold hair fell from a clear sky as Todd reached the firehouse. He climbed up the stairs of the drill tower until he stood on the upper deck. High up out in the open. The pelting strands stung as they struck his exposed flank and arms. The clumps itched fiercely as they clung to his skin. When Todd shook them loose they left behind curving corrugations of red chilblains. Todd scratched and scratched the welts in satisfaction as he looked out across the land and asked it what next. Then he jumped before it could answer.
Todd had long ago passed mundane ideas of perfection. He had always wished for a place by the sea so then he always had the house by the sea. Then that became houses. Then the houses under the sea. The houses in the sea and on the sea and over the sea. Now he couldn’t see the sea but the sea was there. If he cared to listen there were waves somewhere just around the corner. But what did he truly want?
A long fall was one way to answer this question. Imminent injury had a way of focusing the mind. This fall was not a long one though. Perfect futures metastasised rapidly as he plummeted towards the ground and they all had absolutely nothing to do with a soft landing.
Then it was too late and all he had was a bush. The leaves shook as he crashed into it. Todd rolled free as it began to smoulder, leaving his towel and single flip-flop behind.
“That was stupid.” He said aloud to no one.
“Really, really fucking stupid”. He lay in the sparse grass remembering the time he had crippled himself on impulse.
When Todd stood up he found he had unconsciously spewed forth a yard. A rough Autumnal space with the first scattering of fallen yellow and umber leaves amidst the mud and gravel. Cool and peaceful. A mildewed swing-seat shook in the breeze and the faint smell of smoke was in the air. Todd automatically wondered how long it was before Halloween. A deflating football and a fading Frisbee lay next to a tipped over lawn chair. Todd righted the chair, sat down in it and sighed.
Perfection was what he’d been promised with the Ecived. This garden was almost perfection. A slice of memory from his Child-horde. Taken from The Way Before he had encapsulated himself. Todd breathed in the nostalgically crisp air and remembered the times he had visited his grandparents. They had been as mountains in the summer; Pleasant, craggy, white topped, timeless and slightly ominous when clouds passed over their faces. They were always working in the yard. Always. Todd could almost hear the sound of Granpop sweeping leaves, and decided he ought to. A pleasingly rhythmic swoosh and rattle came from nowhere.
This wasn’t bad. Was it? Surely he could stand this? Perfection in this garden seemed moderately achievable. Todd just had to build it up and settle into it for a little while. Let it mould into place. Todd remembered the advice his doppelganger had given himself.
‘Think like jazz! Only by revealing your true innermost could you reach equilibrium. Then you would know true heaven!’
That son of a bitch must’ve been lying. Todd always lied to himself. As he sat there looking around Todd felt relaxed but bored. He rolled up that feeling and dropped it into the Ecived’s metonym slot. Something rattled and clunked and then Todd thought of Chicks.
Apparently that was what he needed. Not the female kind. He had done enough of that for it to get really weird. No, this time he needed something essentially sweet and comforting.
Baby chicks.
Although maybe not just chicken chicks. Something like parrot chicks. But not bitey parrot chicks. Or maybe just a little bitey. Cute bitey. He formed a picture of them and let it wander a little at the last second until they be and was and is.
And they were! Lots of them. Hundreds in fact. Small and cute. Feathery and fluffy. They did not have wings. Todd realised he disliked like things that went flap. Too frantic and panicky. Instead they had arms. Tiny, buff little arms with cute little flappy nubbins at the end instead of fingers. They surrounded him peeping gently. Clustering around his feet as he sat there in the lawn chair.
He pondered the quail. Was what they were? Or maybe quial or qauil? Or Grouse? Or maybe just Very Odd Chickens. Budgerregards. Yes that name fit best. Still. It wasn’t quite enough. In his mind Todd turned the dial up.
The birds clambered up onto him and screamed and screamed. Their feet were plump and pointy, like tiny pin cushions. They left white scratches in his skin as they skittered over his body.
