Sucker Punch

There was a lot of negativity surrounding Sucker Punch when it first came out, but I have to admit that I initially saw this as mainly just part of the backlash that director Zac Snyder has been copping ever since he made 300. I have no issues with most of Snyder's films, I've enjoyed them a lot, but Sucker Punch is definitely bad news. Even with certain reservations I had hoped the film might be a visually dazzling B-film with oodles of camp CGI schlock, but there aren't really any redeeming features along these lines - it's just flat-out bad. It isn't entertaining, it doesn't have anything to really say, it isn't all that original, it struggles to be coherent and (worst of all) it works off some fairly offensive ideas.

Here are ten reasons why you should avoid this trainwreck:

1. I can handle a film that fetishsizes women, it isn't exactly ideal but I can usually tolerate it in certain contexts. Alas, Sucker Punch goes so far beyond a naive rejection of feminism that it actually tries to use the concept of 'girl power' as an excuse to get away with this fetishsization. So we get a gallery of jailbait heroines stripteasing their way through the film whilst also banding together to fight the 'good fight' against their male oppressors. Snyder seems to want the audience to support these underdogs in their gender-specific battle for freedom, yet at the same time he hypocritically objectifies them as blatant sex objects.

2. This gets taken even further as the film plays out endless near-rape scenarios where the girls are repeatedly placed within an inch of violent penetration before escaping. I'm not sure exactly what Snyder is trying to say here, but the least charitable part of me suspects it's just a case of the director using this opportunity to put a few of his own personal fantasies on the screen. Not cool.

3. After the success of Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen, I guess it was only natural that Snyder would be given a blank cheque to make the film he'd always dreamed of making - this film is Sucker Punch. This means that not only does he direct it, but he also wrote the screenplay and produced it. Unlike his other films, this one is completely Snyder's baby, meaning that the responsibility is all his as well. All I can say is that the guy is not a writer and should never be allowed near a screenplay again.

4. The film desperately wants to be a zeitgeist and fails dreadfully. It combines manga/anime influences with a range of pop culture phenomenons and styles (art deco, zombies, dragons, samurai, WWI, steampunk, strippers, etc) but the problem is that it's all too much, and films this highly stylised are rarely successful (as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow will readily attest).

5. The plot. The main character, Babydoll (Emily Browning), gets sent to an insane asylum and descends into a fantasy world. Inside this fantasy world she then travels to other fantasy worlds, and the film stretches on like this for the majority, leaving the viewer wondering why they should care. I think we're meant to be all like, OMGz, which is the real world?!? But hasn't this kind of thing already been done to death in just about every fantasy TV show ever made?

6. Okay, so let's pretend we do care about the plot. Inside the first fantasy world (the one where Babydoll imagines that she's a schoolgirl stripper) she... well, it's confusing. No, wait, that's being generous - it's just stupid. There's this idiotic quest where she has to find a key and a knife and a map and blah blah blah, it makes no sense at all... every time she dances in the stripping world she disappears into another fantasy world where she goes on these quests. Somehow it all connects up and back in the stripping world she collects all these items at the same time, but then you remember that the stripping world is also fake and in 'reality' she is really actually in a lobotomy chair in a mental asylum and there's no real reason to give a shit.

7. I'm going to go back to my fourth point because it just really annoyed me. There's mental asylums, 'erotic' dancing, a martial arts school with a giant robot samurai, a medieval fantasy world, WWI trenches filled with German gasmask zombies, an alien world filled with robots... and why? Because it's 'cool'. Don't look for any other reason besides that. It's incredibly and deliberately unrealistic, there isn't even an internal set of rules to follow in all these geekgasm worlds. Watching it is a bit like watching someone play a video game without understanding what's going on. Why do the Germans even have to talk in German if it's taking place in a fantasy world? There's no consistency or internal logic. Snyder uses the 'fake reality' premise as an excuse for a free for all. By the time that Babydoll was magnificently and bravely slaying a dragon, I just couldn't bring myself to care at all because it meant absolutely nothing, even in the context of the film. Imagine if Snyder had made a movie like this that had an actual script? It would've been great, and that's the real tragedy of it all.

