Its predecessor was hardly a classic piece of cinema, whatever standards you might choose to apply to the judgement, but it’s still staggering that the sequel is such an unmitigated failure on so many levels. Where Ghost Rider was at least semi-coherent Spirit of Vengeance is a mix of stock plot-elements tied together with arbitrary action and characters making stupid decisions which make absolutely no sense except in the service of dragging the story forwards. Stylistically it’s all over the place, with the pair of directors seeming to have picked every element of the film’s aesthetic singularly, with no thought as to the whole, and while the look of the Ghost Rider himself is well handled the idea of moving some of the effects-heavy combat sequences into limbo looks and feels like a cheap compromise.

As a lynchpin on whom to hang your film, Cage is nothing if not unreliable. Excellent turns in Adaptation and Bad Lieutenant are far outnumbered by the likes of The Wickerman, Knowing or Drive Angry and it’s almost unbelievable that no-one took him aside during the filming of Spirit of Vengeance and pointed out just how absurdly over the top and uneven his performance was. Leaden, portentous dialogue is dropped like it’s being delivered by a first year drama student and what ostensibly constitute the script’s ‘jokes’ are wildly mugged, and there doesn’t seem to be any link between the content and tone of what the character is saying. It’s not that the character of Johnny Blaze is unlikeable or even unbelievable, more that he barely exists at all, a paper-thin veneer of a leather costume over an absolute joke of an effort on Cage’s part.

Some of the other acting’s not bad, and Idris Elba’s Moreau seems to have been cast from a different, far superior version of the film, but there’s a wealth of talent squandered given that every half-decent moment emphasises the terrible quality of the lead and the vast majority of the script. Ciarán Hinds in particular has nothing to do as Roarke, the film’s de facto devil, in one of the least sinister or threatening versions of the archetypal character that cinema has ever seen, and it’s a lacking which extends to Spirit of Vengeance’s attempts at intrigue, drama or tension at any point. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Ghost Rider as a character, but even as someone with a passing familiarity to some of the source material this film seemed like the complete waste of a concept which could comfortably fill a trashy popcorn movie.

Hark! A Vagrant is the work of Kate Beaton, a graduate of history & anthropology whose real talent seems to lay in uncovering the stranger elements of history (Jules Verne wrote Poe fan-mail? wtf?) and laying them out in all their comic splendour. The black-and-white art is detailed and communicative without being overly cluttered, with the stylised characters foregrounded to tell their stories and the famous figures instantly recognisable despite being. Still the highlight of the art has to Beaton’s cartooning, which is second-to-none, and even where the book reprints some rougher sketch material or older, slightly less-detailed strips the characters have a nuance of expression which sells every setup and every punchline effortlessly.

The comic balances a love of the literature, pop culture and history it deals with and an anarchically iconoclastic approach to their central figures and conceits and while the references to Canadian history are some distance outside the areas I can claim even a passing familiarity to, the strips are generally accompanied by enough in the way of annotation that they make sense even to the clueless foreigner. The humour is clever and ludicrous by turns, witty and incisive but never cruel, and the sense of the enjoyment that has been taken in the craft is evident on every page. The book, in short, is a joy, and the website contains a wealth of addition material, including more background on a number of the strips, that you should check out. Buy the book, visit the site, and look forward to many more years of Hark! A Vagrant.

Unfortunately not everyone is quite so willing to live and let live, and reading this article, far from the first piece to highlight faith being used as a weapon to promote intolerance, prompted first anger, and then a need to codify my thoughts and feelings towards the problem. I can see the moral quandary which breeds intolerance born out of faith; if you believe in the idea of sinning as an affront to some ultimate authority or as an action or attitude which damns the soul then the idea of proselytising is understandable, potentially even noble. But that self-same impulse which creates the desire to proselytise seems as often to be transformed into revulsion, into a hatred of the perceived sin such that the only recourse is to preach a violent dislike of both sin and sinner and to campaign for policy and legislation that reflects that particular interpretation of a given religion and which restricts the autonomy of others to live outside the tenets of a faith which they do not share.

It’s a crutch often appealed to by the intolerant that an unwillingness to tolerate their point-of-view is itself an act of intolerance and that their naysayers are therefore self-defeating. This is obviously fallacious, but in the interests of completeness, here’s one of the reasons why: In an oversimplified application of Kant’s conception of universalisability (which states that only maxims that can be adopted universally are morally permissible) the right to restrict the freedoms of another which fall within the universalisable is itself not-universalisable, but the right to restrict actions which would restrict universalisable freedoms is universalisable… I acknowledge that that could be clearer. The point being that a tolerant position accepts the right of others to self-determine unless they interfere with the same rights for other, whereas an intolerant position accepts only its own right to self-determine and assumes the right to determine for others.

