Sunday 29 April 2018

Ranking the Alfred Hitchcock films


I've always felt directors get too much credit in the film business. Not to the overblown extent of actors, obviously, but it's your screenwriters – writing their own stories rather than adapting tried-and-tested best-sellers they've bought the rights to – and your sleep-deprived, script-editing showrunners I've got the greatest respect for.

So I never gave much of a toss about Alfred Hitchcock. He just seemed to be a fat, limey knock-off of Rod Serling, who didn't even write the stories he was presenting. But when I watched a couple of films, liked them a lot, then watched a couple more, I started to get it. So then I did my customary thing and scoffed the lot over a couple of months, including all the deservedly overlooked ones no one ever talks about because they're not really worth mentioning. Still, maybe I can pluck out a couple of obscure gems for you.

Here are a non-filmmaker's philistine first-timer reactions (I'd only seen Rear Window previously) to The Top 52 Hitchcock Films. Shorts, collaborations, foreign language remakes, TV things and ones I couldn't find not included.

Saturday 14 April 2018

Alrightreads: Dead Stuff

Dead good?


John Metcalfe, The Feasting Dead

1954 / Ebook / 123 pages / USA

***

Exhumed from the Arkham House archive, this vampiric ghost story is billed as a criminally overlooked horror classic. That's going a bit far.

If it was bundled with other novellas and short stories in an anthology of obscurities, there's a good chance it'd be one of the stand-outs. If it had been adapted for a murky seventies TV anthology, it'd be fondly remembered. But as a stand-alone volume, it doesn't do much to justify a place on your classics shelf.


Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead

1969 / Audiobook / 190 pages / USA

***

Zelazny's anachronistic future has some unique touches that make it stand apart from your standard Silver Age sci-fi setting. So it's a shame he cheapens it by making it the story of an unenlightened 20th century businessman who made his way to the future the long way round and ends up doing preposterously well for himself in this brave new world. What's the male equivalent of a Mary Sue?

It might just be that I've watched a lot of Red Dwarf recently, but from prolonged suspended animation to psychic terraforming, I have a feeling this slim volume had a place on Grant Naylor's collective bookshelf.


Iain Banks, Dead Air

2002 / Audiobook / 408 pages / UK

**

Like Complicity, this is the story of an amoral local media figure who serves as a mouthpiece for the way Iain Banks sees things, and who gets caught up in an implausible cinematic thriller to keep things from getting too realistic.

There are some differences though. The author stand-in's monologues are now more tedious (even if he's basically right, I found myself siding with the interfering squares questioning the point of it all), his irresistibility to women comes off like wish fulfillment, the jeopardy's entirely his own fault, so he deserves what's coming to him, and Complicity wasn't turned around with ambitious haste to provocatively position itself as a landmark of Post-9/11 Literature.

It's not my least favourite Banks book, but that's only because he wrote Canal Dreams.


Various, Dead Funny Encore: More Horror Stories by Comedians

2016 / Ebook / 256 pages / UK/Australia

****

This feels like a more consistent collection than the first one, mainly because all the contributors understood what it was this time, and again it's mostly entertaining. The comedians don't all feel pressured to be funny, but it's better when they do.

Faves: Stewart Lee's 'Test Pressing,' Rufus Hound's 'Date Night,' Alan Moore's 'Cold Reading.'

Worsties: Alice Lowe's 'Carnival,' James Acaster's 'To Do,' Natalie Haynes' 'The Basement Conversion.'


Saturday 7 April 2018

The 10,000-word Star Trek dissertation I somehow got away with writing for my 'English Literature' degree


Other people's opinions cobbled together to fit a prescribed word count and passed off as original. Of no intrinsic value, but useful experience for my subsequent career. And I got to watch loads of Star Trek under the guise of research rather than having to read hard books.