8. Scott Glenn. He's one of those guys who are almost famous because they've just been around for so long playing small roles in a big films. I'm guessing he's the only moderately famous name they could get for this pile of steaming trash. His character is... what? A mentor? A trainer? He just turns up every now again spouting cliches that have no real meaning or payoff.

9. The music is really bad. The worst offender would have to be the absolutely horrible cover of The Pixies' 'Where Is My Mind?'

10. The stupid monologue at the end. Just... argh!!!!

Look. The first five minutes of Sucker Punch is a wordless but effective music-video sequence that introduces the heroine's backstory. Snyder should've made the whole film like this... it would've essentially been a silent film (he could've got in on the craze before The Artist), and it would've been automatically twice as good because the audience would be spared Snyder's awful attempts at dialogue. It's an excrutiating and frustrating film because Snyder has such a flair for manipulatively visceral visuals.

I hate to insult anyone who likes this film (different horses for courses and all that) but I question the intelligence of a Sucker Punch fan. More than anything made by Michael Bay, this film is the sharpest piece of evidence in the case for cinema's ongoing degradation. Anyone who thinks Sucker Punch has a satisfying narrative must have undergone a lobotomy of their own.

Actually, there's something. Maybe Zac Snyder is saying that this is the future; that a a lobotomy is the only thing that will make modern films like this enjoyable? Maybe Sucker Punch is a critical work of genius?

Nah.

DIRECTOR: Zac Snyder
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Zac Snyder and Steve Shibuya.
KEY ACTORS: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Scott Glenn, John Hamm

RELATED TEXTS:
- Zac Snyder's other films are: Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen, The Legend of the Guardians and Man of Steel.
- I guess you could kind of compare Sucker Punch to Inception.
- 'Cuckoo nest' is a trope where a character in a TV show or a film is unsure of what is and isn't real, EG. The episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy thinks the entire show has just been a hallucination, or the episode of Deep Space Nine where Sisko wakes up in a mental asylum and thinks he's a sci-fi writer who made up Deep Space Nine in a series of novels. Other shows that have done this include Lost, Red Dwarf, Smallville and Life on Mars.

Moving House

I would love to keep pumping these reviews out but I am in the process of moving house at the moment and it has gotten just too hard to commit to five reviews a week. Normal service should resume by next week sometime, but in the meantime it will just be a case of whenever I get the time.

In the meantime, here's some cool pictures...

Johnny Depp in the underrated historical flick The Libertine.

Jason fights off an army of (literally) animated skeletons in the classic adventure Jason and the Argonauts.

Everyone's favourite out-of-work actors in the cult comedy Withnail and I.

Arnold Schwarzenegger in this great Japanese ad. Some actors will do anything if the price is right.

Natalie Portman menaced by her own reflection in Black Swan, one of the best films of the last five years in my opinion!

Which Lie Did I Tell?

Which Lie Did I Tell? is a non-fiction book by celebrated screenwriter William Goldman. It follows on from his previous book about writing in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Goldman is probably best remembered for writing the classic western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for which he won one of his two Oscars. He also put pen to paper for the films Misery, Marathon Man, All The President's Men, A Bridge Too Far, Heat, The Princess Bride, Maverick and The Ghost and the Darkness, amongst many others. This book, Which Lie Did I Tell? is an entertaining, mildly cynical and practical look at being a writer in Hollywood.

Goldman is very much the archetypal Hollywood scriptwriter. I watched one of his later films the other day, The General's Daughter, and without knowing it was him I guessed that he was the writer. I'm not saying he's shit, but he definitely knows how to write a script in a very traditional 'Hollywood' way.

The first part of the book deals with Goldman's own experiences... the period in the '80s when he was out of work, how he came to write the very popular novel The Princess Bride, how it was adapted into a great film, and his work on the films Misery, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Absolute Power, the abysmal Year of the Comet and a few others. It's a refeshingly honest insight into how things get done in Hollywood, how egos can overwhelm a good idea (see The Ghost and the Darkness), and how little writers get recognition for their work. He regales the reader with all of this whilst using as little vitriol as possible and with much good humour, making for good reading (well, he'd wanna make for good reading if he's meant to be such a good writer!)