Todd selected one and named it Come Fly With Me.
He winced as his mind reached into the budgerregard’s head and wrinkled up it’s brain. Increasing the surface area as much as the tiny skull could take. The bird’s eyes went wide and its beak gibbered. Todd thought he might have overdone it. Then Come Fly With Me shook its head and cuffed the others out of the way with its tiny muscular arms. It climbed up Todd’s neoprene tunic and then onto the crown of his head, clinging tightly to his scalp. It began to sing.
‘The summer wind, came blowin’ in, from across the sea..’
The rest of them began to sway in time. En masse they crooned the refrain:
‘Doo-doo-do-do-dooo—do-dooo.’
‘It lingered there, to touch your hair, an-nd walk with me..’
‘Doo-doo-do-do-dooo—-do-dooo.’
More of them now picked it up. They came scuttling from all corners of the yard. Or was it truly a yard? Could be a real garden if he let the grass grow. They all joined in. Todd, in spite of himself, felt that urge of morbid curiosity yet again. He increased their number with a stray flick of his mind giggling as thousands of them came bobbling towards him from all corners. They piled up thickly against his body until Todd was buried up to his neck in an enormous chick pyramid. It tickled. He could feel their tiny arms pummelling him gently.
Todd smiled in satisfaction. To be swept up in a smooth crooning hillock of warm budgerregards was apparently very soothing. In fact this was shaping up to be pretty gosh darn good as far sensations went. Todd could probably enjoy this for a quite a while.
Then Come Fly With Me shit on him.
It ran hot and wet and sausagey down Todd’s forehead and into his left eye. “AAH FUU..” Todd yelled and the cold inrush of air hit the cavity in his molar as he ripped it up and started again.
You may never intend to procrastinate. But if like me, the urge strikes you as naturally as does swimming to a fish, a two second dopamine hit can often become ‘Wonder of the Day’ in less time it takes to you to think: ‘Fuck it. It’s still early, I can spare a minute or two..’
Today that ten hour time thief is the BBC Motion Graphics Archive at Ravensbourne University. An archive of BBC program titles and idents that stretches all the way back to the iron age. What started as a momentary flick’n’click though it’s pages turned into a one way ticket aboard the nostalgia express.
Which for a bone idle bastard is the equivalent of taking the Inverness to Penzance train. A journey of some 20 hours and 20 minutes apparently. Although roughly about five pages of old TV titles in I realised that this wasn’t really a train journey but more of a Merry-Go-Round. Alexei’s Sayle’s to be precise.
Titles! Thousands of Them!
Here’s the compulsive thing about the archive: It is a huge jumble of all the shows which had brilliant titles. Shows you might only barely remember but which had title sequences that were frequently more engaging than the content. Which for the period was really the whole point of title sequences. To get you excited that the next show might just exorcise the tedium of pre-internet life for thirty minutes.
Now in the age of slashed production budgets show titles are often cobbled together post production after-thoughts. But in years gone by titles were frequently so dynamically creative in their execution, and so symbolically evocative that you felt almost honor bound to spend at least the next twenty minutes ‘waiting for the good bit’. Whilst you were actually watching a treatise on Edward Said or Mark Urban banging about politics.
It was a brilliant bit of bait and switch and I’m sure I wasn’t the only bitter eleven year old turned into an unwilling pseud by a clever bit of puppetry or animation. Take for example Ralph Steadman’s 31 seconds of blood-spattered nightmare for ‘Leviathan’, a satirical history show (with Mark Bloody Urban, of course).
Even no-budget shows you have never heard of had beautifully surreal title sequences, Many of which stand alone as great tidbits of visual art. To choose one at random: ‘Archer’s Goon’ I have no recollection of whatsoever. Turns out it’s a science fiction show from 1993 aimed at kids.
There are also loads of titles that are seemingly so totally unrelated to the show’s premise that it becomes a fun guessing game. See if can you figure out what this show is about?
