*

Pineapple Express (2008)

Directed by: David Gordon Green
Written by: Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow

Summary: Process server and stoner Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) witnesses a murder by drug smuggler Ted (Gary Cole) and corrupt cop Carol (Rosie Perez). The smugglers trace the rare joint roach Dale left behind back to him and he has to go on the run with his drug dealer and friend Saul (James Franco). Male bonding and more pot-smoking ensue, as well as bloody gun-, fist-, and forkfights.

Did I like it: Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it.

Humor: The film is categorized as a comedy, but while it had plenty of amusing ironies, I just didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Some scenes and developments had a contrived sense of comedy, but I only really laughed at the description of Ted and Carol’s rival drug gang as “the Asians”. (It was funny because it was a dig at America-centric ignorance, and got less funny later – more on that below.) Then again, I couldn’t enjoy the belt buckle scene because of my embarrassment squick and I’m also just one of those people who don’t find pain hilarious, at least unless it’s also somehow clever or in a particular context, so your mileage may vary. Red (Danny McBride) getting up time and time again after being shot – that was amusing, because it’s a dig at an action film cliché. Someone getting a fork in the back – that was pain played for laughs, but it wasn’t funny to me.

Politics: The opening scene set in the 1950s in a military bunker sets the film as anti-government and pro-weed, and continues to give us, via Dale’s monologue, what seems to be the basic assertion of the film: that everybody likes weed, but because weed is illegal, ordinary citizens are forced to associate with criminals, and that’s a shame. The philosophy is mixed later as Dale and especially Saul’s vagueness and bumbling are partially blamed on weed, and Dale admits that his life isn’t everything he liked to pretend it was.

Race: “The Asians.” It was funny when the white guys show their ignorance by lumping all of Asia, except for India, together into one big ethnicity. It was less funny when “the Asians’” agents all speak with accents and shout untranslateable insults while attacking. The off-putting thing was how their ethnicity seemed to be the joke, rather than the dig at the presumed-white audience. As for other non-white characters, there was a sassy black lady cop (Cleo King), the corrupt Latina cop Carol and goon characters of colour. The main character Dale, the “good drug dealer” Saul, the main villain Ted, and Dale’s girlfriend (Amber Heard) and her family were all white.

Gender: The three named women characters were Carol, Angie the teenaged girlfriend, and Bubbe, Saul’s grandmother. There were also Angie’s mom and the aforementioned sassy lady cop. I’m pretty sure the Bechdel test was not passed. I liked Carol as a villain, and I liked the lady cop – both seemed incredibly capable and worth taking seriously, even if the lady cop was sassy, black and fat, which American comedies seem to think is hilarious somehow. Angie – Angie’s difficult. Did I mention she’s Dale’s teenaged girlfriend? She seems fairly strong-minded and together, at least compared to Dale, despite the final judgment being that, if she wants to be with him, she must be really immature.

Sex: No actual sex, some crudity, but not to the point of tedium. There was simulated it’s-not-what-you-think gay male sex. Dale and Angie’s relationship smacked disturbingly of high school girl fetishism, even if it was meant to showcase Dale’s own immaturity. Angie, framed as an 18-year-old and played by then 21-22-year-old Heard, looked so young it was hard not to wince watching her with Dale, despite the actors’ actual age difference being only a few years.

Violence: So very much of it, especially in the big gun fight in the end. I didn’t exactly mind, though it shocked me to see that Dale actually kills “an Asian” (accidentally) and just moves on without even pausing to acknowledge it. It was and accident and in self-defense, but not even a look back?

Overall impressions: Eh. I didn’t find it as off-putting or disingenious as I expected to. If it had been funnier it could have been something. What I did like about it was that it was a comedy that didn’t rely on sex(ual assault) or embarrassment for its jokes. Even when in embarrassing situations, the characters seem to breeze through them, which is a blessing to watch when one has the squick I have. If this led to a dearth of jokes, I don’t really mind. There were character moments and action enough to hold my interest.

***~~ (3/5)

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Perhaps it isn’t fair to review a first novel written in 1957 from the point of view of 2001, but at least it’s interesting.

Spirited sorority star Beth takes high-strung newcomer Laura under her wing, with results that can be predicted from the title by anyone familiar with 1950s terms for gay people. What follows is a drawn-out love triangle with the two young women and a fraternity hunk, tinged with a sense of inevitable doom.

