Friday Review 1
January 22, 2010 Leave a comment
Last week’s Independent’s Arts & Books supplement featured Matt Thorne saying:
‘if you can cope with yet another novel that seems to be set in a parallel reality, a science-fiction trope so hackneyed that it can even be found in junk TV shows like Fringe and Heroes.’
Well, if you can survive that you might enjoy Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. Where because its literary pop fiction its ok to have a parallel reality. This leaves me two options.
1. Drop the parallel reality from my novel including the Draw of Hastings in ten-sixty-something.
Or.
2. Put in more pop culture references but I’m guessing Firefly, Dollhouse, Buffy, Heroes, Fringe, X-files, Heinlein, King, Orson Scott Card, Bernard Cornwell, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes and Dr. Who don’t count.
As I write Simon Mayo and Mark ‘Big Hands’ Kermode are talking about Precious with director Lee Daniels. Apparently comedians like Mo’Nique are twisted like us Brits… Damn right.
Film of the week is apparently A Prophet, the new Jacques Audiard film. This is The Shawshank Redemption without dollops of Hollywood syrup.
Malik a weedy 19-year old gets sent down for an unknown crime. He promptly wets himself over Corsican mobster, Luciani. It’s a case of kill or be killed.
The film however has pieces of evolutionary throwback in its DNA much like the human tail. The dream sequences come across as a failed attempt to keep the title relevant.
Other films worth looking at are Armoured and Brothers. But, with the latter it is DEFINITELY worth watching the Danish original instead. Brodre is much better.
Terrible review of the day goes to Anthony Quinn for quoting Carl Douglas’ Kung-Fu Fighting to open his review of Ninja Assassin. How hackneyed can you get? It’s a dumb actioner that does its job with dialogue equal to Quinn‘s quote. It’s above the 1 star review though because its pure dumb fun and there is a space for that in our world of dour liberal pleasing plod.
Having read Stieg Larsson, Tove Jansson and Asa Larsson last year it gladdens me to see the Independent trumpeting Henning Mankell, who will be familiar to BBC viewers because of his Wallender series featuring Kenneth Brannagh.
Also worthy of note is Arch Tait’s translation of Nothing But The Truth by murdered Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. This is definitely going on my shopping list.
The book deals mostly with her reporting on Chechnya. The war that got Putin into power. The rest of the books contains her thoughts on Russia. Definitely worth buying regardless of your thoughts on the country.
For the final book of the week lets return to the crime genre. Che Committed Suicide by Petros Markaris continues Inspector Haritos’ sleuthing. To commit suicide signals suicide is a moral crime. Back at University the was a paper on suicide in the Roman world. As suicide was not a crime but could be honourable or philosophical action so commit could not preface it. In the book people linked to anti-junta protests start taking their own lives. Time for Haritos to solve the case.
should have been released last week or a fortnight ago amidst the snow clogging up the nation. Today Britain is just damp. is back. His book on the English language and his touring of Britain kept me going while in Japan. Now he is back as editor of Seeing Further, a thick tome covering the first 350 years of the Royal Society featuring contributions from both scientists and novelists.
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