Category: reviews

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25 books reading reviews

25 Books, book 2: I am Legend

I had a dilemma as whether to include this book or not in my 25 Books list. You see I didn’t actually read this, I listened to an audio book version of it. An abridged version as broadcast on Radio 7. However since I’m lagging seriously on my books (I should be onto book 5 or 6 by now) I’m allowing it. After all it is a book and I spent the time to “read” (i.e. listen to it). But I’m adding a rule that I can have a couple of audio books.

By the way on that whole “I’m way behind” thing look for an upcoming blog post, hopefully later today.

Anyway to this book.

I first became aware of “I am Legend” in the credits to the 1971 movie “The Omega Man”. The movie, based fairly loosely on the book, is about a man living alone in a world devastated by a world-wide plague that killed 95% of the population and left the remaining few as pale-skinned… well what they are is an interesting point but let’s just say they can only come out at night and they’re no longer quite human, and definitely not friendly.

Anyhow I enjoyed the film – though it was a bit dated – and always intended one day to go back to the book. I intended this even more after the recent Will Smith remake of the film – which I’ve not yet seen. And now I finally have read/listened to the book.

I enjoyed it but it wasn’t the big step up from the movie that I thought it might be. It was better in some ways but less satisfying in others.

This kind of story – last man left alive – has always appealed to me, both as a reader and a writer. In fact I did, during Eurofiction, write a story that was compared by the judges to I am Legend. It was one of my two highest scoring stories but not one I was particularly proud of. I think the appeal – which is obviously not unique to me – is that one can easily imagine oneself as alone in the world. Being alone aside from hostile not-quite-human creatures can easily become a metaphor for “No-one really gets me, I feel as if I’m all alone”.

The book was written in 1954 and it betrays its era in a couple of ways, notably its handling of sex. It’s actually quite coy on details to a modern eye/ear whilst maintaining a tone that suggests it knows it’s being shocking – which I guess it would have been. At times it felt like what I imagine an old-fashioned bodice-ripper would be like – lots of “heat rising in his loins” and so on. There’s a discussion of Neville’s frustrated desires, but absolutely no mention, nor even implication, of masturbation as a release.

One thing it does, which I imagine was fairly new in 1954 but has become almost a cliche since, is to give us a “scientific” explanation of a classic mythical monster. And this is where it diverges from the movie (ok, more properly the movie diverges from the book) because it explicitly calls the plague victims “vampires” whereas in the movie they’re not – at least I don’t recall any fangs or bloodsucking. I actually quite enjoy this trope and Matheson does it well, though it has been done better since.

The story is fairly slow-moving. There are some fast paced moments of fleeing from or fighting his vampire foes, but there are also long passages, discussions of how he survives, of his scientific theorising, in which not a lot happens. I actually didn’t mind but I can imagine some readers being impatient.

The ending is another area where the book differs from the 1971 movie (and the 2007 one is different again I believe). I actually think the movie ending is the better one – but I won’t spoil either.

6/10 – enjoyable but a bit dated and not quite a classic.

Categories
reviews TV

Dollhouse 1.01 – ‘Ghost’

Dollhouse Dollhouse is the new TV show from Joss Whedon, starring Eliza Dushku. You may not have heard much about it, you certainly haven’t from this blog because I’ve been keeping a low profile. I’ve been deliberately ignoring hype and information for two reasons:

  1. I think I’ll enjoy it more with less pre-conceptions
  2. I think I’ll be less invested in it if it gets cancelled.

However it’s Joss Whedon and it’s the first new TV from him in a long time, virtually the first new anything. So I’d lying if I said I hadn’t been looking forward to it.

Unfortunately it’s not great. I mean it’s not great, not insanely fun and re-defining what you can do with the genre, it’s merely OK. At least that’s true of episode 1 – Ghost. I hope and pray (almost truthfully) that it will get better. All three of Joss’ previous TV series had merely ok eps, Angel and Buffy at least had some not good at all ones. So I’ve been trying to convince myself that it’s ok, that it can have a mediocre start and get better. I’m having a little trouble though because all his previous shows were better than this from ep 1. Even Firefly‘s “The Train Job” which was a re-tooled, and significantly less-good, pilot from the original two-hour Serenity – even that was better.