If that summary sounds like I didn’t enjoy it, it’s giving a false impression. The mistakes the characters make pile up and not all plotline leads where you’d think, which keeps one interested and keeps one reading. There are no easy solutions and only a couple of happy endings. On the whole the novel was an enjoyable mix of tragedy and pleasure, and an interesting look into 50s sexual politics.

The picture painted of American colleges of the time was one where sex occurred all the time, but was never discussed except between trusted friends and always secret, despite the social expectation of constant dating. Attention is drawn to this when Beth and Laura’s roommate Emmy is caught and humiliated by the sorority. The behaviour of the interested male characters towards the women also strikes me as particularly heinous – even that of the supposedly wonderful Charlie. The punchbag male of the novel is Bud, an irresponsible musician with a roving eye, but I find dashing Charlie much more disturbing. Charlie doesn’t take no for an answer. Charlie thinks it romantic to hold Beth by the neck until she stops struggling. The passages describing his “easy authority” and how much Beth loves to be “commanded” by him certainly made me squirm. I knew this about 50s romances and it’s not like the idea of the sexy rapist doesn’t survive to today, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to read.

Certain familiar and expected patterns occur in the characterisation and attitude towards queerness, but there was nothing painful about how the novel finished. Inconstant Beth makes her decision, and both she and especially Laura have grown as people because of their affair. Laura’s queerness doesn’t disappear, nor does she go mad or kill herself or go to ruin or to a nunnery. The central story was of growing up, of Laura shedding her nervousness and pettiness and the self-harming habits that she used to cover her inner turmoil with in exchange for true inner strength. It was uplifting, even for me, an openly queer woman in the 2000s who’s had remarkably little hassle over it, and who can use that word for herself without anybody being particularly shocked – much less taking it like a slap in the face, like Beth does.

That’s not to say that there weren’t issues with the writing and plot points. Especially in the beginning of the novel point of view seesaws wildly between the characters, and although this gets less as the novel goes on – or perhaps you get used to it – it’s a little disorienting at first. Many tropes appear and are dealt with, and many coincidences are a little too convenient, too dramatic, like scenes in a movie rather than a novel. Odd Girl Out needs to be taken for what it is – a first novel, a tragic romance, a novel written in the 50s and sold cheap with likely very little editorial finetuning. If you can manage that, it’s a very enjoyable novel. If you also manage to imagine being a gay woman who has never read anything about gay people before that didn’t say they are unmentionable, horrible, dirty and wicked, it’s tremendous.

***~~ (3/5)

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The year is 1962. Bobby Blanchard is fresh out of college, and fresh out of dreams since a nasty fall disqualified her from professional field hockey. Instead, she’s taken a post as the Games Mistress in the exclusive Metamora Academy for Young Ladies. Behind its tall gates await spooky mysteries, learning experiences and true – and not so true – love. As the tagline says, “She schooled them in field hockey… and desire!”

I won’t deny I enjoyed this novel immensely, though it wasn’t without some guilt. I barely notice how I miss stories that focus on gayness and women with no straightness or men to upstage them until I come across something like this. On a purely personal level, I found Bobby Blanchard deeply satisfying.

Even as I say that, I can’t deny its faults. All the women may be gay, but they’re also all white. The sole non-white character, the Japanese exchange student Misako/Mimi, barely has lines, and is used by the school’s Young Integrationists Club as an example of how pro-integration Metamora is. Is this conflation of Asian American experience with the African American a parody? I can’t tell. I suppose you could excuse the lack of non-white characters because of the pulp genre, or say it’s because of the exclusive environment the novel is set in and the segregation that still separated the races in 60s America, but that doesn’t make the novel any less white-white-white.

One character, the juvenile delinquent Angle, reads rather like a trans man, but this – ahem – angle is never developed. Of the three gay men (two of them merely strongly implied to be so) who appear in the novel, only one does not strike you as a stereotype. It’s most striking when a character that appeared in an earlier novel by Monica Nolan and was described as “brooding” turns out, now that we know he’s gay, to love fashion and dancing and teasing Bobby about her love life. If Nolan can write such varied and differently beautiful female characters, even if many of them, too, were partly based on stereotypes, why does this variety end when it comes to gay men? Is the lack of non-white characters truly necessary for the genre and setting, or just moral cowardice that prevents writing about the delicate subject of race in the 60s? I guess I won’t know unless Nolan’s next novel in the Lesbian Career-Girls series is a black/white romance, which was a sub-genre of original lesbian pulps.

