***** (5/5)

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Judging by the cover, Hot Fuzz looks like another dumb action comedy parody, in line with such wastes of space as Loaded Weapon 1 and Epic Movie. Chances are, though, that if you’re reading this blog you’ve already found out that it’s actually awesome.

The markers for awesome are there for those in the know. It’s an Edgar Wright movie, written by Wright and star Simon Pegg, who also collaborated on Spaced and the zomcom classic Shaun of the Dead. It’s set in a quiant English village. Those two officers not looking at the explosion are not hardened L.A. cops, but scrawny Pegg and sizeable Nick Frost dressed in English police uniforms. Still… ngh. If you’re like me, “movie parody” tends to suggest toilet humour, people falling down a lot, repeating scenes from popular movies but done in funny voices, and not one laugh in the whole dreadful hour-and-a-half run.

Well, that’s not what you get here.

Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is the ultimate police officer, by the book at all times, who catches more criminals than any other officer in the force. In fact, he’s so good that he’s making all other officers look bad, and so he gets shipped off to the country as the new sergeant of Sanford village.

The reported crime rate in Stanford is so low that the local police station feels more like a social club. Everybody knows everybody and the main cause of concern is kids wearing hoodies in the town centre. Sandford is so idyllic that when people start turning up dead, Angel is the only one who suspects murder.

Wright and Pegg’s writing is rife with references to action films, as well as being self-referential to the point of obsessive. The film reads as a cavalcade of clichés that refer to no particular action film so much as to all of them, and it’s not made funny by actors making faces but by actors taking themselves entirely seriously. It’s hard to say where exactly it passes beyond clever and funny into awesome. Shortly after the credits, when Angel is stabbed by Peter Jackson dressed as Santa Claus? When Nick Frost’s Danny Butterman stops in the street in shock – “You ain’t seen Bad Boys II?” When Angel makes paperwork look badass? When action buddy film queer subtext is fully acknowledged (though stopping short of nookie)? When handguns are grabbed from a bicycle basket and the town centre becomes a Wild West style shooting range? Oh god, I can’t even choose. The film is a whole cavalcade of awesome.

I’m trying to find something to criticize, and it’s not easy. Don’t see this film if you will be upset by the sight of the following:

- gory, graphic murder scenes
- explosions
- swans
- little old ladies getting kicked in the face
- little old ladies with shotguns
- too many iconic actors and actresses to keep track of
- cussing
- horseback riding
- James Bond taking a beating
- unrealistic survival
- Oscar-winning actresses with face-masks
- creepy villagers
- really, really, I mean seriously bad rendition of Shakespeare

If that’s all right with you, seriously, give it a shot.

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Bechdel Test:
1. It has at least two female characters
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.

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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke

http://www.jonathanstrange.com

***** (5/5)

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It’s long. The plot is convoluted, the characters numerous, and the footnotes copious. It’s archaic; “show” is  spelled as “shew”. It made my geeky little heart burst with its awesomeness.

Susanna Clarke has managed to write, in the dawn of the 21st century, a surprisingly authentic 19th century English novel – and made it a fantasy novel, with compelling characters and an affectation of dry scholarliness. The instant literary connection I made was to George Eliot’s Middlemarch and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, possibly just because those are the two English literature bricks I’ve read recently, but the similarities are striking, both in the terms of epic plot and in showing multiple viewpoints of characters on multiple levels of society, with their varying moral backbones and hang-ups. I even found the novel reminiscent of the casual racism of 19th century novels, as fairies are shown to be a uniformly dirty and amoral race, even if the bad taste is diffused by having the true hero of the story be a black Londoner.

There’s much here that deserves careful examination. I only wish I was erudite enough to make a full analysis, find all the literary and cultural sources and make more studied comparisons, but alas, I am not a student writing a paper. Let’s just say that it’s not necessary to be an aficionado of literary history to enjoy this novel, but it helps if you find Wellington + reanimated corpses a pretty awesome combination, and what helps most is liking English classics in the first place. If the latter is not the case for you, chances are you’ll give up within the first 50 pages anyway.

For people who absolutely hate Eliot and Thackeray, but want to find out what Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is all about, I wrote the following condensed recap in the spirit of Book-a-Minute Classics. It was previously published on GoodReads. If you haven’t read the novel and don’t like spoilers you probably shouldn’t have read this far in the first place, look away now.

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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Condensed Version)

Mr Norrell
I’ve spent all my life studying magic and now intend to revive it in England. By which I mean I want everyone to see how good I am and admire me.
Fairy, revive Lady Pole so the cabinet ministers will be impressed with me.

The gentleman with thistle-down hair
Ooh, she’s pretty!
(Revives Lady Pole, then enchants her and makes her dance in his house every night.)

Mr Norrell
Oops.

Jonathan Strange
I am young, talented and arrogant. I never resolved my issues with my father so I’m going to become Mr Norrell’s pupil and rebel against him with all my might.
(He does.)

Mr Norrell
The Raven King of the north is a fable.

Jonathan Strange
The Raven King rules!

Mr Norrell
Fairies are dangerous.

Jonathan Strange
Fairies rule!

The gentleman with thistle-down hair
(Steals people.)

(Invisible bells ring, objects disappear and new ones are put in their place, people act strangely, as if enchanted.)

Mrs Strange
There’s a curious gentleman living at the Poles who tells me stories about fairies all the time. You know Lady Pole? The strange woman who complains of music and says what a drag it is to dance every night, and babbles on about fairies?

Jonathan Strange
That’s nice, dear. Not now, though, I need to study magic some more. Did you know invisible bells are associated with the appearance of fairies?

The gentleman with thistle-down hair
(Steals Mrs Strange and puts a stinky wet moss-oak in her place.)