By now you’re probably thinking I hated it. I didn’t but let me put it this way. If you’d shown me this and I didn’t know it was from Joss I would never have thought he’d been involved. It had none of his humour or flair for dialogue. It pretty much just played it straight all the way through.

Unlike some other fans/reviewers I don’t see the concept – agents or ‘actives’ are programmed with personalities/skills, hired out and then have their minds wiped on return – as inherently a problem. I can see that it could mean there’s no chance for character development, that we’re watching Eliza play a different role each week and so it’s hard to care – but someone as smart as Joss will have thought of that.

I’m more worried that take away the Joss humour and edge and what you’re left with, on the evidence of Ghost, could be a ep of pretty much any lawyer/cop procedural – albeit with a scifi twist.

I’m writing this now, over a week after I watched it because I’m about to watch ep 2, “The Target“. I’ll report back soon as to whether it got any better.

Eliza wakes up

Almost forgot the most important part – 5/10

Categories
25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, Book 1: The Servants by M.M. Smith

The Servants by M.M. Smith
The Servants by M.M. Smith

This is the first of my “25 Books” proper which I started to read on the 7th Jan 2009. I finished it on the 10th which was actually quite a long time since it’s fairly short. But that shouldn’t mislead you, I enjoyed it a lot, it’s just I was away that weekend.

Firstly I should say that “M.M. Smith” is yet another pseudonym for Michael Marshall Smith who writes fantasy/sci-fi under that name and crime fiction as Michael Marshall. I haven’t read any of the later because it’s pretty violent and I’m a little squeamish, but M. tells me it’s very good. I did enjoy his first book Only Forward which has a very particular (and funny) voice and is very inventive.

It was interesting to read this immediately after Slam because it’s also a book in which the main character is a boy, in this case he’s 11. Again it raises the question of whether it’s aimed at readers of that age. Again I think it’s written in a way they could follow but it’s also perfectly accessible to older readers too.

The Servants follows the story of Mark, his mum and stepdad, David. They’ve moved from London to Brighton. They’re living in a big house owned by David. In the basement there’s a tiny flat in which an old lady lives. Mark befriends her and she shows him something very interesting and special.

I really liked this book. I liked it because the writing, the setting and the story are very simple. I tend to like things that are simple, classic and unfussy and this has that feel. There are really only 4 characters, most of the action takes place inside the house and it’s all very simply written.

I also liked it because it does something that I admire. It lets us see through the eyes of a character things that that character himself does not see. To me that’s clever writing. It means that we see David as a bit more sympathetic than Mark does, which makes Mark in danger of seeming a little brattish. However he mellows and without giving anything away, he eventually sees it too.

I read something somewhere about it being a kind of ghost story but I don’t think it’s quite that. However it does have the atmosphere of a ghost story and there is a fantastical element to it.

The key to living anywhere is to know how to live there – just ask any snail.

9/10 – simply written but moving story.

Categories
book reviews

Slam – Nick Hornby

So, I bet you’re thinking this is the first of my “25 Books” right? Well you’d be wrong. I read this over the Christmas period whilst at my parents. I have since finished my first 25-er (that’s sounds naff but I need some sort of shorthand) but I felt like I owe this one a review first.

Slam is about a 16-year-old skater (skate-boarder) called Sam. Sam loves skating and has read the autobiography of his hero Tony Hawk hundreds of times. So much so that when he needs to confide in someone or ask for advice he talks to a poster of Tony who “talks” back in quotations from the book. Sam’s life is turned upside down when he meets Alicia, a short-lived girlfriend who becomes the subject of a (hopefully) lifelong relationship. She becomes the mother of his child.

I liked this book. Mostly. For a start it was very readable. I find Hornby so anyway but here, where he’s trying to emulate the voice of a 16-year-old, it was even more so. No surprise then that I finished it in only a few hours over a couple of days. Although that may have had something to do with trying to escape watching soaps and gameshows with my parents.

If there was anything I didn’t like about the book it wasn’t the fault of the writing per se, it was the subject matter. As a mumble-something-year-old man who’s still single, probably would like not to be but who’s always ben iffy about having kids, it pushes lots of buttons for me. It caught me off guard as the back cover doesn’t mention pregnancy and I hadn’t read any reviews – I bought it because it was the latest Hornby. Anyway this is a book review not a discussion of my issues.

