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Books for the Climate Change Generation

This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook - The essential guide to saving the planet through peaceful protest and civil disobedience.

Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman - The story of average suburban teenagers struggling to survive during a near apocalyptic drought in California. This book really doesn’t pull any punches…

Apocalypse by D.H. Lawrence - The iconic author’s thoughts on religion, industrialisation and modern society. As applicable today as when it was written.

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland - An unflinching portrayal of the lives of two sisters in a world devastated by plague, famine, energy crises and climate disasters.

Rewild Yourself by Simon Barnes - 23 ways to bring nature back into your life.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - The relentlessly bleak story of a father and son in a world ravaged by environmental disasters.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions! Much love - Elko x

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Was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Ahead of its Time?

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a 2003 film directed by Stephen Norrington, based on the graphic novel by comic book powerhouse and amateur Rasputin impersonator Alan Moore, is a film that I’ve always held quite close to my heart. As fledgling little hipster, I was enraptured by the films gothic aesthetic and ornate victorian design. However, what really made my heart race and my eyes sparkle, unblinking at the CRT screen until I could no longer process colour and shapes properly, was the premise: all these different characters, from all these different works of victorian fiction, all coming together to fight evil. The very concept of it was groundbreaking to me, and it made a young me chitter with excitement.

Despite this, and despite it making a $100,000,000 profit, the film was critically panned, Roger Ebert calling out the ‘inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy.”

As well as this, being made in the the cinematic dark age that was the early 2000s, it’s evident that a lot of the film just doesn’t hold up. The special effects are often laughable, and the acting is often off kilter, which is a shame considering how beloved the source material was.

However, looking back now, I can’t help but think that League was not an inherently bad movie, but rather a good idea executed poorly, or more to the point, executed at the wrong time.

Just five years after League was released, Marvel released their first self funded film, Iron Man, which I’m sure I don’t have to tell you was an unimaginable success, changing the entire film industry, not least because it was the start of something both creatively and financially incredible, that being the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a series of films featuring already iconic characters, set in the same world. I still remember the sensational feeling I had, and I’m sure many others had, watching Avengers in 2012, seeing these heroes finally meet and interact with each other, and it was the exact same feeling I had watching League as a child. And so I wonder, would League have been better recieved if it was made in the 2010s?

I don’t think I’ll blow anyone’s minds when I say that shared universes are hot shit right now, with many movie studios gawping green-eyed at Marvel’s unparamounted success, which has collectively made so much money that I’m looking at the number right now and I’m not quite if I can even read it. As such, so many studios and creators are scrambling to create their own shared universe, including but not limited to Universal’s Dark Universe, Sony’s Venomverse, the Cloververse, whatever the hell Ghostbusters 2016 was trying to do and of course, the DCCU, which I’m happy to report has finally made at least one good film.

So I ask you, why not a League reboot? Each character could have their own fleshed out movie based on the book they first appeared in, finally culminating in an epic united front against Moriarty or super Dracula or something. Well, if any of that tickled your fancy, well I’ve got possibly good but more accurately anxiety inducing news for you: there are rumours that Fox are planning an all-new, female-centric adaption of the graphic novel. Just rumours, mind, and of course, there are some worries that it will clash with Universal’s Dark Universe, which also features Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man, etc. However, I really wouldn’t be worried, for two reasons: one, if  2017’s The Mummy was anything to go by, the Dark Universe will crash and burn like the Hindenburg, and two, I sincerely believe that in these times, there’s a far bigger market for a film about Tom Sawyer teaming up with a vampire to fight Kaiser Wilhem or whoever the villian will be than a film about Tom Cruise being useless for 110 minutes. Besides, we know damn well that at the very least, a Dorian Gray movie would be a success, because if Marvel and more to the point, Tumblr has taught us anything, it’s that the world loves a dark, bougie twink.

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Fury, Hacksaw Ridge and the Conflict of Ideology

There is a scene in the 2014 WWII movie Fury in which Sgt. Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt) gets the attention of the inexperienced and naive soldier Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) and points to the towering plumes of black smoke in the distance.