From a story-telling point of view, the novel suffered from having too many named characters to keep track of, and an over-use of “the (adjective) (noun)” to describe people. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of description unless it appears several times in each page, as it does here. Nolan’s habit of describing people by their profession as often as by their name also gets to be such a quirk it distracts from the narrative. However, I have no complaints about her use of cheesy lines, especially to describe sex and arousal. Those are part of the pulp genre and hilarious, adding a great deal to the novel’s humour, which is never very up-front. This isn’t an over-the-top parody so much as a genuine genre novel, just written decades after the genre’s heyday and infused with modern sensibilities, including a lack of shame over sexual orientation. I much prefer it that way.

Let’s talk about what I liked. The novel’s mystery plot unfolded so slowly it would not have maintained its interest on its own, but it did not need to. Other plots involving the formation of the Metamora field hockey team, Bobby learning to become a better teacher and use her brain, the drama and competition among the girls, the mistakes made and rectified in guiding the students to learn, were quite enough to keep you interested. The shape of the plot reminded me of the Harry Potter series, as if the school setting with its houses, factionality and prefecture weren’t enough, but it worked. The novel sells with a single idea – she’s gay, she’s a gym teacher – but there’s a story there as well as character development that doesn’t solely revolve around Bobby’s sexuality, or Bobby herself. Instead of dropping a gay character into a straight environment to create friction, pretty much everybody in Metamora already is gay and the friction lies elsewhere, in the much more universal problems of teaching, learning and growing up – and mysteries, of course. Who among us wasn’t called to solve the case of a ghostly cyclist or a disappearing locket while in our teens? I only wished it could have gone on longer, and tied up more loose threads.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to pulp fans, lovers of light literature, and anybody who wants to read a book that is not about men or straight people. You may have to forgive a few things, but it’s worth it.

****½ (4.5/5)

-

I am not even going to pretend I’m not biased towards this franchise. I totally am. However, I’ll try to keep some perspective.

The original Red Dwarf TV series was a BBC sitcom based on a lone earth mining ship, the Red Dwarf, travelling through space three million years away from Earth, carrying the last human being alive: the slobby, underachieving Dave Lister. He’s all alone… aside from his obnoxious dead superior resurrected as a hologram, a life form evolved from his cat, a dotty super-computer, and later also a fussy and unstable sanitation mechanoid, not to mention any number of humanity’s leavings in the universe, from androids to genetically engineered lifeforms. He kills time, gets involved in dimensional paradoxes, battles various ridiculous foes such as a monster evolved from chicken vindaloo, and longs for a long-dead crush, Kristine Kochanski.

The series ended after Season 8 in 1999. In 2009, it returned with the three episodes of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth.

In true reboot fashion, the show was given a thorough makeover. The Red Dwarf mining ship now looks more like the starship Enterprise than a factory, the special effects have lost most of their campiness, and no longer is there a live audience or a laugh track to tell us when to laugh. But a reboot it isn’t. The cast has returned, appropriately aged and still stuck in space, and the writing is pure Red Dwarf. While the twisty-turny meta-on-meta dimension travel plot I might have credited to, say, Futurama, which doesn’t make it any less brilliant, but there was a psychological and emotional dimension that, while not explored quite to my satisfaction, I associate with Red Dwarf specifically, especially when its joined by absurd pseudoscientific plots and typically British cruel comedy. What most sold this particular entry into the canon to me, though, was the meta-on-meta, and the way it took the piss out of the cast, the characters, the fans, TV tropes, the media-consumer world as we know it and the writer himself.

Not that there weren’t things to complain about. For any fan, it’s annoying to be plunged into a storyline without any explanation made for the intervening years, aside from the short line explaining that it all happened in seasons 9 and 10 (which haven’t been made). The upgrade on the Red Dwarf, as well, is bound to annoy those of us longing for the dingy quarters we’ve come to know and love (not that this was the first unexplained upgrade the little rouge one has gone through). I also missed Dave Lister’s broad Liverpool accent and Holly, the ship’s laconic computer. To top it all off, in an act of unforgivable cruelty, Doug Naylor (the writer) makes us think that the Red Dwarf crew are not real. That might just a bit too much for a loyal Dwarfer, even if she can take the teasing in the comic book shop scene, one of the funniest of the lot.