The next part of the book is about ideas he's had for films but hasn't followed through, and the reasons why certain scripts get picked up by studios whilst others don't. It's informative for anyone wanting to become a scriptwriter, a kind of guide to the do's and dont's.

The final part of the book shows an original script by Goldman and details the opinions of some of his peers on what works in this script and what doesn't... quite frankly, this script is an absolute stinking turkey and did little to endear me to Goldman's apparent talent. I know he has written some great films, and I've enjoyed quite a few of them, but if the script featured in this book (and the film The General's Daughter) is anything to go by - well, maybe he jumped the shark.

Anyway, this is a cool insider's guide to the Hollywood screenwriting process and has some nice trivia and amusing asides from Goldman on various bits and pieces to do with his career and the writing process. I can't say I think he's the greatest scriptwriter who ever lived, but I can say that he does know a thing or too about writing in general, and what he has to say is definitely worth reading for anyone even remotely interested in writing for a living, or anyone just interested in the behind-the-scenes hoopla of Hollywood.

My Man Godfrey

My Man Godfrey is one of the early 'screwball' comedies of 1930s Hollywood... those snappy character-based comedies built on witty fast-paced dialogue and farcial plot mechanics. My Man Godfrey is one of the quintessential screwball comedies, having endured beyond its time as a reflection of Depression-era concerns about social class and sexual politics. Along with The Thin Man series, the film is probably also one of actor William Powell's best-known films.

I liked it, it's a good mix of 'silly' comedy and the pertinent issues of the day. How come no one really mixes comedy with hard-hitting social commentary any more? Four Lions is probably the only new movie I can think of that really fits that mold, and it's about as far from a screwball comedy as you can probably get. I liked the way the bright lights at the beginning of My Man Godfrey segued into the Hooverville trash heaps of the Depression. It's a nice contrast that sums up the hypocrisies of the haves vs. the have-nots, and it set the tone for the film's narrative (which deals with a down-and-out 'bum' given a second chance by a family of rich eccentrics).

This was the first time I've seen a William Powell movie. My initial impressions were that he was a more sardonic and less attractive version of Cary Grant, but as the film went on he seemed to become more intellectual and upper class, like David Niven or Ronald Colman. The classic character actors Alice Brady and Mischa Auer also appear and are both great in their supporting roles too. Auer cracked me up more than a few times as the 'freeloading' artist sponsored by some spoilt socialites.

For me, the best bit was the scavenger hunt sequence at the beginning. It's a great way to launch into the story, and it sweeps you along with the characters as they get caught up in this gimmicky challenge. The film's narrative lags a little bit after this but things do keep changing up enough to keep it interesting, and whilst I didn't see the ending coming it still felt 'right'. Anyway, if you've liked some of the other great comedies of the '30s, My Man Godfrey is the halfway point between something like Topper and Ruggles of Red Gap.

Oh, and I was a bit shocked by the wet T-shirt sequence. Take that, Hays Code!

DIRECTOR: Gregory La Cava
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Morrie Ryskind and Gregory La Cava, based on a short story by Eric Hatch.
KEY ACTORS: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Mischa Auer, Eugene Pallette, Alan Mowbray, Jean Dixon

RELATED TEXTS:
- The short story 1100 Park Avenue by Eric Hatch.
- Remade as My Man Godfrey in 1957, starring David Niven and June Allyson.
- Much like My Man Godfrey, the earlier film Ruggles of Red Gap tells the comedic adventures of a butler.
- Other pre-eminent screwball comedies of the '30s: It Happened One Night, Platinum Blonde, The Awful Truth, You Can't Take It With You and Topper.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actor (William Powell), Best Actress (Carole Lombard), Best Supporting Actor (Mischa Auer), Best Supporting Actress (Alice Brady), Best Director and Best Screenplay.