‘See that?’ he says, ‘That’s a whole city on fire.’

Fury is probably my favourite WWII movie, much for the same reason Jarhead is my favourite post-Vietnam war movie; It takes a gritty, depressing and altogether realistic look at the nature of war. Growing up (in the UK at least), you’re led to believe a strangely nostalgic narrative about WWII, that the veterans were golden-boy heroes who took it all in stride, keep calm and carry on what what, and while I have every respect for the soldiers who fought against the nazis and the axis forces, I still find this portrayal rather diluted. Fury portrays its heroes as ordinary people dropped into the deepest bowels of hell, the magnitude of the horror they’ve witnessed twisting and breaking them, turning them into much darker, cynical people who are often seen not as heroes but as beasts and psychopaths detached from what you could call ‘civilised’ society. There’s this incredible scene about halfway through the film where Wardaddy and Norman are in the apartment of two German women and instead of abusing the women or raiding the place like the rest of the soldiers, they try to create a sense of normality. They wash themselves, they play piano, they eat together with the women (one of which Norman even has a brief affair with). Watching the scene is like watching children playing house. Of course, this is ruined when the rest of Wardaddy’s squad turns up, drunk, brash and dirty. They bang on the piano and take the women’s food. As if seeing what Wardaddy is trying to create here, Gordo (Michael Peña) recounts the story of when they spent days upon days shooting enemy horses in extreme detail, as if reminding Wardaddy and Norman that war isn’t eggs and piano music, it’s blood and fear. As if punctuating the scene, the two women are killed in an explosion, leaving Norman hysterically scrambling through the rubble, and a part which weirdly stuck with me, Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) drags him out, laughing ‘Who you think you are, Jesus Christ? You gon’ raise her up? Get the fuck back in the tank.’

On the other end of the spectrum, however, is 2016′s Hacksaw Ridge, based on the true story of Desmond Doss, a WWII combat medic and conscientious objector. While the film still has all the grit and gore you would expect, the themes are completely oppositional to Fury. Where Fury was necessarily cynical and even at times straight-up negative, Hacksaw Ridge is essentially a hopeful story about about a simple man who refuses to let a dark world change him. As Doss (Andrew Garfield) says, ‘With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together’. While not my favourite of the two, Hacksaw Ridge is still a great film, even though I did roll my eyes a little every time soft music started playing, Garfield looked up into sunshine and spouted some homely wisdom about Jesus or how he sees the world.

I would never say that either of these films are wrong in their portrayal of WWII, namely because I’m barely 20 and I’ve never been to war. I will say, however, that they are different, one being cynical and the other hopeful. I think which one you prefer says a lot about your character. Personally, I believe Doss, both the real soldier and the character, acted honourably and were right to stick to their ideals, not allowing the war to break them. However, whenever I watch Hacksaw Ridge, I can’t help but quote something Wardaddy said - ‘Ideals are peaceful. History is violent’.

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We Are What We Are | Review

If I had to describe 2013′s We Are What We Are in one word, even though I don’t want to because it only serves to diminish and dilute, it would be grey. Not grey as in boring, but grey as in oppressive, like a looming raincloud or a soviet administrative building.

The film follows the Parker family following the death of the mother, Emma. The audience isn’t told much about them, but let’s just say ain’t exactly the Brady Bunch, with constant hints that they aren’t exactly normal (strange rituals, a mysterious family history, a cellar full of missing women, keeping ketchup in the fridge, etc). 

Thematically, It reminds me a lot of The Witch, or The Vvitch, however you want to spell it. Not only does We Are What We Are also have heavy themes of family, religion and the concept of man vs nature, but like The Witch, it’s horror is also grounded in this Kafkaesque sense of some great unknowable terror, creating an incredible stifling sensation in the audience, which is a brand of horror that, in my opinion, desperately needs to come back into popular cinema.