Had I read any reviews (which I did immediately after) I’d have seen that it’s viewed as a book for “young adults” simply because the main character is that age and it’s told from his pov. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Isn’t the point of reading (and perhaps writing) to see the world through another pair of eyes? In any case I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Hornby’s brand of gentle observational comedy. I say gentle because it’s nowhere near as sharp as “High Fidelity” was, but then that’s my favourite of his and I don’t think anything since has been as good.

What lets the book down slightly for me is that it tries to sort of have its cake and eat. It wants to have something approaching gritty realism but it wants to wrap it in a softer, gentler and above all optimistic view of human nature. So it shows us that teenage pregnancy is a life-altering, if not life-wrecking event (a “slam” in skating is when you fall and hit the ground hard) and that it makes things tough at an age when you’re not necessarily equipped to deal. However it pulls out an ending, which while it doesn’t negate any of that, allows the reader some relief from thinking, “this is just going to be hard grind of juggling school, work and baby-care”. To do this Hornby uses a device on top of the Tony Hawks device, something which up until that point I could have happily lost. When the ending occurred I could suddenly see why he’d done it. It felt a little like a cheat, slightly unearned. However it was a genuine relief to have some sense of ongoing happiness for these characters.

Apologies for being a little vague. For once I don’t want to give away the ending.

7/10 – for the humour, the readability and the main character.

Categories
book reviews

Chesil Beach (far away in time)

On Chesil Beach is the latest book by Ian McEwan and I read it recently. Now I know what you’re thinking, why on earth do you trust him after Atonement? Why spend your hardly-earned cash on one of his books. Well in my defence it was a 3-for-2 deal, plus I had heard good things about it. Anyway bought it I did and read it too. And you know what? it’s good.

But it’s not completely – how shall we say? – unproblematic. It has at its centre an idea, a pivot to the story, not quite a plot twist but certainly a, erm, plot kink, that is inherently frustrating. I don’t want to give too much away but it has a somewhat downbeat ending. The structure of the book also lends itself to a certain disappointing dilemma. The heart of the book is about sex. The central event in the book is the wedding night of a couple in the 1960s. We meet them first on this night as they enjoy their dinner together and look forward (or not – he’s eager, she’s fearful) to the consummation of their relationship. Then, in various flashbacks we get the story of their lives and their meeting, everything leading up to this point in fact.

Now as I said about Atonement McEwan writes about sex well. It feels real and therefore carries a certain erotic charge. Plus the building anticipation of how that key moment will play out creates a drive to know what will happen. So unfortunately, the rather well written passages about their earlier lives, which are actually most of the book, feel at times like a distraction from what I really want to know.

Maybe I’m just shallow.

Still, even with this and the not-so-happy ending, I still prefer On Chesil Beach to Atonement. It’s well written and evocative. I think it should be required reading for anyone who thinks sex education is a bad idea.

8/10

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reviews

The Mentalist

Imagine Derrin Brown as a detective.

If, like me, you’re enough of a pedant to sigh whenever someone uses “beg the question” when they really mean “prompt the question”, then you may get a slight measure of satisfaction when a word is used properly. So the first thing I noticed about The Mentalist that it’s not about someone with a learning disability. OK, of course if that were really the subject of this show they’d never call it that, but they could have called it “Cop-Psychic”[1] or simply “Jane”, so  I take it as a small indication of the producers sensibility that they got this part right.

The Mentalist is about a John Edward style TV psychic who after a personal tragedy gives it up to become a police officer. As a medium he was a fake, using cold reading techniques to gather enough information to give a convincing performance. He now uses the same techniques to solve crimes. A simple and yet interesting concept.

Being the Smartest Guy in the House

The show reminded me a lot of House, and let’s face it medical shows are just cop shows where the criminal is a disease, the cop is the doctor and the symptoms are the evidence. (In fact I’m pretty sure House used that metaphor explicitly in dialogue early on.) They both feature arrogant central figures who are impossibly brilliant at what they do and know it. At one point Patrick Jane, our psychic-turned-cop, says that he doesn’t like seeing doctors because “they always want to feel like they’re the smartest guy in the room, when obviously that’s me.” They even both share a disdain for belief. When one of his colleagues states she has a cousin who is a real psychic, Jane says “he’s either deluded or dishonest or both.”

