Tag: Danny Boyle

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Favourite Scots words, P-R

 

From pixabay.com / © Dimitris Vetsikas

 

Today, November 30th, is Saint Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  Also, I’m in the middle of reading Douglas Stuart’s 2022 novel Young Mungo, which is set in Glasgow during the 1990s and is choc-a-bloc with cherishable Scots vocabulary: bevvy, chib, doo, midden, schemie, sook, smirr, tattie–bogle, wean, winchin’…  Thus, this seems an opportune time to post the latest instalment of my attempt to catalogue my favourite words from the Scots language.

 

Patter (n) – A long time ago, I remember Iain Jenkins, my English teacher at Peebles High School, trying to explain to my class why William Shakespeare placed Mercutio’s monologue about Queen Mab in the middle of Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet.  After all, the monologue didn’t have any bearing on the plot that came before or after it.  It was merely Shakespeare showing off his own verbal flamboyance and inventiveness.  Eventually, Jenkins exclaimed, “Patter!  It’s just patter!  It’s Mercutio indulging in a bit of patter!”

 

Patter, then, is smooth talk, smart talk or funny talk – often delivered by someone, like a politician or a salesman, who’s trying to sell you something.  The word crops in phrases like, “I gave her the auld patter,” or “Enough ay yer patter!”   And a person who comes out with it a lot is called a patter–merchant.  The city of Glasgow seems full of patter–merchants, surprisingly enough.

 

Pawkie (adj) – used to describe a person possessed of a dry and quietly mocking sense of humour.

 

Pech (v) – to gasp or wheeze breathlessly.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short supernatural story Thrawn Janet, you get the line: “Even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds an’ lay pechin’ for their breath.”

 

© Kypros Press

 

Peely-wally (adj) – looking pale and sick-looking.  That’s why in Solo (2013), the James Bond ‘continuity’ novel written by William Boyd, there’s a bit where an injured Bond is scolded by May, his formidable old Scottish housekeeper, for looking ‘awfy peely-wally’.

 

I’d assumed this was derived from ‘peeling wall’, something that obviously doesn’t look healthy.  But I’ve recently learnt that peely comes from an early 19th century word peelie, meaning ‘a gaunt, pale person’.  And wally is a Scots word meaning ‘made of china’.  Even now, people refer to an ornamental china dog as a wally dug and to false teeth (once made of porcelain) as wallies.  So peely–wally really means ‘as pale as china’.

 

Peep (n) – the lowest level at which you can set a gas flame before it goes out.  To ‘put someone’s gas at a peep’ is to seriously knock them out of their stride or deprive them of their vigour.

 

Peewit (n) – a lapwing.

 

Pieces (n) – sandwiches.  Years ago, while I was living with my Dad, I got a job at a local warehouse.  I needed to make myself a packed lunch every morning, to eat during the short break I got in the middle of the day.  My Dad would always inquire before I left the house if I’d remembered to get my pieces together.

 

Pisht (adj) – drunk.  Just as the Eskimos are said to have a hundred words for snow, there must be at least a hundred words in Scots for being inebriated.  See also arsed, bevied, bleezin’, blootered, buckled, fou’, gubbered, hingin’, minced, mingin’, miraculous, miracked, mortal, reekin’, reelin’, steamboats, steamin’, stocious, wellied, etc.  This, of course, is a tragic reflection on the state of the Scottish psyche…  I wrote, whilst sipping a large whisky.

 

From pixabay.com / © rebcenter-moscow

 

Plook (n) – the curse of many a Scottish person’s adolescence,  plooks are pus-filled pimples.  It was rumoured at my school that every time you ate a Mars Bar, you got a plook.  The adjective is plooky and, predictably, this figured in countless playground insults: “Ye plooky bastart, ye!”

 

Plump (n) – as in ‘a plump ay rain’, i.e., a sudden downpour.

 

Poke (n) – a small paper bag.  I suspect this word is most commonly heard in Scotland’s chippies, where people request ‘a poke ay chips’.

 

Poultice (n) – an arsehole.  For example, “Thon Boris Johnson is a right poultice, so he is.”