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Savageland | Review

Hark back to my review for The Girl with All the Gifts, in which I briefly critiqued the use of zombies in modern pop-culture, touting them as exhausted and played out, ‘a tired fad’ I believe was the phrase I used. A terrible shame, as I remember a time when zombies where legitimately scary, an inhuman mass of shambling figures in the dark. Today, however, they are merely targets, a copy-paste enemy for us to moreishly mow down in our first-person shooters, which The Walking Dead has taught us can easily be evaded by speed-walking, and can easily be dispated with a swift blow to the head with a golf-ball.

So how in the (when there is no more room in) hell did an under-the-radar horror flick use zombies to send waves upon waves of shivers down my spine with nothing much more than a series of grainy photographs?

2015’s Savageland managed to do just that. This faux-documentary (which in my opinion, will soon replace the traditional found-footage genre) follows Salazar, photographer and lone survivor of a mysterious massacre in a quiet town just north of the Mexican border. People quickly assume he commited these atrocities. His only defense? A series of photographs depicting the victims, as well as the monstrous figures hidden in the shadows…

Savageland is a fresh, brilliantly constructed and paralysingly scary piece of horror cinema and possibly one of the best editions to the genre in the last five years, blending in an almost cerebral sense of terror with an interesting commentary on immigration. Just, you know, have some nice cartoons lined up for when you finish it.

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Take Me to the River | Review

I’ve heard it said that one of the fundamental joys of film is plot; the common fantasy of life having meaning, of a definite beginning, middle and end, of not a single question being left unanswered.

2016’s Take Me to the River doesn’t give a shit about your pathetic fantasy.

The film follows Ryder (played by up and coming star Logan Miller), a skinny, gay teenager from California visiting his rugged, cornfed family out in Nebraska. Needless to say, he’s kind of the rainbow sheep of the flock. In a pile of old wrangler blue jeans, he is a pair of bright red booty shorts. As if things weren’t hard enough, an interaction with his young cousin Molly leaves him the target of suspicion and condemnation from his family.

Take Me to the River does an incredible job at creating a sense of isolation and dread in Ryder, never really taking the focus off of him, but what truly gives the film its edge is the constant sense that there is something going on that we are simply not privy to, making each scene seem incredibly tense and surreal, as well as unforgivingly brutal. Much of this tension comes from Josh Hamilton’s incredible performance as Keith, Molly’s father and defacto patriarch of the family. Everything from his choice of words to the slight shifts in his eye create a sense of quiet, impending doom, like a coiled rattlesnake.

But as with every character in this film other than Ryder himself, his motives are never made clear, leading to much speculation on behalf of the audience. There are constant clues leading to some dark family secret, particularly in the intense interactions between Keith and Ryder’s mother (Robin Weigert) as well the surreal interactions between Ryder and Molly. However, the audience will never achieve any gratification as to what exactly is going on. The final scene shows Ryder leaving Nebraska to the rather appropiate tune of Queen’s Under Pressure, detachedly looking out at the river as his mother weeps before cutting to black.

Take Me to the River is an indie darling made up of tense, emotional scenes that will leave your skin crawling and your brain screaming for answers where there is none. Perhaps that’s its genius. This film is like seeing someone inescapably beautiful walking down the street, but before you have a chance to do anything, they’ve already gone. You don’t know what would’ve happened, and you probably never will, but God help you if you don’t think about it every now and again.

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Indie Film Extravaganza!

I’m back, bitches, and not just because I haven’t posted anything in a couple of weeks. For you see, for the longest time now, I’ve been subsisting on found-footage horror movies and old Top Gear specials, the visual equivalent of eating nothing but instant ramen and black coffee for a month. What’s wrong with me? I asked myself. I used to watch arthouse films and read coming-of-age novels. I listened to Alt-J on vinyl, I’m better than this. Something needed to change, so I decided to get back to my hipster roots and watch some indie movies.

The first indie flick on my screen was 2017’s Sun Dogs, the story of a well-meaning if delusional young man and his quest to join the marine corps. On the face of it, this appeared to be a quirky comedy about an eccentric outcast, not unlike Napoleon Dynamite, but by god, if it isn’t so much more than that. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say that this movie is heartfelt and heartbreaking. It’s a story that could be told without words, or a ninety minute runtime, and I’m not ashamed to admit it left me weeping into my pillow.