I think that where they differ is that Gregory House is a startlingly misanthropic figure where Patrick Jane is merely annoying. Also, it’s really unfair on the evidence of one show but I think Hugh Laurie beats Simon Baker in both acting ability and screen presence generally.

Suspect Device

Anyway, what separates this show from a thousand other cop/medic/lawyer shows is its gimmick, its device, so how well does it use it? Quite well I think. One potential problem is that whilst it’s enough for a TV psychic to get a few details in the right ballpark to let the person feel like they’re having a real contact with the “other side”, the police ultimately have to prove what they think they know. However they tackle this head-on and within the first five minutes one character has shot another on the basis of Jane’s, let’s face it, educated guesses. Later in the episode he uses his techniques to get the murderer to incriminate himself, a pattern I suspect we’ll see again.

It’s also interesting that after the initial scene where we’re shown what little pieces of information he uses to construct his guesses, that after that we only hear his (always correct) insights. And of course they use his talents for comic relief, allowing him to embarrass his colleagues.

I do foresee a trap here, that the writers might just get lazy and have him know things he couldn’t possibly know, simply by establishing a pattern of credibility with the audience. However I hope they don’t do that, or not straight away. The fresh thing this show has to offer is its device and so they should keep it to the fore. Like Derrin Brown, show us the trick and then, at least some of the time, show us how it’s done. The formula works because it includes us the audience in on the “clever” side of the transaction, and so we’re flattered and will love you for it.

A good example is near the end when the criminal says,

“I knew it might be a trick but I had to be sure.”

“Yes. That’s how the trick works.”

And The Trick Worked

I definitely enjoyed The Mentalist and if you enjoy police procedurals then this looks like it will be a good one. I haven’t spoken much about the fact that this is a pilot and therefore needs to set up the concept, establish the characters and introduce an on-going story element. I haven’t done that because it does all that well enough for it not to be distracting.

I have too much TV where I need to keep up week to week so that I’m not sure if I’ll become a regular Mentalist viewer, but it’s enough of a new twist on the genre, with enough intelligence in the writing to be highly enjoyable when I do catch the odd episode.  8/10

[1]Yeah ok, that’s a terrible title but you get my point.

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reviews

Merlin (or “Camelot the Early Years”)

Ok so that’s not original but clearly, the BBC’s new flashy drama Merlin is a Smallville for medieval times. You’ve got the younger versions of the main characters, not necessarily settled in their hero/villain roles (Arthur’s a jerk, Morgana seems ok), nor in their eventual romantic configurations yet (Arthur fancies Morgana, as does our young wizard, though there’s some Guenivere-Merlin banter that must be going somewhere). The formula works (for Smallville, time will tell for Merlin) because you get to play with people’s expectations whilst having a sense of familiarity. Plus you can do all those oh-so-funny wink at the audience jokes such as Guenivere’s “Who on earth would want to marry a king?” line.

I enjoyed it but it felt padded. They really overdid the setting up the fact that a) Merlin and Arthur not getting along and b) Merlin can move things with his mind. Maybe the budget was overstretched by the CGI dragon (not that great to be honest) but some of the later seemed rather minor and once the point had been made (e.g. by saving the falling Gauis) I’d’ve cut the others.

I also can’t quite understand why you’d cast Richard Wilson as the mentor when you’ve got frikkin’ Giles on the payroll! Failing that (and allowing for the fact that possibly Tony Head wanted to do something different) you’ve got John Hurt, although he may have just signed up for the voice work knowing that it would be a lesser commitment.

Having said that I did enjoy enough of it to watch again. Eve Myles did a great job in making the witch creepy and threatening – enough for a saturday teatime audience anyhow – and I enjoyed the ‘spell-singing’ at the end.

Overall – a bit of nonsense with enough about it to keep me watching, for now – 6/10

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reviews

Fringe

I watched the two hour pilot to the new JJ Abrams produced show, Fringe, the other day so here’s a quick review.