 

Puddock (n) – a frog.

 

Pure (adv) – popularised by the actress Elaine C. Smith, whose character in the Glasgow-set comedy TV show City Lights (1984-1991) used the catchphrase, “Pure deid brilliant!”  Placed before adjectives to amplify their meaning to the nth degree, it crops up in phrases like ‘pure mental’, ‘pure radge’ and ‘pure sleekit’.

 

Puggled (adj) – exhausted.

 

Quaich (n) – in the words of the Meriam-Webster dictionary, ‘a small shallow drinking vessel with ears for use as handles.’  These days, ornate quaichs are often used as pint-sized trophies at Scottish sports events.

 

Quine (n) – a girl or young woman.  This is commonly used in Scotland’s North-East, where boys and young men are also described as loons, so you hear a lot about quines an’ loons.  In the early 1990s, a group of Scottish feminists, including the journalist Lesley Riddich, started up a magazine called Harpies and Quines – harpy being a word commonly used in Scotland to describe a grumpy, ill-tempered and mean-minded woman.  The famous high-society magazine Harpers and Queen failed to see the joke and attempted to sue them.

 

© Channel Four Films / Polygram Filmed Entertainment

 

Radge (adj) – violently wild and crazy.  Used as a noun, it refers to a mad hooligan.  It had humble beginnings in Eastern Scotland, where it may have come from a Romany word with a similar meaning, ‘raj’, but radge was for a while a trendy term used the length and breadth of Britain.  This was because of its copious use in Danny Boyle’s hit movie Trainspotting (1996), where it was associated with Robert Carlyle’s ultra-violent character Frank Begbie.  I seem to remember the author Irvine Welsh, on whose novel the film was based, remarking disgustedly that he’d heard Hooray Henrys using the word radge in London wine bars.  And I also remember Q magazine running an interview with Robert Carlyle under the memorable headline RADGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

 

Rammy (n) – a fight or brawl.  A stairheid rammy is a brawl that breaks out among the womenfolk in the staircases and on the landings of Scotland’s urban tenement buildings.  During the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, a heated television debate between then-SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon and then-Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont was described afterwards by journalist Ruth Wishart as “a right good stairheid rammy” that “made strong men avert their eyes”.

 

Randan (n) – a drunken knees-up, as in “He’s away oot on the randan!”

 

Rector (n) – the Scottish term for headmaster.

 

Redd (v) – to tidy up.  I’ve rarely heard this verb used in Scotland, or at least in the parts of it I’ve inhabited.  But I frequently heard it during my childhood in Northern Ireland, where a good number of the people are descended from Scots.  My Mum would frequently explain, “Get this room redd up!” or “Give that place a wee redd!”

 

Riddy (n) – an embarrassment.  As in: “Liz Truss!  What an absolute riddy!”

 

Right (adj) – uttered with the appropriate intonation, right becomes a contemptuous response, dismissing something that another person has just said.  Though for maximum impact, use the phrase Aye, right.  “Maggie Thatcher wis the best prime minister since Churchill?  Aye, right.”  And indeed, Glasgow’s annual book festival is called Aye Write.

 

© Glasgow Life

 

Rone (n) – the length of guttering along the edge of a roof for collecting and removing rainwater.

 

That’s all for now.  More Scots words, and more example-sentences that insult famous Conservative Party politicians, will come shortly…

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Jiggery-wokery

 

From abc.net.au / © BBC

 

‘Woke’…  What does that word even mean?

 

Here’s failed US presidential candidate and failed insurrectionist Donald Trump using it to denigrate the American women’s soccer team, who do un-Trumpian things like ‘taking the knee’ during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.  “Woke equals failure!” he barked on TruthSocial, his minor social-media platform, when the team was knocked out of this year’s Women’s Football World Cup.