Meek's Cutoff

I decided to watch this film after seeing it on a few 'Best of' lists for 2011, hoping for a new revisionist western ala The Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowar Robert Ford. It isn't it at all like that film, in fact it isn't at all like any other western I've ever seen. It's very much an indie anti-western, seeking to redraw the genre's boundaries in much the same way that indie films often push the boundaries of drama and comedy. Meek's Cutoff seeks to show the often untold side of the pioneer's story, IE. The pioneers who didn't make it. What we get is a beautifully photographed and ultra-realistic depiction of 1845 Oregon that makes little to no concessions to traditional film dialogue or narrative structure.

I wanted to like this film but I found it kind of slow and boring. I can handle slow films but for me there has to be a payoff of some kind. The true story of Meek's Cutoff concerns a party of pilgrims who are led astray by their guide and 'protector' Meek. The tense slow build of the film mimics the rising panic these people must've felt as they slowly came to the realisation that they were going to die in this barren wilderness. I thought this story was going to be about harsh survival and the inevitable breakdown of civilisation when food and water runs out, but absolutely NOTHING HAPPENS. No one starts dying until the last ten minutes, and most of the film focuses on an Indian that the pilgrims capture and squabble over. It's boring and drawn out and I can almost handle 90 minutes of character mumbling and staring off into the distance if there was any kind of narrative payoff at the end, but the film refuses to nail anything down because it's much too hip and indie for that. The ending made me downright angry.

After looking up the real events this film is based on, I can only conclude that this is an abridged and seemingly toned version of the historical event. In director Kelly Reichardt's quest for atmosphere and understatement she's actually managed to make a film that's less exciting than the reality it's based on. Meek's Cutoff is a waste of a good idea, a waste of the talents of Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, and a waste of time. Maybe I just won't bother the next time someone thinks it's a bright idea to make a 'mumblecore western'.

DIRECTOR: Kelly Reichardt

WRITER/SOURCE: Jonathan Raymond, based on real events.
KEY ACTORS: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Shirley Henderson, Neil Huff

RELATED TEXTS:
- Reichardt previously directed the indie films River of Grass, Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy.
- Other 21st century westerns: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, True Grit, The Proposition, 3:10 to Yuma, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Open Range and The Missing.
- Other films about journeys of survival and/or European explorers getting lost: Aguirre the Wrath of God, Van Diemens Land, Burke and Wills and The Way Back.

AWARDS
Independent Spirit Awards - won Producer's Award.
Venice Film Festival - won SIGNIS Award. Nominated for Golden Lion.

The Bridges of Madison County

The Bridges of Madison County was openly derided by some when it first came out because of the mixing of Clint Eastwood with the romance genre. Indeed, this film could probably be summed up as "Eastwood goes soft". It's strange to hear his voice so regular. There's no growl in it, his attitude and manner is so light and easygoing. He plays against type, and he does it well. His character, Robert, is an old, sensitive adventurer - a man of the world with a certain non-judgmental openness and charisma. When he crosses paths with Francesca (Meryl Streep), she makes him realise how lonely he truly is, and the two strike up a doomed but passionate affair. The bridges of the title are a metaphor for Francesca - the county's locals take them for granted and don't see their beauty.

It's actually quite a well-staged piece of romance fiction. The story has that bittersweet edge to it, and Eastwood is able to curb his screen persona for the benefit of the genre, and he's a confident enough performer to do it without any self-consciousness. It would be nice to think that this is what the real Eastwood is really like, that the performance isn't fake because he's finally just being himself after years of macho posturing. Either way, half of the success of the film hangs on his successful performance. The other half of this success is (of course) Meryl Streep as the film's protagonist, Francesca.