The second indie movie I saw was 2017’s Mr. Roosevelt, written, directed and starring Noël ‘totally not Zooey Deschanel’ Wells, which may very well be the platonic ideal of an indie movie - a quiky young woman with incredible bangs trying to find her place in the world, scenes of near-anarchic freedom, a straight laced counterpart who has her shit together, a love interest with a beard, etc etc you get the idea. Despite it’s rather cliched tropes, the film itself more than holds up thanks to it’s exceptional writing, direction and acting. Mr Roosevelt is one to see for any twenty-something feeling kind of lost right now.

The final film I saw was 2014’s Requirements to be a Normal Person, which- wait, am I watching Mr. Roosevelt again with the audio changed to spanish? No? But there’s a young woman with incredible bangs struggling to find her way in life. Still no? Damn. I take it back, Mr. Roosevelt is not the platonic ideal of an indie flick, this is. Within the first fifteen minutes, I’ve already seen all the genre tropes set out in Mr. Roosevelt mixed with elements of Amélie and the works of Wes Anderson. It’s a hipster’s dream. Although you will spend the entire movie wondering if it’s sponsored by Ikea.

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The Girl with All the Gifts | Review

Imagine, if you will, a beautiful face, bearing a look of slight confusion (narrowed eyes, lips parted, etc). This was me, reading about the plans for a film based on the hit video game The Last of Us.

‘Wait…’ Thought I, ‘Didn’t that already happen?’

Yes, I’m sure of it: fungal zombies, distanced father figure, little girl who’s brain holds the potential for a vaccine… That was definitely a movie already. What was it called again? Oh yeah, The Girl with All the Gifts.

Much like Good Time, The Girl with All the Gifts is one of those pretty good movies from the past year or two that apparently no one fucking saw. Despite starring actors such as Paddy Considine and Glenn Close, The Girl with All the Gifts only made back 2.3 million USD of its 5 million USD budget, although it was critically acclaimed, earning an 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and winning a British Independent Film Award. Personally, I believe The Girl with All the Gifts’ downfall was a worn out premise and plot that couldn’t be saved by any number of excellent performances or incredible original score (honestly though, Sennia Nanua was excellent, and the score was ancient sounding and eerily beautiful). I’ve already joked about the similarities to The Last of Us, and that came out in 2013, when the zombie craze was already starting to die down. No matter how well the movie was made, you can’t rely on an already tired fad.

I don’t know, maybe the book was better.

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Far Cry 5 | Review

Far Cry 5, Ubisoft’s latest outing into what has been dubbed ‘murder tourism’, has been mired in controversy since the first trailers came out. As soon as certain people learned that the primary antagonists were members of Montana-based murderous doomsday cult loosely based on some vague interpretation of the bible, they were quick to call it a ‘Christian killing simulator’ and later a ‘white genocide simulator’, because this is the latter half of the 2010s, and therefore everything is part of a grand conspiracy concocted by social studies students in order to make the Star Wars franchise worse and stop actual innocent people from being actually murdered. I would call it Orwellian, but Orwell was insightful and brilliant, and to bring him into this would be insulting. This is more like experiencing a skittle-induced headache while listening to your racist uncle’s views on how things were a whole lot better when minorities just stayed quiet about their subjugation.

Soon though, as we got to see more of the game, the controversy fog cleared, and people began to realise that people who kidnap people and drown them in hallucinogenic baptism pools might be bad people regardless of the god they follow and the colour of their skin, and people were just as happy to mow them down as much as they were when the Far Cry enemies were pirates or asian. However, all was not well for Ubisoft’s best franchise (fight me, Assassin’s Creed fans), for people, in that truly magical way of theirs, still found things to complain about.