 

And here’s John Cleese grumping about the BBC being woke because it banned that episode of Fawlty Towers (1975-79) where the Major uses some unfashionable language to describe the West Indies cricket team.  (In fact, the episode was temporarily pulled from the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV, and reviewed, and reinstated with a content warning.)  Cleese is so incensed by wokeness that he’s started hosting a TV chat-show in which he fulminates against it.  His show is called The Dinosaur Hour (2023) and it’s broadcast on the right-wing, alleged ‘news’ channel GB News.  Amusingly, Cleese was peeved to discover that his new employers at GB News had just signed Boris Johnson, whom he considers a ‘serial liar’, to host a show too.  Well, John, when you lie down with dogs, expect to get up with fleas.  In this case, big, blonde, bloviating, bonking Boris-fleas.

 

Another household name much concerned about woke behaviour is Elon Musk, who last year purchased Twitter (or X, as he calls it now) and set about purging it of wokeness.  He’s certainly done that.  He’s also purged the platform of half of its advertising revenue and half of the value of its acquisition price.  Musk has described wokeness as a ‘mind-virus’ and ‘communism rebranded’ – and communism, he’ll tell you, is a very bad thing.  Though that hasn’t stopped him opening a big Tesla plant in communist China, in Shanghai, and being warmly welcomed every time he visits the country, and declaring that democratic, capitalist Taiwan is actually Chinese property.  Musk is also introducing to Twitter a ‘snarky, anti-woke AI chatbot’ called ‘Grok’, which sounds like a character from the sci-fi comic 2000 AD (1977-present).

 

From britishcomic.fandom.com / © Rebellion Developments

 

I don’t agree with Musk on much but he’s right to liken wokeness to a virus.  Because the moment that people with his right-wing politics come into contact with it, they seem to turn red-eyed, froth at the mouth and gibber insanely, like the infected did in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2003).

 

© DNA Films / UK Film Council / Fox Searchlight Pictures

 

But if you need refuge from wokeness, just move to Florida.  There, Governor Ron DeSantis has been pushing a ‘Stop-Woke Act’ in the hope that the state will be ‘the place where woke goes to die’.  In fact, DeSantis’s Florida is now so anti-woke, and so determinedly opposed to the teaching of wokey things like Critical Race Theory, that its State Board of Education has kids learning in school that slavery was a good thing because it helped the black slaves to develop ‘skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit‘.  Wow.  Who knew?

 

I’m sure DeSantis’s achievements in Florida are admired by Suella Braverman, the belligerent and self-serving British Conservative politician who was very recently sacked from her position as the UK’s Home Secretary.  During her time in office, she slammed the British police force for being too woke.  One example was when she claimed to have reprimanded officers in Essex for the woke act of raiding a pub and removing a display of racist golliwogs.  (Except that she didn’t – it turned out that Suella had been disingenuous, or stupid, or both, which is perfectly possible in her case.)  Suella, or ‘Sewer-ella’ as I like to think of her, also famously condemned a faction she called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’.  Supposedly, these have formed a ‘coalition of chaos’ with the opposition parties and are responsible for all of Britain’s ills.  She said this whilst serving in the brief but tumultuous government of Liz Truss.  Accusing someone else of being part of a coalition of chaos?  That’s a bit rich, given the context.

 

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has complained that woke builders are daring to ‘enjoy yoga, muesli, listening to Radio 4 and sharing their feelings’ rather than ‘devouring greasy-spoon breakfasts and discussing sport.’  Xbox games consoles have been accused of being woke for getting updated with an ‘energy saver’ mode to lessen their power consumption – because, as you know, attempting to be more environmentally-friendly just drips with contemptible wokeness.  The makers of The Simpsons (1989-present) have been lambasted for being woke, coincidentally by Cleese’s associates at GB News, for no longer having scenes where Homer loses his rag at Bart, picks him up by the throat and strangles him until his eyes bulge and tongue protrudes.  Not wanting to strangle children?  How hideously woke.

 

So, what does ‘woke’ actually mean?  Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’.  Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and LGBT rights.”  Fascinatingly, the phrase ‘stay woke’ goes all the way back to 1938, when it was first heard on a recording of a song called Scottsboro Boys by the legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly.