Streep plays the dowdy, dependable housewife with a slight Italian accent, and as a woman whose dreams went unrealised. She's fascinated by Robert, he's from another world, but she's also self-conscious that she's too dull for him and is embarrassed about her housewifeness. I love that Streep has this character written out like this but still imbues it with a lot of unexpected strength, she steadfastly refuses to play the role as naive. And this is just as well because the whole film hinges on this character, and to have her as a stereotypical housewife cipher would've been a mistake. Eastwood-the-director knows all of this too, and he gives the whole film over to Streep as both director and actor. The camera often 'activates' and follows Streep throughout the film, a visual motif that suggests andaffirms that this is her story (EG. It follows a dog onto her lap, or follows her past Robert's car door and hovers on his company name on the truck because it's from her perspective).

Most of the film's strength lies in the acting, and the blocking of scenes. I still have some criticisms though - the meat of the story is too slow to start. The framing story of Francesca's son and daughter piecing together their deceased mother's past and discovering her secret affair didn't really work for me. Her son is the weakest aspect of the film, he's just a bit of a dick. The story occasionally cuts away back to her kids as they re-evaluate their own adult marriages in light of learning about their mother's romance and infidelity with Robert. It's upsetting for them, to see her in this new light, and it casts a pall over their memories. I can understand this subplot, but I just didn't care about it.

The Bridges of Madison County looks at the question of what it takes to make a person happy, and portrays love as complicated and multifaceted as it details a romantic fling in the most unlikely of places and circumstances. Ultimately it's a poignant, nostalgic film, and I'd recommend for fans of both Eastwood and Streep.

DIRECTOR: Clint Eastwood
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Richard LaGravenese, based on the novel by Robert James Waller.
KEY ACTORS: Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep, Annie Corley,Victor Slezak, Debra Monk

RELATED TEXTS:- The Bridges of Madison County, the 1992 novel by Robert James Waller. He also wrote a sequel in 2002, A Thousand Country Roads.
- Films about brief forbidden love affairs: Brief Encounter, Falling in Love (also starring Meryl Streep), In the Mood For Love and Love Affair.
- Streep also explored romance territory in Out of Africa and Heartburn.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress (Meryl Streep).
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Film (Drama) and Best Actress - Drama (Streep).

A Separation

"What's wrong is wrong - no matter who says what"

A lot of people felt vindicated when A Separation took out the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars this year. It's the sort of film that has a quiet, undeniable power that gets into your head and makes you think, it's a film that - against all the odds - actually comes from within Iran whilst also questioning said country's oppressive regime. I have to admit that I was quite surprised at this film and the country it portrays, I never realised Iran was so modernised or that it was open enough for such dialogues to take place. I think some of us in the West have this view of Iran (and most of the other Middle Eastern countries) as backward nations full of religious fanatics. I guess this is part of the beauty of international films, they blow apart our assumptions and can broaden our view of other cultures. I'm not saying that Iran doesn't have certain issues relating to fanatacism and theocracy, because it does (as evidenced by this film), but the society portrayed in A Separation (and the issues it deals with - such as the separated marriage of the title) is entirely accessible to an English-speaking audience in ways that they may not have expected.

We open with a POV shot from within a photocopier, an image that establishes Iran as a society of contrast where technology and theocracy now exist side by side. Nadar (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are a progressive Iranian couple undergoing a divorce due to complicated reasons. Simin wants to leave Iran so that their 11-year old daughter can grow up with a better education and opportunities, whereas Nadar refuses to leave while he still has his elderly Alzheimer's-stricken father to care for. It's a house in collapse, and the couple try to be pragmatic about it despite the difficulties in their situation.

Anyway, the film becomes quite intense when Nadar hires a maid to look after his father while he goes to work. A series of events occur (some of which we see, some of which we don't), culminating in the maid's miscarriage. Her husband, an unemployed man with a short temper, blames Nadar and demands satisfaction under Sharia law. Meanwhile, Nadar demands equal satisfaction for the woman's mistreatment of his father - an event that happened at the same time as the miscarriage.