If you thought Post-Apocalyptic Romance you’d be a half right. Just kidding it’s a hospital comedy.
The Missing & The Idents
There are some glaring omissions however. ‘Further Abroad With Jonathan Meades’ is not there, Nor is BBC One’s ‘On The Record’ which had the houses of Parliament turn into a evil looking crocodile marauding over a map of the British Isles. The actual political discussion program bored me to tears but I’d watch the hell out of the title sequence.
I also searched in vain to find the original ‘Alexei Sayle’s Stuff’ title with Steamboat Fatty and the kids in the bald caps swearing in the theme song. However the archive does make a great jumping off point for shows you can’t quite remember and then look for elsewhere
It also allows you to compare idents throughout the decades, and see how far we’ve fallen come! A great example of this is the animated bat-wing logo from 1953 at the head of this article. Sure it looks like the crypto-fascist logo from an Alan Moore graphic novel but compare it the BBC One ident from 2018 below. I don’t know about you but I find the 2018 version way more dystopian. Something about the out-of-focus people, all of them with their phones out, gathered before a massive star topped tree while the slogan ‘One-Ness’ morphs into BBC One logo. It’s schmaltzy, pandering and sinister all at once. Give me the bat-wings and shifting eye circles any day.
Or how about BBC Scotland? Years ago we had ‘Around Scotland’, where the letters all flew about above a puddle of water like you’d collapsed in the gutter and were too pissed to catch them. When they finally resolved the O in Scotland was a big flaming ‘O’ ring. If you’ve ever been for a big messy night out in Glasgow it all makes perfect sense. What do we have now? A wee crystal jobbie laid out like a fucking dog’s egg onto some wet cobbles.
My favorite part of the archive though, is that finally I can see the full ‘Arena’ titles. Including the one with the Spitting Image animal puppets aboard Noah’s Ark, which is even darker than I remembered and makes the lame Spitting Image reboot look like Gordon the Fucking Gopher.
Categories
Masterchef The Professionals UK.
As Autumn turns to Winter and the days turn into nights about three o’clock in the fucking afternoon. So too does Masterchef the Professionals appear upon the screen like the seasonal spectre of Can’t-be-Arsed-Pour-Me-a-Drink TV.
You don’t intend to watch Masterchef, you end up marooned on it. Sure you can flick about on Netflix, or up and down the listings searching for something to watch while your horsemeat lasagna congeals on it’s little plastic tray. But you know you’ll settle for Masterchef just because it’s so easy! Perfect F.A.P fodder – Formulaic And Predictable. A televisual big old bowl o’ brown that slides down nice n’ easy.
For the minority of you who aren’t familiar with the format, it is basically of one of those food porn Marks & Spencers Xmas adverts masquerading as a competition. Whilst being as intellectually stimulating as a nuke-able Rustlers Cheeseburger bought from the reduced item shelf in the local Co-op.
It’s precisely this digestibility that makes it sort of semi-socially required viewing. The sort of show you can have a conversion with your Daily Mail reading Auntie about, before she goes off on a rant about the ‘greens and migrants’ again. There are three allegedly distinguishable variants of the show;
- Regular, for the ‘foody’ amateurs who always take themselves waay too seriously.
- Celebrity, which is comprised of AS SEEN ON TV clients of publicists, who once interned under Elizabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert and tyrant of Star TV which produces the show.
- And finally there is Professional. Which is made up of purportedly professional chefs.
Anyways, this year we have same old buttery biscuit bollock brained Gregg Wallace. Michelin starred Marcus Wareing now looks like a knock off mascot lion from a sports tournament. As for Monica Galetti (rhymes with Alphabetti Spaghetti) she has bleached her hair yet again and could probably be either the baddie or the love interest opposite Christopher Lambert in a straight to DVD film.