 

From wikipedia.org / © William P. Gottlieb Collection

 

Though how the term ‘woke’ became elastic enough to encompass eating tofu, and builders talking about their feelings, and Xboxes having energy-saving modes, and Homer Simpson not throttling his offspring, is anyone’s guess.  Perhaps a simpler definition of the term – certainly when you look at the people mentioned above who’ve railed against it, like Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Braverman, the Daily Mail and GB News – might be: ‘Anything that right-wing tossers don’t like.’

 

Indeed, as somebody who considers himself partly Scottish, I felt a surge of pride a while ago when Gavin McInnes, founder of the neo-fascist American militia the Proud Boys, denounced Scotland as ‘the most woke country in the world.”  No wonder Scottish novelist Christopher Brookmyre responded to McInnes’s ravings by saying: “That delighted me…”

 

Unfortunately, nobody ever lost money by underestimating human beings’ intelligence.  There’s clearly political mileage in ranting endlessly about wokeness. Gradually, you brainwash millions of people, mainly older ones who don’t get out much, and sit and watch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News all day, into believing that dark, malevolent woke forces do indeed lurk in the world, planning to deprive them of their Bibles, guns, gas-guzzling automobiles, Big Macs, racist jokes, un-politically-correct 1970s TV shows, etc.  It’s also convenient for the likes of Trump (currently facing 91 felony counts) and Britain’s Conservative government (trying to justify why the country is such a horrible, unhappy mess when they’ve been in charge of it for the past 13 years) to peddle the narrative that the establishment is riddled with hostile woke agents.  The civil service, the courts, the police…  A giant woke conspiracy is being implemented from society’s corridors of power and it’s trying to discredit them and stymie their every move.

 

I’m not claiming, by the way, that stupidity is confined to right-wingers.  The left is also capable of it.  In recent years the American right has infiltrated school-boards and removed books they disapprove of from syllabuses and libraries, books deemed too woke, often written by people of colour or members of the LGBT community, and often featuring characters of colour or LGBT characters.  There was even a book suspended in Alabama because officials didn’t like the sound of the author’s name, Marie-Louise Gay.  But left-wing educators have done themselves no favours by trying to ban books that offend their sensibilities too.

 

For example, I lately came across the case of a school board in Washington State pulling Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) off its required reading list for ninth-graders because a group of ‘progressive’ teachers objected to it.  Sure, you can argue that To Kill a Mockingbird portrays its black characters with less depth than its white characters and has a ‘white saviour’ narrative that’s offensive to many.  But shouldn’t teachers focus on developing their students’ powers of critical thinking, argument and self-expression so that they can articulate why they object to the book?  Engaging with – certainly, studying – literature shouldn’t be limited to books you’re personally comfortable with.  You should have to experience ones you find discomforting too, whilst developing the ability to formulate logical and coherent responses to them.

 

I don’t deny there are works that some people will find upsetting because of their beliefs or backgrounds or difficult experiences they’ve had in their lives.  And I don’t see anything wrong with books and stories having trigger warnings, which inform readers the content they’re about to immerse themselves in may be uncomfortable or even traumatising.  I say that as a writer who’s had trigger warnings attached to his fiction in the past.  But banning books altogether?  I don’t agree with censorship, unless it’s of something that’s completely off-the-scale in promulgating odious stereotypes and stirring up hatred.

 

Otherwise, I don’t have much of a problem with wokeness.  Especially as it seems to annoy all the right – and I mean ‘right’ – people.  So, now, it’s time to sign off and grab some lunch.  What will I have…?  Why, tofu of course.  Up yours, Sewer-ella.