I'm struggling to write this review without sounding racist or culturally sheltered. I don't believe that everyone in the Middle East is an Islamic extremist... I think they're people just like people in any other part of the world. But having said that, I feel like this film was partially about playing with Western assumptions about Middle Eastern society. The split between Nadar and Simin is largely amicable, they both still love each other and Simin even tells the judge that her estranged husband is a good father. This isn't your stereotypical Muslim marriage; this is a modern family that seems to be even more progressive than a lot of families in the West - with both mother and father working, and both parents supportive of their bookish daughter's quest for education... Nadar even encourages his daughter's independence (as evidenced by the petrol station scene). Another assumption that I (shamefully) made was that the husband of the maid would be an abusive spouse. He's a hot-tempered man, and the expectation of the viewer may be that he beats his wife, but the film doesn't play into such assumptions. When he finally cracks the kind of violence involved isn't what we might expect.


This is a film that's clearly working around a government's censorship - it doesn't seem like that kind of a movie at first, it's more of a courtroom drama - a complicated morality play in relation to a changing society. It tries to get at the truth of things by showing a seemingly simple situation involving a handful of people and then revealing the complications underneath. I think the hidden subversiveness of A Separation is in the fact that this is a situation where Sharia law can't and doesn't apply. These are people who are trying to assign blame for the harsh realities of life - the maid and her husband blame the loss of her baby on Nadar, and Nadar blames his father's decline on the maid. In reality, neither is really at fault for these unfortunate turns of fate - and it's a fundamental truth that seems at odds with the totality of Sharia law.

Another subversive facet of the film is the way it looks at the role of women in this modernising society. Nadar and Simin's daugher is forced by the (unfair) letter of the law into a situation that she shouldn't have to face. A Separation is partially about her loss of intellectual innocence, an internal act of government-sanctioned violation that demonstrates the differing levels of independence within Iran's infracstructure. Nadar and Simin's household might be liberal-minded but it's largely at odds with the society around it, and there's a certain incompatability between their progressiveness and the way the law operates in their country. The integration of religion into this society is quite heavy (aside from the Vatican, Iran is the only country in the world governed by a religious body), but the issues that Nadar's family faces - divorce, both parents working, care for the infirm - are ones that we would associate with our 'free' Western society.

For a film that seems so low-key on the surface, there's a lot of complexity to the issues it deals with. Director Asghar Farhadi directs it with such confidence and even pacing that it's hard not to get sucked into the magnetic pull of its events. It just feels real and relevant and once the plot started unfolding I just had to see how it would end.

DIRECTOR: Asghar Farhadi
WRITER/SOURCE: Asghar Farhadi
KEY ACTORS: Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi

RELATED TEXTS:
- Asghar Farhadi previously attracted critical acclaim with his films Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly.
- For a great American indie film about divorce see The Squid and the Whale.
- Other divorce/separation films: Kramer Vs. Kramer, American Beauty, Lantana, Revolutionary Road, Little Children and Blue Valentine.
- Leila Hatami came to international acclaim with her role in the 2002 film The Deserted Station.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Foreign Language Film. Also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Non-English Language Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Foreign Language Film.
Independent Spirit Awards - won Best International Film.

Brilliance of the Moon

Brilliance of the Moon is the third book in the Tales of the Otori series by Australian author Lian Hearn and rounds off the initial trilogy that the books form. It's a lot faster paced and to-the-point than it's predecessors and I found myself tearing through it rather quickly, eager to see how it all wraps up.

Takeo is now Lord Otori, gathering an army and marching across the Three Countries in the hope of uniting them, just as the prophecy in the previous book said he would. He now has Kaede at his side and plans to finally avenge the death of Shigeru and to re-take the city of Hagi from his treacherous step-uncles. But Lords who may have once been allies have now become enemies, the alliances of the Three Countries are forever shifting and the marriage of Takeo and Kaede has angered those who believe in the rigid codes of class on which their society has been founded.

There are a lot of loose ends to tie up in this book and Hearn does a pretty good job of satisfactorily concluding most of the bigger ones. Some she has deliberately left open for further novels to explore, but thankfully it doesn't feel like cheating and I don't think a more satisfying end to these epic novels of samurais and secret assassin-magic could have been written. Five battles take place in Brilliance of the Moon, and Hearn has done a very good job to ensure it doesn't get boring or monotonous.