Beyond the ration position there is also the question of the appeal of such a faith. Frankly, if the religion in question is compatible with a dehumanisation of other people, if it uses the concept of sin to justify homophobia, misogyny, racism or xenophobia, and asserts a God or Gods who support hate then what is the appeal? For those people of my acquaintance who believe in a higher power God is presented as loving, as forgiving, and as understanding, and while I don’t share their beliefs I can see why someone would willingly throw in their lot with such a deity. But I don’t understand someone who would worship a cruel God, a jealous or an angry God and who would take it upon themselves to try and impose the values of such a miserable, emotionally hollow faith on others. If your God is hate, if they are intolerance, persecution or wilful ignorance, then I want nothing to do with them, or you.

***

Chill wind and collar up, cigarette smouldering unsatisfyingly between chapped lips, he squirms in uncomfortable patio furniture, hands clasped around his drink to leach warmth, another moment passes. Another drag of smoke, another flick of ash, another sip of black coffee, another moment passes in torturous crawl. People pass, mainly in ingress, in flight from the bleakness of a sky which blends into brutalist architecture. And another moment passes.

***

I don’t remember what I was dreaming, just that the scream which woke me blew the dream apart. The walls blew out into white and the figures were thrown out after them, vanishing into the light of a violent decompression. I was at the window before I properly woke-up, looking for the source of the noise, but I couldn’t see anything unusual. I thought about calling the police, but didn’t.

***

- You see Professor, that whiskey you’re drinking? I poisoned it!

The Professor sniffed his drink, licked his lips to try the taste again.

- What poison did you use?

- The nectar of the rare spider-orchid, Ophrys Arachnites Sphegodes…

- Ah, that explains the hint of molasses, the Professor finished the whiskey in his glass and smiled. – I think you’ll find that that particular poison denatures in alcohol.

***

The Minister for Apologies took his place on the podium to the mild, slightly-confused applause which tended to greet his every speech and statement. It petered out quickly as the crowd, largely comprised of whoever happened to be passing, waited to see what terrible confession, whose foolish act the Minister was about to offer the government’s sincere contrition for. The autocue flashed a single word, tiny and surrounded by empty space: sorry.

***

- The patient has a unique condition I call idiopathic auto-etiology, the doctor excitedly informed his students, just as sufferers of a fugue state create a situational identity based on their environment so Ms. Smith does likewise. However, where in a typical fugue the created identity persists until such time as the original personality is reasserted, Ms. Smith’s fugue personalities are less stable; with the slightest change in stimulus she changes, she recreates herself from moment to moment.

***

“Hey.”

I was alone in the park, I was sure of it, but I had been spoken to, so I span in place looking for my unseen companion. A stray cat sat shivering at the foot of the tree, eyes fixed balefully on mine.

“What are you looking at the cat for? Cats are fucking idiots mate.”

This time the voice was nearly above me, and I looked up to see a spider hanging down in my path.

“That’s right, a spider that talks, big shock etc. Listen mate, I need a favour…”

***

It’s been kind of a tough year for me, a couple of months ago my ex-girlfriend, of five years actually, she killed herself, and it was kind of sudden. It seemed kind of sudden. But the worst thing was that she sent me her suicide note, she e-mailed it to me. I didn’t hesitate to act, of course, but by the time I’d corrected her spelling and grammar… It was too late.

***

Tyrannosaur starts with an act of brutality and quickly spirals into the pathetic, with every act of aggression and cruelty stemming from a kind of cold panic, a fear that every kindness and every empathy is a weakness, a channel by which the characters are offering themselves up to be hurt. There’s a kind of existential dread, Satre’s Nausea met with the terror of an incomprehension born from an inability to understand or explain the behaviours, beliefs and habits by which they are trapped in untenable lives. Every action in the film is one of extremes which feed into an escalation in reactions so that even the most horrendous acts of violence are as inevitable as they are shocking, despite coming from characters who are initially utterly opposed in their responses to their helplessness. Later they are made alike by trauma and tragedy, ripped apart on screen until the audience is made complicit in their actions by an understanding and acceptance of the film’s violent coda.

Olivia Coleman and Peter Mullan are everything you’d expect from the praise that this film has occasioned, the former finally given a stage expansive enough to showcase the calibre of her talent and the latter demonstrating again why he deserves the too-seldom acclaim of being one of Britain’s (expanded from “Scotland’s” for an increase in range) finest actors, and certainly one of the most consistently overlooked. It would be easy to assume then, this being the case, that the supporting cast might let the film down, but both practised hands (Eddie Marsan, Sally Carman, Ned Dennehy et al) and new faces (Samuel Bottomley) all more-than pull their weight, perfectly observed characters captured in the transience of experience by Paddy Considine, whose script and direction belie the fact that this is his first time at the helm of such a project.

