Category Archives: Lists

Friday Fiction Fixes #17…

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The Jonah by James Herbert – 1981

herbertjonahOddly, it was my dad – who I would never say was a big reader – who became my first point of contact with the works of James Herbert. He was possibly the only author my dad made any time for. Back in the mid eighties I was far too young to read anything by the dark master of British horror, but that always stuck with me and when I was old enough I got through a bunch of Herbert’s novels.

The Jonah is the last Herbert novel I read, but it’s unfortunately one of his lesser offerings. It’s about a detective who has had misfortune follow him throughout his life. Despite the author’s history, it’s a dark police thriller which can only very loosely be described as horror.

The writing is fine and the narrative is moderately entertaining, but Herbert’s penchant for shoehorning in an obligatory sex scene rears its head again in a somewhat unrealistic romantic sub-plot which is signposted from miles away. However, The Jonah – for its shortcomings – is quite a short novel, so it’s not something that you will have to wade through for too long.

James Herbert was absolutely capable of producing great stuff and he produced a number of classics throughout his career. The Jonah is certainly not bad, but a classic it is not. If you want a good entry-point to his work, there are far better places to jump into the water.

Tuesday TV Testimonials #17…

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MythBusters (2003 – 2016)

MBOpEd_PIC1MythBusters was a very long-running science experiment show that bagged almost 300 episodes before it finally threw in the towel. It was one of my favourite things on TV over the last decade, and if you exclude ongoing dramas it’s right up there near the top of the pile.

Every week, hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (who were soon supported by regular team members Kari, Tory, and Grant) would try to ‘bust’ some commonly held ideas such as… could you penetrate the ground or kill a person with a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building?; and, was it possible for a stream of urine to freeze in the winter? That kinda thing. Other more unique curiosities included… can a person falling off a building glide to safety using a sheet of plywood?; and, can being underwater protect you from bullets? The results were often very surprising.

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I swear, Kari wasn’t dressed like this during the show!

If it all sounds not particularly earth shattering, that’s probably because it wasn’t. But it was always fun. There was much silliness, many explosions, and a whole lot of ballistics gel throughout its run, but the well presented and thought out experiments were backed up by what sometimes seemed like pages of theory, and it wasn’t uncommon to learn something along the way either, which can’t be a bad thing.

Monday Movie Mentions #17…

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United 93 (2006)

220px-United93Yeah, I know, it’s hard to believe that it’s been sixteen years since the September 11th attacks – the watershed ‘JFK’ moment of my generation – but here we are, still feeling the effects of that day and living our lives differently because of it.

There are a handful of movies that have been made about the tragedy, but United 93 is as good an account as you will find. It’s probably not the kind of movie you’ll sit through more than once, because you’re not going to get any joy or substance out of a second viewing. It doesn’t pull any punches in its delivery, and it’s impossible to forget what it is you’re watching.

We can argue about how accurate the depiction is, and how much of it was amended and tweaked for ‘dramatic purposes’, but when you’re talking about the single worst act of terror committed against the civilised world, it’s a little redundant to start picking at these things.

United 93 is an extremely tough and sobering film to watch, as rightly it should be, and there’s nothing to smile at here: no levity at all to remind you that these are actors on a stage. But it’s a movie we should not disregard, about a day that we never will.

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Sunday Song Suggestions #17…

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Come Get Some – Rooster – 2004

Back in the early part of the new millennium there was a proliferation of British indie music taking over the UK charts, almost all of which left me cold. Rooster was the only band that could realistically be labelled as such that I got into, and certainly the only one whose music I bought.

Come Get Some was the lead single from Rooster’s self-titled debut album and with its simple yet effective guitar sound, and the throaty and classic vocals of lead singer Nick Atkinson, it should really have set them off on a long and prosperous career.

Unfortunately, like a lot of musical acts, the band was swallowed up by the industry and Rooster had been and gone before a lot of people had even heard about them. There was a second (and final) album the following year, but the band was never better than when they came right out of the gates.