I told M that this was coming up and asked her if she was interested (she’s a huge Lost fan). In trying to describe the show based on the brief bit of blurb I’d read, I think I made it sound like a version of Heroes. When I tried to correct that impression after reading more, I told her it sounded a bit like X-Files (I knew she’d liked X-Files when it was on). She still wasn’t feeling any excitement about it. In the end she explained:

“Looking back I think a lot of the appeal of X-Files was David Duchovny.”

which is fair enough. But now having watched the first installment of Fringe,

  • I can see that Fringe is not just “a bit like” X-Files, it really really wants to be X-Files. Fringe wants to marry X-Files and have its cute little alien babies. More importantly,
  • How many people out there are going to watch for the pleasant day-dream inspiring delights of Pacey from Dawson’s Creek? Ok, ok – unfair I know. I’m sure Joshua Jackson has his fans but, and I could be way off but it never struck me that they were the kind to get drawn in to a pseudo-science pseudo-scifi thrillery thing with a, no doubt, soon to be very convoluted back story.

Now all this sounds very negative which is a shame because I don’t think it’s a bad show, I just can’t quite see it finding a huge audience, but what do I know? Anyway I’ve not really started reviewing yet, so let’s do that.

Fringe is about a CIA-FBI liason officer who gets involved in the case of a flight full of people whose flesh literally melted off their bodies. In the course of investigating this her partner (and lover) gets blasted with a dose of the chemical agents responsible, thus setting up a “solve it in 24hours before he dies” scenario. In order to reverse the effects she needs the assistance of a crazy chemist locked away in a mental institution. To get to him she needs his estranged genius drifter of a son i.e. the aforementioned Pacey/Jackson.

Thus the roles are all neatly defined. She needs to solve the crime to find the plane-poisoner and extract vital information for the cure. Mad old Dad assists with forensics and the final cure. Pacey can speak crazy/science to M.o.D and therefore acts as both handler to him and sidekick to her. In fact his role is a little thinly defined right now. There wasn’t much he did – chasing someone down an alley, a bit of particularly harsh interrogation – that someone else couldn’t have down. In a way he played the traditional female sidekick role, seemingly involved but with little to actually do. However since I don’t believe a golden dawn of radical feminism has yet arisen on Hollywood I suspect he’ll have more of a job to do in upcoming episodes.

But back to the neatness. This was a perfectly serviceable piece of television but I think the thing that stopped it being more than that was that I was too aware of the pieces of series setup slotting neatly and smoothly into place. The core team and relationships. The mysterious billionaire who seems destined to be the ongoing bad guy and his apparently benevolent organisation. The hints at what kinds of things we’ll be exploring in future. Mention of shadowy agency-within-an-agency machinations and some vague idea of a connecting threat called “The Pattern” (which I fear will end up as a holdall container for whatever mystery-of-the-week they want to write[1]) It was all efficiently and relatively unobtrusively done. But I was still aware of it. Maybe that’s just a problem with pilots, or a problem with viewers like me who’ve seen too many pilots.

Overall, ok but nothing here to tempt me into regular viewership – 6/10.

[1]As a Buffy fan I can hardly complain. What else is the Hellmouth but a built-in excuse for so many monster stories in one place?

Categories
Buffy Rewatch reviews Season 1

Buffy re-watch: 1.08-1.11 Robots, Puppets and Other (Invisible) Nightmares

So this is my first multi-ep re-watch review, and as you can see my titles aren’t getting any snappier. I’ll try to work on that. I deliberately left myself the final episode as a ‘oner’ because it’s my favourite season 1 ep and because it deserves a longer review than the few lines these four will get.

1.08 I Robot, You Jane – IRYJ or “Robot” is definitely a guilty pleasure. It shouldn’t work because it’s so cheesey and silly. Even for 1997 the computer stuff in this episode is just so off-beam. But you forgive it all that because it’s fun. And it’s fun because you’ve got all this lovely relationship stuff – Giles and Ms Calendar, Willow and Malcolm/Moloch with Xander getting jealous. And of course the last line and reaction which is pretty much the mission statement as far as BtVS romances go

Buffy: Let’s face it: none of us are ever gonna have a happy, normal
relationship.

Xander: We’re doomed!

Willow: Yeah!