I have to admit though that I was left a little confused by some aspects of the trilogy. Obviously the themes the author explores regarding the code of castes/classes is something too big to be completely resolved in this book, especially when so much action needed to take place and so many characters needed resolution, so I have a feeling this might be what drives her follow-up books to the trilogy (Harsh Cry of the Heron and Heaven's Net is Wide). People who read this book when it was first released as the end of a finite trilogy might've found it a little wanting though, and understandably so.

Some of the characters she introduced in this book also left me scratching my head... there's a sequence involving some kind of ogre/demon that wasn't entirely explained and seemed a little out-of-place, and it was featured so fleetingly that I couldn't help but wonder at why it was included at all. Come to think of it, this could be a criticism of the series overall - some of the characters enter and exit so quickly that I couldn't help but feel that either Hearn needed more pages to tell her story or that she should've involved less characters. I know it's unrealistic to have events like these dominated by only a few key characters and she was probably aiming at a certain historical-realism, but these are fantasy novels we're talking about here, and sometimes less is more.

Also, I couldn't help but think the ending was a little too neat. I don't want to ruin it for anyone, but let's just say there were very few surprises for me when I got to the end of the book. I don't know if I was neccessarily expecting more, but I just felt that it all went down in a far too straight-forward and predictable manner. This isn't always a bad thing, I still found it very enjoyable, I just... I dunno, as I said, maybe the other books round things out a bit more. Anyway, if you like feudal japan and samurais and cool stuff like that, and don't mind a smidgen of magic and historical-style intrigue, I'd reccomend these three books (Across the Nightingale Floor, Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon).

Thunder Road

Rock 'n' roll hillbilly gangster whiskey bootleggers? Hell yeah, that sounds like a great movie! Robert Mitchum is one of the all time coolest cats to ever act on the big screen, and he resolutely refused to credit the profession of acting with any importance. In short: he didn't give a shit. And Thunder Road is what happens when you give this guy - a reefer-smoking, calypso music-loving A-list superstar - the chance to make his film 'dream project'. Mitchum not only stars in this film (and ropes in his real-life brother to play his character's brother), he also co-wrote the theme song, co-wrote the screenplay and produced it. When an actor usually takes this chance to do a 'vanity' project it becomes incredibly self-important or life-suckingly 'artistic' (see John Wayne's overblown The Alamo or Johnny Depp's The Brave), but in Mitchum's case? He just wants to make a movie about souped up cars and redneck rockers. What a champ.

Mitchum plays Luke, the maverick son of a good-natured crime family that specialises in brewing illegal moonshine and burying cash in their backyard. Bootlegging is in Luke's blood, but he's out to make sure that his younger brother Robin (James Mitchum) never follows in his dangerous footsteps. Luke faces hardline g-men and a rival bootlegging outfit. It's a high stakes game that can result in your car ending up a burning wreck, and Luke and his brother come up with entertaining innovations for their wheels - such as razor blades on the front, oil slicks from the back, and the ability to dump a load of whisky before the car has even stopped.

The whole film is a Hollywood cliche, but it's overlaid with all these great hillbillyisms, so it's a bit of an odd combo. The Hays Code (which specified that crime could never be shown to pay) means that we know right from the outset that Luke (and his lifestyle) is doomed. I love how all-in Thunder Road is. There's a scene where Luke meets up with the big boss of a rival bootlegging crew, and his response to the meeting is to just slug the guy and jump out the window! This is a film full of car bombs and mountainside car chases. Mitchum's character is, predictably, a war hero - but he's also a dyed-in-the-wool whiskey runner who can't commit to a meaningful relationship with a woman because of his passion for hooning around with a boot full of illegal alcohol. How can you not love that?

DIRECTOR: Arthur Ripley
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Robert Mitchum, James Atlee Phillips and Walter Wise.
KEY ACTORS: Robert Mitchum, Gene Barry, James Mitchum, Keely Smith

RELATED TEXTS:
- See also Moonshine Highway, The Moonshine War and Moonrunners.
- Also see the truck driving noir They Drive By Night.