Even aside from fan angst, I found Lister’s longing for Kochanski difficult to connect with. We’ve seen relatively little of their relationship as lovers, and know nothing at all of how it may have developed, so much of it becomes Lister’s obsession rather than a genuine connection between two people. Also the emotional thread of Lister feeling “dead” while trapped in infertile space in the beginning wasn’t sufficiently explored for his awakening later in the story to pack any real punch. No offense to Craig Charles’ acting – this was all in the writing. And as a final complaint, the Blade Runner scene recreation was rather pasted on. The only way in which it flowed from the script was in the Creator’s arrogance in claiming heritage from the classic film – for the rest of it, it would have worked perfectly well without the connection. It did give us that wonderful death scene, though, so I don’t mind that much.

In the end, though, everything I loved in Red Dwarf (except Holly, moan) was there: the crew, the actors slipping perfectly into their characters, the ridiculous sci-fi, the satire, the psychology (to an extent) and the brain-twisting, cheeky, cruel comedy.

Would I recommend this to someone who’s never seen Red Dwarf before? Probably not, as it’s a premise that must be grokked before it can be settled into comfortably. For fans of Futurama or Terry Pratchett, though, I would, as those shows have likely prepared you. For fans of the series, I say, definitely give it a go (not that you weren’t going to) but here’s a small hint: spoil yourself for the ending first. Otherwise it just might be a bit too cruel.

***~~ (3/5)

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1910 is another more or less standalone entry into the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill. I say “comic” because as this instalment is fairly short it would be a bit cheeky to call it a graphic novel, but any comedy you’ll encounter will be predictably dark.

In 1910, Mina Murray*1 and Allan Quatermain*2 appear surprisingly in their prime (a fact explained only in the epilogue), working with A.J. Raffles*3, Thomas Carnacki*4 and the immortal Orlando*5 to try and prevent a predicted apocalypse presumably engineered by the magician Haddo*6, and miss out on a very commonplace drama going on in a dockside drinking hole, slowly leading up to a catastrophe.

The story offers the same kind of name-dropping 19th/early 20th century pulp fiction fanfic as all the other instalments, this time wrapped in Penny Orchestra lyrics and the theme of violence, poverty and, you guessed it, rape.

Much has been written about Alan Moore and rape before, but it’s prevalence here and the specific philosophy in which it is wrapped is still worthy of notice. Loosely following the events of song Pirate Jenny, Captain Nemo’s*7 daughter Janni accepts work as a waitress, gets brutally raped, and retaliates spectacularly. That is the core of the story, with the League’s Gentlemen mostly mucking about, relieving internal tensions and making literary allusions in the background. Alan Moore’s paraphrased translation of Pirate Jenny and Janni’s initial rejection of her father’s legacy appear to place the blame of her rape partially on her, though her rage in its wake is treated sympathetically – as ultra-violence so often is. In the final stages of the story the Whitechapel Murderer sings a song at the gallows accusing government and poverty of being the true sinners, rather than prostitutes and their johns – which is fair enough – or “priests with wandering hands” (a jolly way of saying “people abusing authority to sexually assault others”). In the midst of death and destruction, the whores and the killers sing, “mankind is kept alive by monstrous deeds”. Powerful stuff, if borrowed, and it adds up to a eulogy for personal might as opposed to governmental regulation.

Moore’s own sexual attitudes seem to be shining through elsewhere in the text. Plenty of time is spent dwelling on the sailors’ groping of Janni even before they rape her, and Raffles comments with disfavour on the apparent sexual triad of Mina, Allan and Orlando, exhibiting discomfort at the existence of the “He-She” which, aside from being transphobic, is somewhat at odds with the suggestion of Raffles’ own bisexuality in the novels*8. Moore further makes a point to say that Orlando annoys Mina while he is male, thus confining Orlando’s lived bisexuality either to titillating cis female bisexuality or to the image of the effeminate gay man. (Orlando is assumed gender-fluent as well as able to change his/her physical sex, which is compatible with Woolf’s novel.) Indeed, throughout the story he appears as a foppish, silly, self-centered and prattling stereotype of a gay man. His position in relation to Mina and Allan, too, seems to be that of a kinky addition to their true love couplehood.

It’s also noteworthy that in the written-word epilogue Orlando has a re-imagined primordial youth in which she talks about being a rapist – saying how, had he met a woman as beautiful as the one he later became, he would have raped her. Is this an attempt at normalizing rape, downgrading Orlando further, or just a scintillating throw-off line to keep the presumably rape-happy reader excited?