Obviously serious Masterchef watchers like yourstruly don’t give a fuck about the finals or semi-finals. Nope. The early stages are where the good stuff is at, because that’s where you get the fuck ups getting chucked out early on a bed of their own toasted hubris! Pop-Up pricks who chuck shit at a wall before picking out the corn and serving it to you on mint smeared grease paper at £10 a pop. The delusional cafe/bistro hacks who slap dark chocolate in everything from duck to lamb to porpoise. And the ladder climbing ‘Executive Chefs’ who haven’t confit’d a spud since John Major was in power but they’re on the show “with something to prove!”
This season’s first episode has one in the latter category. The unfortunate Kuljit who not only buggered up the always tricky skills test with his deconstructed devilled mackerel. But also shit the bed big style in the ‘Cook Us Your Best Meal’ challenge by serving up fish and potato flavoured variations of the colour puce on a platter of despair.
Anyway, every show is basically the same flavour. It gets kind of ridiculous week after week after week. But hey, if your life is going to shit it can be a welcome distraction and at the moment, who isn’t feeling the cutting edge of precipitous future? What I’m trying to say is I don’t begrudge people for watching and enjoying it.
What I do like to rip on are those deluded tuckfards that appreciate Masterchef. And like the show they fall into three distinct categories:
Dinner Party Despots. Love Islanders and Kitchen Confidential Coke Fiends. The second one proliferates all over the media landscape like Warhammer 40k orcs with tans and teeth whitening. They don’t require much explanation being your standard substandard schlebrity.
The Kitchen Confidential Coke Fiends I have first hand experience of. It happens like this: They take over a neat little neighbourhood cafe and turn it into a Fayne Dayning establishment with their mysterious financiers. Maybe they come to you for a bit of planning advice or a neighbourly chat about taking in their deliveries while they sleep off their hangover.
Almost like your new bestie in fact! So long as you are willing to front them two hundred quid for half a grilled lobster and chips. Failing that crucial first friendship test however now means they’ll probably dump goose grease down your drain and set fire to it.
If you really want to get under their skin mix up ‘celebrity chef’ over ‘professional’ and watch their eye twitch. Don’t worry though! Within six months they’re have legged it overnight leaving hundreds of thousands in debt and a wicked rodent infestation with a serious drug problem. Less Rasta mouse more meth mouse if you catch my drift.
Everyone knows a dinner party despot though! They stand over you in your own kitchen like some kind of poundland Gordon Ramsey and tell you how inferior your buttered toast is compared to theirs:
“Oooh don’t you want to warm the butter in a pan with a bit of harissa and muscovego? It’s so much more satisfying to spread that way. Mighty White? Oh please no! I only do sourdoughs with the yeast collected from a Cistercian nunnery where they have a 200 year old strain of candida running rampant..”
They are the same brand of petty snobs who try far too hard to ‘win’ on ‘Come Dine With Me’. I don’t mean the ones who are in it for a laugh and share the prize money. No I’m talking about those fusspots who insist they have food allergies to rare steak and make ice cream out of imaginary herbs their local ‘natural’ food shop grinds between selling packets of SPICE or K2. The majority of whom are narcissistic negging attention seeking wankers.
Not me though. Perish the thought.
Are you sure that oil is hot enough yet?
Categories
Possessor
This is IT folks, the real deal. A great concept beautifully realised. A perfect slice of speculative techno horror and a fantastic feature length debut from Brandon Cronenberg.
First lets give the elephant in the room a fat sack of peanuts: Brandon Cronenberg is, yes, the son of that David Cronenberg and, yes, he has certainly picked up a few things from dear papa:
Grisly subject matter: Check. Grim technology used for nefarious ends: Check. Icy performances from emotionally damaged characters: Check. Lashings of gore and blood pumping in spurts from open wounds? Check.