Despite all that, it’s difficult to use any enthusiastic superlatives when talking about Tyrannosaur because it’s the kind of film that’s hard to watch, a film which lends itself to the kind of cod-psychological and philosophical analysis I briefly indulged in if only because it offers at least a little distance from both the horror of it and the sense that that same horror is actually grindingly mundane. I’ve a feeling, a fear perhaps, that the heaping of well-deserved plaudits on the film, the point of reviews like this, is in part a kind of salve on the consciences of critical audiences: we acknowledge that such damaged and damned people exist, that such situations are borne every day, and that we have empathy for them, then we simply try to forget that we know anything about it at all.

STEP ONE

The alarm on my pocket watch goes off, reminding me of an impending deadline.

STEP TWO

To decide whether the post is going to be a review, a piece of fiction, an opinion piece or an illustrated entry, I roll a four-sided die which I won from a nerd.

STEP THREE

Each of the four types of post has two sub-groups;

Review: something real/something fake

Fiction: something new/something rehashed

Opinion: something researched/something made-up

Illustrated: something crap/something crap (for kids)

So I flip a Canadian dollar (quack or queen) to decide which the post is going to be.

STEP FOUR

I mash the keys on the typewriter until a real word comes out, then free associate from that until there’s an idea for what to write (this is a cross category tactic), then type up the piece in a single sitting which can last up to eighteen minutes.

STEP FIVE

I scour magazines in the newsagents or books in the library to find an appropriate picture to accompany the post, and then surreptitiously cut it out.

STEP SIX

Since I don’t have a computer at home I post my typed piece and the picture I want at the top of the piece to the Philippines where it is proofed, retyped on a computer and then posted online.

STEP SEVEN

I wait at home for postcards which document my traffic figures and site stats and the attendant cheques for the advertising revenue…

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DISCLAIMER: Sweatshop labour, particularly in areas where children are employed rather than educated, is a global problem. Go to http://www.sweatfree.org/, to read more about the work being done to give workforces a voice in creating fairer and safer conditions.

The Monster Hospital

by Thom Dicomidis

Somewhere dank and dark and creepy

There’s a ward where no-one’s sleepy

A hospital for mythic things

Like dragons who’ve broken their wings

A banshee who has lost her voice

A werewolf who can’t make the choice

Whether to be man or beast

He loves to howl, but hates to feast

On anything that’s walked or run

This werewolf’s vegetarian…

Sometimes it’s chaos in this place

With all these fiends in one small space

A demon who can’t seem to fly

A vampire in the blood supply

Outside a giant has a splinter

The mummy cannot stand the winter

Even wrapped up nice and warm

He threatens to summon a storm

“A plague of locusts on your head!”

But he’s got gout, so stays in bed…

The End

Except that it kind of is. Because it’s not about the story, which whilst occasionally moving is told from the perspective of George Clooney as Matt King, initially via some expedient but uncomfortable narration which is only made more noticeable by how quickly it’s dropped. And because it’s not about the rest of the cast, with Amara Miller as this year’s most Abigail Breslin-esque big-mouthed naïf and Shailene Woodley as the problem child and the only non-Clooney character with anything close to personal development outside. And because it’s not even about the central themes of loss, and what we choose to let go of and what we choose to hold onto. And because it’s definitely not about Hawaii, even if the audience leaves knowing how to pronounce the word properly.

And finally, because I’ve pushed this conceit far beyond the point where it can be considered fit for purpose, because it has to be either about George Clooney or it becomes about the fact his Oscar nod and the number of other Oscar nominations The Descendants has garnered suggest that it’s the exemplar of its genre, rather than an example. George Clooney is very good in The Descendants, he might even be great, but for the fact that the character is never really fleshed out beyond the bare bones that are required to support the naked machinations of plot and narrative. Matt King is left as a bland non-presence, carried on the abundance of the same provided by the casting, which leaves the film lacklustre in its most literal sense.

I think what bothers me most, and to be fair this is a retrospective gripe, is that The Descendants feels like a film that knows exactly how competently made it is and, as such, never tries particularly hard to exceed the bounds of its source material. The tragedy is inbuilt and referred to almost effortlessly and the comedy never does much more than raise a wry smile. The script, aside from a moment of ill-judged almost-farce towards the end, is fairly tight; with the aforementioned smiles coming as a result from clever dialogue which nonetheless manages to feel naturalistic and Alexander Payne’s direction has a few notable moments in a comfortably above-average film.