Jonathan Strange
Good heavens, dear, you don’t look well.

Moss-oak
I’m a tree.

Jonathan Strange
I think you need to lie down.

Moss-oak
(Does, and dies.)

Jonathan Strange
Oh no! Arabella!

Mr Norrell
I really miss Jonathan Strange, so I’m going to villify him in every newspaper and destroy his life’s work.

Jonathan Strange
To get over Arabella’s death, I will throw myself in my work. I wonder if I can find a way to Faerie.
(Does.)
OMG WTF FAIRIES STEAL PEOPLE!!

Lady Pole
DUH.

Jonathan Strange
Norrell, let’s summon the Raven King so he can help us free my wife.

Mr Norrell
Magic! Oh, I love magic. Didn’t you hate me, though?

Jonathan Strange
Maybe later.

(They do magic. A giant raven almost eats them. Secondary characters save the enchanted people.)

Norrell
They’re saved! We’re the best magicians ever.

The Raven King
I planned the whole thing.

English Magic
(Is revived.)

***** (5/5)

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I freely admit that I am biased against French and Belgian adult comics. This is because at some point no amount of high concept sci-fi or fantastic art can make up for the way the female characters are too often written as fantasy dolls propping up a pair of perfect tits. No, this is not all of them, and there are French and Belgian comics I love, sometimes despite the issues, but at some point I just gave them up.

Miss Don’t Touch Me is a French adult comic about prostitutes being murdered by a sadistic killer, features half-naked women on most pages, and I loved it to pieces.

Here’s the set-up: Paris in the 1930s. The virginal Blanche works as a maid together with her free-wheeling sister Agatha. She begs Agatha not to go to the dances where a murderer has been known to be picking up victims. When Agatha is (inevitably) killed, Blanche swears revenge and tracks the killer down to a high-class brothel. She gets hired as the brothel’s “English governess”, a girl who whips but must not be touched, “Miss Don’t-Touch-Me”. It’s a job she performs with vigour, putting all her anger and revulsion – towards her sister’s killer, or men and sex in general – into the act, while continuing in her off hours to search for clues. She intends to take the life of her sister’s killer.

The two artists behind the name Kerascoët have managed to create an art style that draws the eye and holds it by packing a big wallop of charm. Yes, charm is the word, despite the subject matter. The art is sketchy, but expressive and detailed. The characters are instantly recognizable, as they come equipped with varied body-types and their own unique features features. A cartoony, exaggerated style applied to the characters is combined with rich, almost expressionistic backgrounds. The layouts are simple with little variation between the panel shapes. Dramatic moments are underlined with larger panels and close-ups.

The plot sounds like a woman-against-man parable, almost as much as it sounds like slasher porn, but doesn’t in the end come off as entirely either. The story takes place very much in the female sphere, with men – even the ones who have all the power – barely making an appearance. Blanche’s main encounters are with women. She clashes with the other prostitutes as well as forms attachments with them, becoming particularly friendly with the other two “special girls”, the angelical masochist Annette and the “madame-monsieur” Josephine. Perhaps it’s partly because of this focus that the novel doesn’t come off as as offensive as you might think, though mostly I still put that down to decent writing, that is to say, that female characters are full-fledged and their motivations, however extreme, make sense within the story.

Blanche is not a likeable heroine, a wish-fulfilment character or even someone you might want to hang out with. She’s driven, murderous and has trouble controlling her impulses. Even so I found it easy to sympathize with her. I find this kind of character is particularly satisfying to read about, as, when successful, she provokes and evokes the reader’s darker impulses, and makes her question the moral structure of the story itself.

Many of the characters easily fall into categories – neurotic Blanche, Agatha who loves fun and gets punished it, martyred Annette, the money-grubbing madame, the cruel bully, and so on – but they’re also characters you can understand and recognize. There’s no forced feminist message obscuring plot and characters; what you get instead is a depiction of subjection, commercialism and dehumanization as the default state of these women’s lives and the (even more) gruesome consequences thereof. They are tied to the brothel in more ways than one, no longer fitting into the world outside after living by different rules within its four walls, and the description of their predicament and their world is gritty and evocative.

I have to add, despite it being a non sequitur – how awesome it is to have a black transsexual prostitute as a wise mentor character, someone kind, beautiful and adored? Josephine is strong, intelligent, in control, and not the least bit ridiculous. More of this, please.

Does it pander to sexual sadists and exploit its premise? Certainly. Does it uncritically portray the virgin/whore dichotomy? Yes – in a sense. Whatever the reason or plot behind it, the image of a naked woman strung up and cut is always a titillating image, harking back to the old days of pulp art and true crime scandal rags as well as ongoing, franker publications. The setting is all about sex and violence and Hubert & Kerascoët exploit the reader’s potential interest in them shamelessly. There is, however, a difference between presenting sadomasochistic scenarios and condoning actual violence against women, as there is between exploiting a kink and espousing an ideology. In my mind Miss Don’t Touch Me is on the good side.

As for the virgin/whore dichotomy, the dichotomy of perception exists in the world of the novel, where whores and loose women are considered by male outsiders, by the killer, the brothel owner and at first Blanche herself as less worthy, as people who can’t expect to be treated humanely unless they enforce this through violence. Blanche herself becomes a star attraction of the brothel because of her hallowed virginity. I am however willing to argue that this, rather than blaming sexual women for their predicament within the context of the story, is instead a depiction of attitudes towards virginity and of women’s own mobility – and lack thereof – within the trap those attitudes have made.

I might not be over my bias yet – it is reaffirmed every time I walk past a comics stand in my home town – but I will certainly be keeping an eye out for these three authors.