In this regard Brandon is certainly carrying on the family tradition regarding the Cronenbergian approach to surreal and grotesque (and in so doing transcending the usual genre niches). But he also puts his own stylistic flourishes into the film that fortifies Possessor into a prescient and substantial work that can stand quite comfortably on it’s own merits and be a part of the Cronenberg f̶r̶a̶n̶c̶h̶i̶s̶e̶ dynasty. It’s not flawless! Hell what film is. But it is pretty gosh darn good. And it is very pretty to look at too! More so than the muddy ’70’s turd browns of Cronenburg senior’s palette choice anyway.
The story in ‘Possessor’ is thus: Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos, an agent who works for a Black Ops organisation who implant targets with a mind controlling device operated remotely by their agents in order to perform high level assassinations. The film opens with Tasya in the body of a professional hostess. Crying her eyes out as he emotionally calibrates with the body of her host, right before she enters a bar and savagely carves up a wealthy looking gentleman with a dinner knife. After that she slices open her host’s throat and wakes up in her own body.
Of course Tasya loves her work! So much so that she simply can’t wait to leave her perfect family behind to get back to it! Her boss, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh (channeling a certain meaty surgically enhanced facial aesthetic perfected by Mickey Rourke) can’t help but sympathise. And offers her a hit in which she must inhabit the body of Colin Tate, played aptly by Christopher Abbott. A small time coke dealer who happens to be the boyfriend of a billionaire’s daughter.
Tasya follows Colin, getting his diction and mannerisms right, so that when she inhabits him she can more easily ‘pass’ as him in front of his nearest and dearest. Kind of like Konstantin Stanislavski combined with Richard Kuklinski. Anyway, Colin has an interesting day job courtesy of his girlfriend’s father and intended target John Parse, played by Sean Bean. Colin, via virtual reality goggles must quickly catalog the interior furniture of video streamers. Cue a quite a graphic sex scene in the uncut version where Tasya as Colin fails to concentrate on describing the curtains in the bedroom of a couple of active amateur webcam pornographers. Of course, with Tasya masquerading as Colin, within Colin, things don’t go according to plan…
So far so Cronenburgian. But Brandon is doing things a little differently. The first stamp of his own auteurship (yes I know it sounds wanky but fuck it) is his eye for detail. Nothing is placed in front of the camera lens without an intense degree of thought and consideration. The sets are both sumptuous, chilling and very unsettling. From the very beginning in the opening scenes where the first ‘possessee’ walks up a flight of stairs into some vaulted cellar ceilinged bar located in a sky scraper, you get a strong sense of matter out of place. Of one thing masquerading as another. Indeed in that initial opening the camera follows a spine like sculpture along the ceiling of the bar which made me wonder if that sculpture was made for the film or something Brandon had seen and marked.
From then on, every location seems to have a particular purpose and significance, imbuing the film with a distinct feeling of geodemographic horror. From Tasya Vos’s grotesque modern McMansion that she lives in with her unsuspecting husband and daughter. Which overlooks an interminable row of garages, with apartments attached as afterthought. All with exposed electricity meters. To the stunningly disorientating skyline of Toronto; presented as a cornucopia of glass office-scape apartments reflecting garishly back at each other. As though the whole city were some true to life urban panopticon of blank indifference. Even Tom Parse, the targeted billionaire entrepreneur has his own terrible ostentatious interior on display, over-frescoed, golden gilt and marble edifice just a step away from McMansion Hell.
Honestly I’ve not seen anything this good regarding the dystopian horror of architecture since Gattaca [1997] and High Rise [2015]. The latter of which is surely no coincidence, considering Cronenberg senior made a pretty decent stab of filming JG Ballard with Crash in 1996.
As for the rest of the story. Well I don’t want to give away too much. There are stories with twists and there are stories with turns. Compared to those Possessor is a helter-skelter standing tall above the rest of the fair. Let’s just say that Andrea Risborough imbues Tasya Vos with not only a chilling enjoyment of her work but also a certain amount of sleight of hand. Certainly it is grim grim grim, but beautifully so. Go and watch it dammit and get an uncut copy if possible.