First off, the setting. I heard a lot of people complain that rural Montana was pretty boring compared to the series’ usual far-flung, exotic places like Kyrat or Rook Island, and maybe this is the secret redneck in me, but personally, I really enjoyed Montana. The world felt bigger and denser. Looking back on it, Far Cry 4 was just a jungle with some story missions, villages and endangered animals to slaughter. Hope County, Montana has forests, mountains, rivers and crucially, hardly any radio towers. Instead, areas of the map are revealed far more organically, with conversations, maps, road signs and exploration. It was an incredible evolution for the franchise. What’s more, there’s countless characters who can give you missions, which, unless it involves collecting baseball stickers or something, makes it easy to earn resistance points (resistance points are necessary to move forward in the story and are earned by doing missions, liberating outposts, etc. I will say, however, that they can become a bit of a grind once you’ve done all the big story missions).

Another aspect of Far Cry 5 that caused a great deal of murmuring in the comments section was the player character. In previous installments of the franchise, the player character was an actual named character the player controlled, such as Jason Brody or Ajay Ghale. In Far Cry 5, however, this has been scrapped for a customisable silent protagonist simply known as The Deputy, because while the sheriff was shot, the Deputy was famously not (that sounds like a joke, but it’s actually not). This was a ballsy move from Ubisoft, as the protagonist has always been a signature element of the series; a fish out of water slowly becoming master survivalist and all-round killing machine (except Ajay, who doesn’t even flinch when he kills his first man and proceeds to dumbfoundedly agree to become a one-man guerrila army and take out an entire fascist regime because apparently he’s Jason Bourne or something). But Pagan my Min if the silent protagonist in Far Cry 5 isn’t somehow incredibly endearing. Maybe it is the fact that they’re silent, because then you can imagine them as literally anyone. I wasn’t trust-fund douche Jason Brody or blank-faced terminator Ajay Ghale, I was The Deputy, who I imagined as a strong-willed, kind-hearted, Native American woman who knew how to kick ass, take names and fly WWII era fighter planes for some reason. Furthermore, I got attached to the people of Hope County a hell of a lot more than I did to the people of Kyrat or Rook Island. Maybe it was just because because I could enlist them to kill cultists for me, but I had a real affection for them. I never cared what Pagan Min did to Sabal or Amita, but if Joseph Seed even looked at Nick Rye or Jess Black the wrong way, I would beat his ass straight into a Rabbids game.

I loved Far Cry 4, and if you had asked me straight after I finished it what I wanted the next one to be about, I would said Oh, you know, a fish out of water fighting a militia in the jungles of, I don’t know, Peru or something. So basically, same shit, three years later. And Ubisoft could have done that, but they didn’t, they made it different, they took chances and in my opinion, made it better. If you’re one of those people who just wants the same thing over and over again with only minor changes, then good news, Far Cry 3 is still great and you can still play it. But if you want something new, then that’s even better, because Far Cry 5 stands a good chance of becoming my game of the year for 2018.

Oh wait, Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming out this year. Well, Far Cry 5 is still great, anyway.

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Why Good Time is a better Drive than Drive

What people seem most fixated on when they talk about Drive is what I can only describe as an aesthetic. They speak of synthwave, of bloody hammers, the grittiness of it. They bite down and smile as they talk about, punching the air in front of them lightly with two balled up fists. But Drive isn’t gritty. Not really.

When I first saw Drive, I was kind of shocked. Not because there wasn’t that much driving in a movie called Drive (I’m not falling for that again. That’s right, I’m looking at you, Trainspotting) but because it’s so light and floaty. It’s Ryan Gosling driving a vintage car down the Los Angeles river with what’s-her-face from The Great Gatsby by his side. It’s a scene straight out of an indy romance put under the valencia filter. Where was the vapourwave? I was promised vapourvave, dammit!

Now, obviously, Drive is still an amazing film from one of the most visionary directors currently working, but I went in expecting something grittier, denser… it just didn’t match the aesthetic I assumed going in, and when I left the theatre, part of me still hungered for a film full of drugs, blood and synth music.

So, recently, I saw Good Time.