While there’s nothing as overtly pro-rape or rape-apologist in the text as in Moore’s Watchmen and Promethea, it’s hard to miss the suggestion that violence against women is not only horrible and humiliating to the victim, but also natural and instinctive to a man, and necessary for the propagation of the human race; female homosexuality is bisexual titillation for a primary male lover, and male homosexuality distinctly normative with bottoms and tops, and also slightly off-putting.

None of this balances very well with the fact that the League is led by Mina, a resourceful, intelligent, powerful, honourable, charismatic woman, that Janni takes power for herself in spite of her father’s misogyny and her own mistreatment, or that Moore himself has spoken out against sexism in comics. There’s an overlaying feminist message strongly undermined by an anarchic, violent, rapey and heteronormative one. Moore seems entirely aware of the instincts he’s catering to – but does it anyway, without apology, explanation or much criticism.

There is no doubt that Alan Moore is an exceptional author and carries the distinction of gracing the medium with intelligence, vision, complexity, erudition, a sense of history and a general assumption that your readers are not idiots. Even this rather mediocre and unoriginal instalment has a certain dark power that is definitely attractive, as well as voicing an unconventional call for criminal anarchy against an unfair state. Do its issues with gender roles make it worse than the bubblegum sexism and righteous violence that we get in mainstream comics? The dreadful answer is, probably not.

-

*1 Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897
*2 King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885
*3 The Amateur Cracksman, E.W. Hornung, 1899
*4 Carnacki the Ghost Finder, William Hope Hodgson, 1913
*5 Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf, 1928
*6 The Magician, W. Somerset Maugham, 1908
*7 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, 1869
*8 Open to debate, I suppose, but you need pretty thick hetero-goggles to ignore it.

**½~~ (2.5/5)

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Note: I realize it’s a bit cheeky reviewing a book of quotations, but it’s either this or another bit of nothing.

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Horseradish is a book of quotations drawn mostly from Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events books. The author, as you might know, is also a fictional character, and one with a uniformly bleak view on life. The name of the novel refers to a particularly unpleasant vegetable, and forms a part of the introductory tale of the book, that of a woman who goes in search of a wise man to find out if there’s more to life than utterly depressing things like family, work and literature. She is, as can be expected, disappointed, and ends up worse than she started.

The opposite of a positive thinking book, Horseradish’s “wit and witticism” centers on putting things into a depressing perspective. It’s interesting to note that recent research suggests attempts at positive thinking make a person with low self-esteem feel worse, while flat, unpleasant facts cheer them up. This makes perfect sense to anyone who has ever had a low self-esteem, and none at all to those who haven’t, as false optimism only serves to underline a sense of hopelessness and make a person feel more alone. As such, Horseradish might work to cheer some of us up, by mocking platitudes and coming up with better, funnier, more realistic, wonderfully depressing ones instead.

That being said, I would have wished for more consistent sets of thoughts in each of the thirteen categories, and perhaps even a sharper focus on truly sad ideas. The quotes range from the flat (“Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable too. But it never helps.”) to the keenly observant (“When people ask you if you play a certain sport, it is likely that they are very good at that sport and are hoping you are only mediocre so that you can waste an afternoon losing a game.”) to the pointless (“A good thing to do when one is sitting, eating and resting is to have a conversation.”) and the facetious (“There are some who go through life with a shadow hanging over them, particularly if they live in a building which has long, wide awnings.”), with some nearly positive messages thrown in between just to keep you off balance.

Whether or not you’d enjoy this book as a stand-alone depends on no-one but you. To some, it will seem pointlessly depressing, and others, a handy go-to when you feel like an inspiring sentence or two to remind you that a lot of other people have it pretty bad too. If you’re a fan of Lemony Snicket and have read all his Unfortunate Events novels, this book is truly pointless because it’s just repurchasing the words you already purchased before, with only a few new sentences thrown in. But, at least it was printed in an eco-friendly way, cost a couple of coins, and I, who haven’t read the series, personally rather enjoyed it for the 30 minutes it took to read it.

****~ (4/5)

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Sometimes a piece of art seems pointless until you read the artist’s intention. At other times, it is so much better if you don’t. The latter is the case with “New Swedes”.