Which is what’s mainly wrong with this film. Echoes of a dozen slice-of-life indie comedies haunt every pairing of ridiculous circumstance, every character who adheres a little too closely to an archetype and every tearjerk’d moment and, for all its virtues, the film cannot escape its antecedents. If you’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine or something similar recently, then The Descendants will seem very much of a type, its emotional effect offset against the sensation that heartstrings are being tugged at and sides not-quite tickled in a rather deliberate manner. So, to return to the ellipsis of this piece’s title: Not all change is evolution… But damn, no change at all is hardly encouraging.

It falls somewhere short of being a documentary or travelogue, if that’s what it was ever intended to be, and feels more like a series of postcards with the writer’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings overlaid onto the short clips and stills which comprise the visual evocation of the letters the narrator is reading, missives from distant lands from a perpetual outsider. This looseness, the organic and oddly voyeuristic nature of presenting these as messages to the narrator, means that whilst some of the pronouncements are apt, even moving, others are less artless, less performative in their intimacy. The occasional foray into the meaningless seems to represent a necessary nadir as counterbalance to the unpractised manner by which the meaningful has to claim to have been evoked.

The juxtaposition, because if you don’t use the word here there’s a good chance you’ve misunderstood either Sans Soleil or the meaning of the word itself, of footage from Japan and Guinea-Bissau shows both how the focus of joy and melancholy can shift depending on circumstance and that the decadently alien is, somehow, somewhat harder to understand. If Guinea-Bissau, through its privations, shows us something about the human condition, then Japan is held up to the light and analysed, sometimes significantly and sometime speciously, as the human condition altered through the luxury of self-reflexivity.

The cinematography, as much as Sans Soleil can be spoken of as having a single unified style, made up as the film is of as many parts extant footage and stills as have been created to bind them together, is opportunistic and curious, drawn to the elements of an event to which the eye and the attention would naturally be drawn, but with the composition of the shot always in mind. The shivering of a camera seldom not in motion separates the activity of life from the passivity of the experiences acquired through screens and developed from cold chemical negatives.

It’s hard to know whether such a film, so aware of the strictures and limitations of its medium that it stubbornly retreats almost into being one only under sufferance and at the outermost limits of the medium’s pragmatic definitions, can be reviewed by the standards which are implicit when one sits down, committing to a set amount of time engaged by someone else’s imagination. San Soleil is a film which ought to be watched, as much for its trepidations about a future which seemed in 1983 that it could easily spiral out into the end of the history as for its assuming plainness.

There’s a section of the film, only a few minutes long, which includes an analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo which reminded me of Tarantino, but with the musing as a functional metaphysic rather than a parading of the filmmaker’s intelligence and insightfulness, and a moment where they quote the writings of Ryoji Uebara, a man who is about to fly a kamikaze mission against American ships. He finishes by saying: “I have spoken frankly. Forgive me.” and I’m not sure it matters whether the quotation is genuine, or whether the way they discuss Vertigo really holds up, as long as you can believe it for a hundred minutes.

It was in one of the gaps between these meetings, gaps just slightly too long to be necessary and slightly too short to do anything particularly meaningful with, that a day which had already verged on the suicide-inspiring managed to plunged to an unforeseen new nadir. I had installed myself beneath a heating vent in some hellish chain coffee franchise, hands clenched around a mug whose warmth was far more appealing than its acrid contents, as I tried to stop a shivering that seemed to emanate from somewhere inside my bones, and was watching the second hand drive time forward, inexorably towards my next appointment.

I’d been sat there some twenty-five minutes, my hands glowing pink and raw with heat leached unceremoniously from the unwanted drink, assiduously avoiding eye-contact with anyone who looked even vaguely happy, to avoid unwanted and unwarranted bitterness. Checking the time on my phone, I forgot that the coffee was mainly a prop and took a sip, spitting it back out before the taste and cold could settle on my tongue. I turned to check the weather through the window, hoping that the rain at least might have abated. Instead I saw her, the last person I wanted to see when life and luck had brought me so low, and attempted to duck out of sight.

Attempted, I say being unflatteringly precise, because in the urgency of the movement I neglected the proper motion necessary to duck beneath a table and instead simply bent sharply at the waist, bringing my forehead into violent collision with the table. This action, my blasphemous cry of pain, and the resultant clatter of scattered crockery; to wit, one mug of thankfully-lukewarm coffee, a saucer and a not-quite empty milk jug, had the effect of drawing the entire rooms instant attention, somewhat counter to my initial intent, as I reeled in disorienting pain.

I doubled over again, less extremely, and clutched my forehead as I engaged in some analgesic profanity, panacea for both for the pain and the imminent social discomfort, realising too late that a feigned faint, either as the cause or the result of the initial head-table collision, would have offered an out. Albeit a slightly emasculating out. Instead I had sealed my fate, and even the dragged-out seconds of rocking back and forth in pronounced pain with my eyes affixed on the scene of the offence, could not last forever. “Thom?”, she asked in apparent concern.

Or, you know, she said some other name…