2017’s Good Time is the first movie with Robert Pattinson I’ve seen since I saw Twilight as a kid, and wow, this is a far cry from that. Gone are the days that R-Pats played a pair of moody cheekbones. In Good Time, Pattinson plays Connie, a small time criminal from New York who, after a botched bank robbery gets his brother arrested, gets to work trying to get him back through any means necessary.

You want grit? Try bleach haired, sleep deprived Robert Pattinson beating a security guard unconscious and then force feeding him acid so he won’t remember it. You want synthwave? Half of all the lights in Good Time are blue or red, its like watching it through a pair of vintage 3D specs. You want Ryan taking a relaxing Sunday drive with his love interest and her kid? No, you want Pattinson, blood-shot, at a white castle in a stolen car with a drug addict and a girl he was about to fuck two minutes ago, that’s what you want. No? Well, too bad, you’re getting it. Pattinson didn’t slog through four Twilight movies for you turn your back on him now.

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The Weirdness by Jeremy P. Bushnell | Review

The title doesn’t lie, this is a strange one.

Jeremy P. Bushnell’s 2014 novel starts out simple enough; our protagonist, Billy Ridgeway, struggling author and professional sandwich maker, ranting about the inexplicable nature of a fresh banana in november. It gets weirder from there, not the least due to a chance encounter with the Devil himself, who offers Billy the fulfillment of his life’s goals in return for finding a missing Lucky Cat figurine.

Again, it get’s weirder from there.

The Weirdness is both beautifully written and incredibly funny. Its plot, though surreal, is still easy to follow, and despite the demons and magic Starbuckses, the characters and story are very relatable, especially if the reader is also a struggling writer dabbling in the occult.

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Gallows | Review

Found footage. Jump scares. Annoying teens. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Yes, 2015’s Gallows is as clichéd as a horror movie can get. It even pulls the old ‘twenty years ago tonight, in this very place…’ gambit, which I believe got old the hundredth time it got told around a campfire, sometime in 1962.

The story however, though rooted in, shall we say, iconic tropes of the genre, is fairly original. We follow… Ryan? Brian? Ryan. Sorry, I had to look it up. Most if not all the characters in this film are pretty forgettable. They’re written like someone was trying to parody the genre but forget the whole parody element. There’s the obnoxious bro-douchebag, the secretly sensitive jock, the drama geek who’s very attractive but everyone somehow believes she’s an absolute hag and the girl who’s sole purpose in this movie is to cry and wear short skirts and oh my god, she was in God’s Not Dead, that’s fucking hilarious.

What was I talking about? Oh right, the story. So Mystery Inc. decide to sneak into school at night to wreck up the play so the jock doesn’t have to perform. Said play is The Gallows, the same play where twenty years ago, in a terrifying age known as the early nineties, some kid accidently hung himself, and what do you know, his ghost now haunts the school and now Josie and the Pussycats have to fight for their lives yadayada you see where I’m going with this.

The Gallows is, to its credit, scary. Seriously, I even did that thing where you close one eye and bunch up into a little ball. The ghost is genuinely frightening at times and I even found the ending quite satisfying. His motives felt real and honestly, he’s the best thing in this movie, which is as it should be.

If you’re a fan of the genre and can see past all the clichés, then by all means, check it out if you want. If, however, you’re sick to your stomach with the whole Supernatural-Horror-Menacing-Teens thing, then yeah, this won’t exactly refresh your palette. This would be like drowning your palette in melted cheese and garlic aioli.

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What Remains of Edith Finch | Review

Bet you didn’t know I did videogames too, huh? Well, I say videogame, What Remains of Edith Finch plays a lot more like what you might call a ‘visual novel’, or perhaps a ‘walking simulator’. However, unlike, say, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Edith Finch involves far more than walking around an empty field chasing lights.

The game follows the titular Edith Finch, the last surving member of the Finch clan, as she explores her family home and the fates of her relatives. The house itself is a joy to explore, full of secret passageways, each room being completely different, each telling a different story. Anyone who read A Series of Unfornate Events as a child (Or, you know, an adult) will feel pangs of excitement as you find each hidden door and eccentric bedroom of golden age actresses and norwegian carpenters.