The piece is a collection of modified dolls mounted on a wall on individual red shelves. The idea is simple. Each doll has had its head screwed off and replaced by one belonging to a different doll. We get a dancing señorita with a cowboy’s head, a bulldog with a little girl’s head, a fat naked woman’s body with a baby doll head, and so on and so forth. Each item is a piece of art on its own, and can be read in a unique way, and each of them challenges both of the two representations combined. This throws into focus the methods of character design and popular symbolism which are used to project a certain idea. Mocking the forms in which we are served the ideas of prettiness, hypermasculinity, sexuality, monstrousness, heroism and innocence breaks down the message and reveals the alphabet. I love it. The idea may be simple, but it’s effective, fun and speaks in a direct, visual level straight into our media-encrusted brains.

And what was the artist’s explanation? What was the intention of the piece? It’s meant to be – or explained to be – a representation of immigrant populations in Sweden, the idea of combining two cultures to make something new. How boring. How simplistic. And what an odd implication – as if being an immigrant in a new country is anything like screwing off your head and replacing it with another one, or that immigrants are then freaks made up of an equal distribution of two essences.

So, I forgot about the tag card and went on to stare at each doll in turn, and I left the museum feeling thrilled. A highly recommended piece. Just ignore the card.

“New Swedes” is currently on display in Kiasma, the Helsinki Museum of Modern Art.

**~~~ (2/5)

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Ten Thousand Waves is a video installation – a film played on four different screens – inspired by a tragedy where 13 Chinese clam collectors drowned off the coast of North Wales, by the British artist Isaac Julien. It’s currently on display in Helsinki’s Taidehalli.

The film mainly consists of long, beautiful shots of a perfectly coiffed, beautiful woman, apparently in mourning, wandering around Shanghai, or staring out of a hotel window, or taking tram trips; of equally long and beautiful shots of the sea goddess Mazu moving over cities and rivers, seeming to search for something. There are a few other images to vary these: grainy footage shot from the air, an old man painting Chinese characters on paper, and on glass, fishermen in the gorgeous Chinese countryside lying sleeping or dead on the bank, cars speeding on Shanghai streets, Mazu suspended on her wires in the studio against the green screen. The soundtrack consists of occasional touches of music, city sounds, wind sounds, and Chinese and English speech, the English of which talks about the 13 dead, and the Chinese being the poetry composed by poet Wang Ping on Julien’s request, about the same incident. The Chinese, of course, I couldn’t understand any more than I understood the characters drawn on the screen. The leaflet provided a translation.

The film lasted for 50 minutes, and then began playing again from the top.

It was beautiful. It was slow. It was pretentious. It was atmospheric. It was pointless. And it was presumptuous – claiming to be a study of Chineseness, created by a Brit. If I hadn’t read the leaflet, I wouldn’t have known it was about clam collectors. Why is this playing for Western audiences? It didn’t manage to portray a single genuine emotion or situation we could connect with – other than to admire its beauty. I don’t think I would have connected with it even if I had been Chinese. It would still have been essentially empty. That it was made by a Westerner and viewed by a Western audience just made it seem all the more fetishistic.

Why is Maggie Cheung so flawless? What does this obviously wealthy, picture-perfect woman in Shanghai have to do with poor immigrant clam collectors? This deliciously lovely, depiction of mourning, and the romantization of death at sea serve to sever connection with the horrors of the event itself – the event becomes nothing but an excuse to show this beautiful sorrow.

The poems by Wang Ping were beautiful in an emotional, keening way, and they, in contrast to the film, do not flinch from the horror of death, which is supposed to sit at the centre of this piece. They combine melodrama with delicate expression and the harsh reality of dangerous manual labour abroad, and are much better on their own than the video installation as a whole.

There is something reminiscent of Chinese films and Chinese poetry in the way the film was built, in being implication more than story, and by reflecting the Chinese love of beauty for beauty’s sake. I’m not saying that Julien got that part wrong. I am, however, saying that he flinched from his subject matter and built a wall of beauty between it and himself, or it and us. Call me a snob, but isn’t that the opposite of the purpose of art?

I’m not saying Ten Thousand Waves has no worth, but from my point of view – white female Finn who immigrated to a cozy office job in Belgium and wandered into a museum on a visit home – its worth is just in giving one a chance to relax for a loose 50 minutes and look at pretty pictures. Beauty has value, certainly, but I expect much more than this from a lauded piece of art about a horrible subject, which has been so many years in the making. I expected the author to engage with the subject, and I also expected him to expect more from his audience.