So even with the element of cheese it deserves a good healthy 8/10

1.09 The Puppet Show – this is another episode that shouldn’t work as well as it does. There’s a long and glorious history of “devil doll” horror movies, and none of them quite get over the inherent silliness of a toy attacking a human. The fact that The Puppet Show almost does is testament to how good it is. I think that’s partly the way it’s shot, partly the voice acting for Sid the dummy and partly the plot. This ep introduces Snyder and he’s one of about 4 characters who you could genuinely believe is the killer. So it keeps you guessing. And laughing. This is a very funny episode, especially with Giles’ reaction to having to produce the talent show.

When I was deciding what to score this ep I dithered between a 7 and 8. I’ve decided there’s no point having a 10-point scale if you award say 7.5 but whilst The Puppet Show is definitely better than Never Kill A Boy… is it really on the same level as The Pack (my favourite so far)? Then I remembered the credit sequence. After that, no problem. 8/10

1.10 Nightmares – The best moments in this episode are just that – moments. But not in the way that I described for The Pack, these are moments that stand alone, they’re simple jokes really, based on what we think individual characters might find scary. I guess I find the ending a little too simplistically moral. But we have some fun along the way. 7/10

1.11 Out of Sight, Out of Mind – this is the Buffy take on the Invisible Man story. Here though the invisibility comes from being ignored and once again, making an everyday issue into a mystical reality works really well. This is one of the few Buffy episodes that genuinely creepy or even scary. I think slashing Cordy’s cheek with a scalpel whilst she’s tied to the chair has impact because it has resonances of serial killer movies and so on. It’s good that we get to see a little more complexity to Cordy in this ep. I love that she can make us sympathise with her, because she’s lonely in the centre of attention, and still be the queen bitch. 8/10

So a good strong run up to the end of the season.

Categories
book movie reviews

Atoning for the Lack of a Proper Ending

Stupid title, oh well.

I recently read Ian McEwan’s Atonement for the Ship of Fools Book Club, and then, since it was availble in Tescos for a fiver, I got the DVD and watched that too. So here’s your all-in-one multi-purpose Atonement review.

The Book

I really enjoyed the book, well most of the book. It’s in four parts and the first four tell the story of Robbie and Cecilia a couple whose fledgling love affair is almost prevented by class, family, war and false accusation of a crime. The final part reveals the fact that the previous three parts were a novel written by Briony, who made the accusation, regretted it and is atoning by writing the story. Only she reveals that she may or may not be telling the truth, part of her atonement may be to tell a better version of the story, one which gives Robbie and Cecilia the happy ending that real life denied them.

Except of course it’s all fiction any way so there is no “real life”, so it doesn’t matter right? As McEwan, speaking through Briony says,

I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened?

Well yes, and sorry Mr McEwan but I am that kind of reader. But I’ll come back to that. Anyway if you want to hear my musings on the ending read my comments on the Ship thread.

As for the parts I enjoyed, the other 90% of the book, let me say a few words about that. The first section was slow to start but very atmospheric, something quite deliberate as we’re later told this is one of the flaws in Briony’s writing style. It’s very clever in the way it switches perspective and moves around in time, without ever being confusing. As someone who’d like to be a better writer I envied McEwan’s talent and will go back and look at those parts to learn I suspect.

The second section of the book is Robbie’s journey to Dunkirk through a war-torn France. I haven’t read a lot of wartime fiction (though I’m aware there is a lot) so perhaps it was that that made me so engrossed in this section. I learnt a lot and like the first thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan it put me there in that situation and gave you that feeling of how utterly brutal and yet random the sufferings of war can be.

The third section is the story of Briony training to be a nurse and treating some of the victims of that suffering. Again it was the things I learnt, the empathy evoked for the suffering and the sense of Briony’s growing up. There’s also a very real sense of wanting to know what will happen, how it will play out when, if, Robbie and Cecilia are re-united. This leads up to a riveting scene where Briony meets with them to tell them she’s recanting and to make her atonement.

Of course it’s this very sense of wanting to know what happened that is frustrated in the final section. Although at the very end there’s a cosy call-back to Briony’s childhood which if not making up for her ripping the narrative rug from under us, at least leaves a better taste in the mouth.

But the unsatisfying ending is all the harder to take because the rest of the book is so good.