What gives Edith Finch it’s charm is the minigames you sink into whenever find a shrine dedicated to a fallen family member. I have a real issue with monotous gameplay; the endless brick throwing and out-choking in The Last of Us nearly brought me to episodes of rage and misery whenever I saw another fucking pallet for Ellie to get the fuck on, how the hell have you not learned to fucking swim ye- sorry, I lost myself there for a second. Anyway, there is no issue with monotony in Edith Finch. Not only can the game be completed in a day, but each minigame is fresh and original. One moment, you’re a shark hunting seals, then you’re in a1960’s comic book, then you’re moving an imaginary king with your left hand (stick) while beheading fish with your right hand (stick). At no point does Edith Finch lose your attention. You’re urged to keep going just to see what the next minigame will be.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a beautiful example of a videogame as a storytelling device, on the same level as literature and film. An enticing, enriching story without sacrificing any actual gameplay. That’s why, despite coming out the same year as Horizon: Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I consider Edith Finch the best game of 2017.

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The Nix by Nathan Hill | Review

I have always thought that the phrase ‘damning with fine praise’ meant ‘telling someone their work is good even when it is certainly not, thus setting them up to fail’. The Nix by Nathan Hill, however, has opened my eyes to a new interpretation.

On the back cover were a slew of one-line reviews from various newspapers and magazines celebrating The Nix. De rigeur for these things obviously, but one sentence, a quote from the New York Times, stood out - ‘Earns the title Great American Novel’.

Oh damn! I said, out loud, in the middle of the bookstore. What I hold in my hands is the new Gatsby, or Catcher. My little heart sang. I ran home like that one scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, my golden ticket in hand. I rushed inside, scrambling for the front page and, ladies and gentlemen, I read. Oh Lord, how I read, and it was good, so good, but it would be so much better if I wasn’t constantly waiting for it to be great.

I have come to realise that ‘damning with fine praise’ has another meaning, that just knowing something is supposed to be great can spoil it. The Nix, the story of Samuel Anderson Andreson, a down and out writer and literature teacher, and his estranged mother, who recently assaulted a united states senator, drawing the two together again after thirty years apart. The Nix is a novel about love and loss, about America, about growing up, and it is good. Very good. It might even be great, and it is factually, undeniably, an American novel. But does it earn the title of Great American Novel? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I intend to enjoy it for what it is; a damn good piece of contemporary fiction.

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Anomalisa | Review

Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa is the cinematic interpretation of Sartre’s immemorial quote ‘Hell is other people’, as well as, somehow, the complete opposite.

Anomalisa is the story of Michael Stone, the author of a motivational book designed to help customer service providers, which is possibly the most incomprehensibly boring thing I can think of. I imagine it being read to me while I’m tied to a chair, torturing me until I give up the whereabouts of the second key. Despite writing a motivational book, which has brought him enough fame for him to give a talk on the subject at a conference, Stone is in fact deeply depressed, his misery and loneliness represented by how everyone else in his world having exactly the same voice (the voice is, however, Tom Noonan, so at least he’s got that going for him). That is until he meets Lisa, a young, introverted (and critically, voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh) customer service provider attending his conference, who Stone quickly becomes obsessed with, believing she might be his salvation.

The most striking element of the film are the characters, not only because the incredible writing lends them an eerily everyday humanity and relatableness (Lisa herself reminded me of a close friend of mine, giving me a feeling of sickness I couldn’t I couldn’t shake off for the rest of the film) but also because, you know, they’re all puppets, which are all on the far side of the uncanny valley. At first, I assumed it was just to add to the film’s creepy vibes while also making it easier for Tom Noonan to voice literally everyone except two people. However, as the themes of isolation and dehumanisation set in, I realised that puppetry is is itself a metaphor for the lack of control and individualism in the human experience. Clichéd, perhaps, but none the less effective.