***~~ (3/5)

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Perhaps it’s a mistake to even attempt to review a P.G. Wodehouse novel. If you’ve read one, you have a pretty good idea of what they’re all like, and you’ve probably already decided whether or not you like them. I happen to like them.

In case you’re one of the people who haven’t read one, they are light comedies with plenty of mix-ups and broken engagements, clever language and inanely blathering young gentlemen. Pip-pip, what ho, stiff upper lip and so forth. Eminently charming – somehow only made more attractive via the passage of time, though this may only be true to people used to overlooking early 19th century race and gender fail and the occasional touch of classism. As much is inevitable.

A Man of Means consists of a series of six short stories that originally appeared in The Strand in 1914, a chronological and a consistent whole that – perhaps due to the co-writer C. H. Bovill – read as particularly snappy and satirical for Pelham Grenville W. The theme might have been the corruptive power of sudden wealth, but turned in the end into a light farce on greed, in which a simple and innocent young man, Roland Bleke, learns to avoid traps laid by mercenary characters after his prize winnings. The most biting of these depictions is the unscrupulous stock broker whose operation eerily resembled that which led us to the global financial crisis almost a 100 years later. He ends up losing while Roland gains via the vagaries of the stock, and Roland never even realizes that he was being used. The most oppressive and dare we say sexually charged of the stories is an affair where Roland finds himself engaged to a beautiful dancer from a fictional South American state, who turns out not only to be after his money to finance her country’s royalist revolution, but also married.

The stories read easily and segue into each other seamlessly. For a fan of P.G.’s, this makes pleasant light reading. I’m almost ashamed to say how little I was bothered by the exoticism and classism, when there was so much simple and clever delight to go with it. At the same time, I do not whole-heartedly recommend this to anybody who happens to come from a South American country, or any nation torn with internal conflict.

*~~~~ (1/5)

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Warning: Contains the f-word, repeatedly.

I give up, Greg.

Wicked gave us a gritty re-imagining of a fantasy world that most of us know best from the saccharine weirdness that was the 1939 film, with intricate characterization, gay people, complex morality and sex! And a weird-ass disability depiction. Okay. I got past that, though it’s a huge peeve and marred my enjoyment of the novel, along with its eventual cop-out concept of evil.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was a gritty re-imagining of an escapist heteronormative fairytale, with feminist themes, intricate characterization, and complex morality! And then a goddamn offensive depiction of disability

Mirror, Mirror equates humans with dwarfism with mythical creatures who are half object and half person and I just fucking give up, Maguire.

You may have been trying to pull the same trick of making a female villain character likeable but a) she’s still shown to be selfish and evil, b) contrasting her with the pretty pale purity of the Snow White character is not challenging the virgin/whole dichotomy but reinforcing it, and c) what the fuck is up with this fucking disability thing?

Not only does your mythical half-man half-rock creature recognize himself in a picture of a human with dwarfism – meaning shortness of stature is a defining feature of the creature’s species rather than, I don’t know, being mostly mineral-based – a dynamic, powerful old woman is rendered helpless and submissive when she becomes disabled.

Also, Greg, I’m afraid this just wasn’t a very good book. I realize you had something poetic you wanted to achieve here, the idea of formation of identity, lots of pretty mental images of blossoming and blood and sex and violence and primordial psyche, but it doesn’t work. Disbelief can be suspended quite far if you get the details right, but that wasn’t the case here. A child survives under ground without food or drink because, well, it’s just a special spot where that sort of thing can happen. She can make dinner out of thin air, too, because of the spot she’s in. She also spews out years’ worth of menstrual blood because, well, she just does, okay. By the way, there really is a God.

Add to that the necessary historical inaccuracies needed to make Lucrezia Borgia your decadent murderess stepmother and no amount of silly preachers or descriptions of rowdy delightful old peasant women (who end up disabled) or “slow” incestuous goose boys… No, wait, that wasn’t going to help your case anyway.

I am angry because you used to get so much of it right, Greg. You depict non-normative people with compassion, you show the humanity of villainous acts, and the villainy of hypocrisy and racial segregation. You create wonderful characters. You show a fabric of humanity that is more varied than just white, pretty people against ugly, usually coloured people. You can’t follow that up with pretentious ableist bullcrap like this and not expect to make your readers angry.

Stop writing for a while, Greg, and read instead. I suggest starting with FWD.