But 2017 is, after all, the Chinese year of the rooster… so perhaps a reunion is in the offing.

Friday Fiction Fixes #16…

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The Swarm by Arthur Herzog – 1974

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I picked up The Swarm from a second-hand store many years ago, and it sat at the bottom of my to-read pile of books for a while before I got around to reading it.

The Swarm is an entertaining and fairly short read about an influx of killer African bees to the United States, and follows them as they move from town to town, taking out everyone in their path. Although an entirely fictional account of events, it takes a leaf out of what Michael Crichton did in most of his novels by including enough scientific-looking charts, graphs and diagrams throughout the text to make what you are reading seem authentic.

The Swarm was published in the early seventies, at the height of the general fascination with disaster stories, but where Hollywood was more focused on earthquakes and buildings catching fire, this novel benefits from tapping in to the public’s fear of the unknown. Bees, yeah… but killer bees.

In fact, the novel was somewhat influential in ushering in a plethora of less than stellar stories about animals taking over, over the next decade or so. Of course, The Swarm itself was turned into a particularly awful B-movie a few years later, but the less said about that the better we’ll all be.

Tuesday TV Testimonials #16…

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The Greatest American Hero (1981 – 1983)

250px-Greatest_am_heroThe Greatest American Hero was a lighthearted drama and another one of those underrated eighties gems that doesn’t get the love it deserves. It’s biggest claim to fame is probably the fact that it had one of the most memorable theme songs of the era, but the show beneath the music is worth remembering too.

William Katt plays Ralph, a school teacher whose students appear to defy the regularities of society, because they are all at least five years removed from having any right to appear as such. Ralph is accosted by a spacecraft while he is leading his unfortunate (or perhaps, not so) class trip of young adults into the desert. He is then given a special alien suit imbued with superpowers and instructed to use it to fight crime on Earth… because, of course he is.

greatest-american-heroTo be fair, as TV premises go, it’s a little on the hokey side and fairly rough around the edges, but it’s enough to get the show off and running. The Greatest American Hero benefits from a good supporting cast including Robert Culp as an FBI agent and unwilling partner, and the aesthetically appealing Connie Sellecca as his lawyer and long-running love interest.

On one hand it’s fall into relative obscurity is understandable: The Greatest American Hero only lasted 40 episodes, so it had probably been and gone before a lot of people even realised. On the other hand it was really the first original show to tackle (and poke fun at) the ‘everyman superhero’ idea that now seems to be commonplace.

Monday Movie Mentions #16…

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Scarface (1983)

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Al Pacino is one of the best actors Hollywood has thrown up in this or any other generation, and he has been a vital cog of many classic movies. The character of Tony Montana is transcendent – even people who have never seen Scarface know who he is – and when all is said and done, Pacino’s interpretation here will perhaps go down as the most iconic performance of his illustrious career.

Scarface is a wacky snapshot of cocaine-fuelled eighties excess, set under the Floridian sun. It’s a gangster movie, but one that is as gloriously over the top as its running time. It has a great soundtrack, a cornucopia of quotable lines, one of the most bloody and exhilarating finales ever, and these days has a very large cult following.

But Scarface is not without its fair share of criticism. It’s unrelentingly violent, a little saggy in the middle, and it’s portrayal of women is lazy at best and misogynistic at worst. With his exaggerated accent, Pacino initially seems badly cast a Cuban refugee, but once the credits roll three hours later, his mesmerising and intense portrayal is difficult to ignore.

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Nope – that ain’t sugar.

Back in the late nineties, when the internet was just beginning to find its feet, there were many websites dedicated to collecting movie soundbites that you could download and play at your leisure. The most popular of these (and no, I’m not making this up) were Schwarzenegger and Tony Montana clips. I had dozens of WAV files that I would play via Winamp, chronicling Tony’s rise from the gutter to the top of his cocaine mountain, and his subsequent fall down the other side.