This kafkaesque puppet show is a terrifying vision of the horrors of the human condition, choosing between the pain of loneliness or the fear of being disappointed by those around you, the security of the everyday against the thrill of the unknown. A beautiful if depressing film from one of the greatest and most original screenwriters of our time.

[fletchingandnock]

Blockbuster | Review

I’m a film hipster. I know this. I’m one of those people that call Amélie by its full name. I use the word ‘Lynchian’ way too much in everyday conversation. Luckily, there are some films out there which would seem to be tailor-made for insufferable nerds like me. 2017’s Blockbuster appears to be one of those films.

July Hygreck’s Blockbuster can be best described as a kind of French Be Kind Rewind (The films of Michel Gondry are somehow a major theme in this movie. The characters constantly reference Eternal Sunshine and Gondry himself even stars in the film briefly as himself. It would be cool if it didn’t all feel so pandering, like self-insert fanfiction.) except more of an indie rom-com than a straight up indie-comedy. Whatsmore, a rom-com of the guy-does-insane-shit-bordering-on-the-creepy-in-hopes-of-getting-dream-girl sub-genre (See also Say Anything, Love Actually, etc.).

The film follows Jéremy, a movie nerd who has seen just enough of the right kind of movies to believe that love conquers all, and his quest to win back his girlfriend Lola by exploiting her love of superheroes. With the help of his friends, Jéremy films a series of fake ransom videos starring celebrities; he holds a nerf gun to their heads while wearing a superhero mask, claiming that if Lola doesn’t get back together with him, he’ll murder them, I guess. You know, I didn’t realise how stupid that was until I wrote it down.

The highlights of the film are the scenes with Jéremy and his friends whose names I can’t remember, when the movie switches focus from the main plot line to the films more comedic elements, which sincerely made me laugh now and again. Another pleasing element was the lack of clichés in the film. All the characters, even Jéremy at times, behave like normal people. Even Lola’s sassy friend seems rooted in the real world. I was also glad to see that the love interest was not simply a reward for the male protagonist, as mistake so many rom-coms sadly make, but was an interesting enough character in herself.

I find Blockbuster quite endearing. It reminds me of one of those amateur films made by like six people. It feels heartfelt and personal. Charming is probably the best word to describe it. As an indie flick, its not the best, and it’ll never be an iconic rom-com, but if you watch it with someone you love in your pyjamas on a sleepy wednesday night, you’ll leave feeling lighthearted and all tingly inside. Sickening, I know.

[fletchingandnock]

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole | Review

A deep sense of superstition and spiritual paranoia whispered grave warnings to me when I decided to review A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s 1981 novel. As an aspiring author, I still find myself thinking about Toole’s tragic story every now and again, as I stare helplessly at the broken stories on my screen, for even this beautiful novel, originally written in the early sixties, would never get published in its own time, driving the author to suicide in 1969, at just 32. I’ve taken to considering Toole as a kind of patron saint of the starving artist, a symbol of the faith and perseverance necessary to become an author, a firm hand forever on my shoulder.

The story itself is that of Ignatius J. Reilly, a morbidly obese, violently flatulent and endearingly pretentious virgin fitted in a green hunting cap. Despite his excellent education, his general awkwardness and misanthropy bordering on the maniacal has reserved him to a nest of notebooks, in which he compiles all the ills of society, all the vice and injustice of modern America, with seemingly no hope of employment on the horizon, much to the dismay of his poor mother. Our heretical hero’s journey to employment takes us to sleazy bars, hot dog stands, worker’s protests, inept police officers and a New York philosopher who quite rightly tells Ignatius that he needs to get laid.

This beautiful work of literature is a masterclass of character-based comedy, relentless in its wit and an identity all of its own, somehow feeling both fresh and classic all at once, still remarkably relatable fifty years after it was written. Although tragically unknown today, I wouldn’t be surprised if this rose to be comparative with Trainspotting or even A Clockwork Orange in the near future. A truly iconic novel. I only wish Toole himself could know that.