8/10

The Movie

In terms of structure the movie is very faithful to the book. It’s beautifully shot, especially the first section, but then almost all period dramas are. I guess once you’ve got gorgeous locations and wonderfully made period costumes that it seems a shame not to make the most of them, and so the cinematographer is given his head.

My problems start with the middle section, the France section, which in the book was my favourite and in the movie is truncated. That’s ok, adaptations have to cut stuff out, but what they removed was most of the tougher stuff, so that sense that the journey was perilous and at any moment you might be killed, or saved, by pure dumb luck wasn’t really in the movie. The scene at the beach at Dunkirk, a masterfully shot 4-minute one shot, gave the impression that it was merely that things were a bit disorganised.

I also had a problem with the casting. Keira Knightley does ok, she’s as good here as anywhere, and James McAvoy is slightly better but in key moments they fall short of the source material. That killer scene I mentioned earlier, the confrontation with Briony, contains a moment where Robbie becomes enraged and may even harm Briony, and Cecilia brings him back from the edge by force of will, her love and holding him with her eyes. The scene is in the movie but it has none of the sense of physical menace nor the restraining power of Cecilia’s love communicated in a look. I watched it and thought, they just didn’t nail it.

Perhaps where the movie is most different is the ending. They replace the putting on of Briony’s play with a TV interview about the publishing of her book. In doing so Briony tells us exactly what happened. That Robbie and Cecilia both died, unre-united in separate senseless losses of the war. That her atonement was to write them a happier ending and that that’s precisely what she did.

Watching this made me realise that whilst I didn’t like the ending of the book, I preferred some remaining ambiguity to the certainty of the movie. The movie ending did have at least one thing going for it though, and that was showing Robbie and Cecilia enjoying their happy ending, playing in the surf near their seaside cottage. And leaving them on a happy moment, even a false one, is nice that it otherwise would have been.

6/10

The Buffy Episode

No really.

The discussion around the ending and the nature of storytelling has reminded me of the Buffy episode Normal Again. Naturally I’ll be getting to this in the Buffy Re-watch project but since it’s season 6 and therefore it’ll probably be 2019 before I get to it I’ll mention a few thoughts here.

Normal Again is superficially just BtVS’s version of a staple plot in genre TV – the alternate reality story where two interpretations of events unfold and the hero is not sure until the end which is real. In this case Buffy is attacked by a demon which infects her with some kind of drug that causes her to hallucinate that she’s really in a mental hospital. Her dead mother is alive and visiting with her abandoning father. It’s explained that Sunnydale, the monsters, her powers and all her experiences are an imaginary world she’s created as a kind of comfort.

It’s cleverly done but so far so Star-Trek-did-it-first. What sets apart Normal Again is that it ends the wrong way. There are certain conventions about this kind of episode. One is that you tell it from the hero’s point of view until you’re ready to reveal which reality is the true one, but Normal Again pretty much sticks with thirdy party pov all the way through. The plot is set up so that Buffy has to choose which reality she wants to live in – if she kills her friends it will “kill” the hallucinatory Sunnydale world and be cured, able to return to her mom and dad. What she actually does is kills the demon and the hospital world disappears.

But the kicker is that it ends, not in Sunnydale, but with Buffy catatonic in her hospital room, the camera pulling back slowly. In TV language that’s saying this is the true reality and it (it being the whole series so far) was all a sick girl’s imagination.

This made a lot of people angry, as Atonement apparently did also. However I think that given that we know from the consistent point of view and the fact that the show carries on and is in fact about Buffy fighting monsters in Sunnydale, that that final shot is about something else. It’s about saying that like Buffy we get to choose which reality we want to live in. We can choose to suspend disbelief and we get the fantasy world of Buffy with all her exciting adventures.

This episode came at a time when there was lots of discontent amongst the fans, a lot of which was around how unrealistic, how untrue to the characters, the show had become. There was also a lot of nitpicking over plot holes and inconsistencies. I always thought of Normal Again as a sly dig at those fans, as an appeal to suspend disbelief again and thereby enjoy the fantasy.

I guess the difference is that BtVS managed to do it in a way that didn’t make me angry.

In case you’re wondering, I’ll rate Normal Again when I do a proper review.