But to distill Scarface into a few seconds of sweary audio would be a disservice to the movie. It’s one of the best examples of its genre, and definitely the most fun to watch.

Sunday Song Suggestions #16…

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Trashy Women – Confederate Railroad – 1993

We’re back to the stetsons and spurs for today’s song.

Trashy Women is taken from Confederate Railroad’s self-titled debut album, and like a lot of country music at that time, it’s very much tongue in cheek and every bit as politically incorrect as the title suggests. The title alone probably fingers it as the kind of song that would not get much positive mainstream success if it was to be released today.

But having said that, Trashy Women is a great example of what I love about this early nineties window of country-rock music, because the performers knew how to present a joke, and their fans knew to take it as such. The modern country scene has become so sterile that you just don’t see this kind of thing anymore, and the world at large has its head so far up its own ass it can’t seem to hear the laughter.

You only need to listen to the song with an open mind to realise that it’s as inoffensive as the title is inflammatory. And besides, it’s hard to go all social justice warrior on something that has as catchy a chorus as this.

Friday Fiction Fixes #15…

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Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett – 1989

Guards-Guards-coverI was introduced to the world of Terry Pratchett by a friend many years ago, who was a big fan of his. He is primarily known for his loosely connected Discworld series of novels, which reached over forty entries before his death in 2015. Guards! Guards! is the eighth ‘chapter’, but it works as a standalone novel as well.

For whatever reason comedy novels don’t appeal to me very much, and the handful of Pratchett books that I read in the nineties – of which Guards! Guards! is the best – is my only foray into the genre. I’ve also never greatly enjoyed fantasy stuff, and the Discworld series is often considered a parody of The Lord of the Rings… a novel I didn’t enjoy either. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why I bothered!

The biggest gripe I have with the novel – and by extension all the other Pratchett stories I read – is just how similar they feel. Sure, they made me laugh like all comedy should, and in the case of Guards! Guards! there were moments that were very funny indeed, but the style of humour is ultimately very limited. It sticks to a tried and tested template and that’s fine, but when a lot of jokes follow a similar format, and one character often feels much like the next, it becomes difficult to differentiate. I wouldn’t go so far as to say once you’ve read one Discworld novel you’ve read them all, but that’s certainly a criticism I can understand.

Having said that, Pratchett’s Discworld trope of using footnotes throughout each of the novels in the series surprisingly never wears out its welcome.

Tuesday TV Testimonials #15…

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100m Final – Seoul Olympics, 1988

There’s something special about those five interlinked rings. I can sit down in front of the TV when the Olympics is on and be entertained by any sport… all right, maybe not the synchronised swimming, but most everything else.

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The Seoul Olympics in 1988 was the first time that I was old enough to watch live and understand what the hell was going on. The 100m final was the blue riband event and was always billed as Lewis the Olympic hero versus Johnson the world record holder – the other six guys could have stayed in the blocks for all the attention they were getting. I was a club-level runner back then and Carl Lewis was my favourite athlete, and I was ready to watch him retain the gold he had won four years earlier in Los Angeles.

And that’s just what he did. Well, kinda. Eventually.

As it played out, Canada’s Ben Johnson won in 9.79 seconds. That’s not blisteringly fast by today’s standards, but then it was a world record run, and my mate Carl trailed what felt like miles behind in 9.92 seconds.

I remember my disappointment as I was watching it, but – revisionist history of a bitter twelve year old fan or not – I also remember thinking something wasn’t quite right. As the race began Johnson was the only man to run the distance in under 9.9 seconds, and now here he was breaking 9.8 seconds. He flew down that track, and seemed to be picking up speed as he crossed the line.

Three days later, Johnson had his gold medal stripped and his record quashed after the most infamous drug scandal in the sport’s history, but even during that brief window between glory and castigation, it was becoming increasingly evident that Johnson had a devil sitting on his shoulder.

In some respects, the stigma of that race remains to this day, and track and field has never fully recovered; because for every Usain Bolt there’s a Justin Gatlin to remind everyone of the sport’s dark past.