 

From wikipedia.org / © UK Government Web Archive

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Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

 

© Duckworth Books

 

Another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema.  Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living.  But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc.  This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

 

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War.  His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric.  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular.  Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq.  And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

 

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes.  Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games.  With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

 

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon.  (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.)  Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

 

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984).  It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report.  He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate…  Too many opinions, too many feelings.  That’s not what this report is about.  We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.”  So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

 

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework.  The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc.  It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their  experiences of the conflict with the undead.  The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched.  Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

 

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense.  For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A.  I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics…  We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.”  But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work.  And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

 

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

 

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though.  An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly.  To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

 

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too.  It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro.  Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener.  He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him.  Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction.  But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism.  Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long.  I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

 

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).  An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes.  Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London.  There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II.  She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland.  Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’  Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.”  That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

 

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones.  Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis.  Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada.  They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake.  Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food.  Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours.  “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore.  A couple of times I stepped in human shit.  Nobody was even bothering to bury it.”  By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty.  It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency.  And the zombies aren’t even around.  They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

 

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere.  The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons.  Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients.  Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

 

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013.  No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

 

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II.  This gives it an oddly historical feel now.  Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s.  And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

 

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023.  For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump.  Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic.  If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

 

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’.  Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all.  Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it.  If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

 

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it.  A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

 

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

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Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black

 

© Filmhouse Trading Limited

 

During the two decades since I last lived in Edinburgh, I’ve spent a lot of time bellyaching about the fact that, for a city that likes to advertise itself as home to the world’s biggest annual cultural festival, Edinburgh has seemed ridiculously determined to rid itself of its live-music venues and make itself about as musically vibrant as, say, Luton.

 

Those two decades have seen the demise of such venues, or part-time or occasional venues, as the Cas Rock, the Tap O’ Lauriston, the Venue, the HMV Picturehouse, Electric Circus, the Citrus Club and – one of my favourite Auld Reekie hangouts – Studio 24.  At one point, I even felt compelled to write on this blog: “So, music lovers of Edinburgh…  Your once proud city has fallen… into the hands of a bunch of suits, nimbies and money-chasing ghouls whose iPods are no doubt crammed with Ed Sheeran, James Blunt and Coldplay songs and whose idea of musical edginess is probably to tuck into a salad in the Hard Rock Café while a paunchy, balding cover band play Hotel California in the corner.”

 

Now, sadly, the blight that’s struck down Edinburgh’s live music scene seems to have infected its film scene too, for last Thursday the news broke that the charity Centre for the Moving Image (CMI) had filed for bankruptcy, with the result that the city’s Filmhouse Cinema, which the CMI has run since 2010, is closing immediately.  This has also meant the abrupt end of the 75-year-old Edinburgh Film Festival, the oldest continually-running film festival in the world, and the closure of the Belmont, the Filmhouse’s sister cinema in Aberdeen.

 

The Filmhouse is, or was, what’s commonly known as an ‘arthouse’ cinema.  ‘Arthouse’ is a label I hate, as it suggests a place showing pretentious movies made by pretentious people who consider themselves ‘artistes’ rather than mere filmmakers – incidentally, Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) get my vote as the most up-their-own-arses films ever made.  But it’s not about artiness.  In reality, an ‘arthouse’ cinema is often the only place in your neighbourhood where films a little offbeat, non-Hollywood and daring to use a language that isn’t English have a chance of being seen.  That’s while the multiplexes restrict themselves to showing movies about masked and / or caped vigilantes possessing superpowers, with lots of CGI and cameos by Stan Lee.

 

Unlike what’s happened to many of the music venues I mentioned above, the Filmhouse’s sad fate isn’t the result of corporate greed, gentrification, nimbyism and hostility or indifference on the part of the local authorities – although in these straitened times, I doubt if Edinburgh City Council will be swooping to the Filmhouse’s rescue.  Rather, as this recent piece by Mark Cousins in the Guardian makes clear, the cinema’s demise was caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of economic and cultural factors: the huge hike in energy bills that’s currently panicking everyone in the UK bar the super-rich (you know, those people whom Liz Truss wanted to give generous tax cuts to), the loss of custom incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and the slow return of custom afterwards, younger people preferring to watch movies on streaming services at home, and older people becoming, well, older and less likely to go out.

 

Besides offering you the opportunity to see certain films on a big screen that you wouldn’t otherwise see there, what makes cinemas like the Filmhouse precious is that they allow you to come out of the closet as a film nerd.  They’re obviously run by folk with a genuine love for movies and, on their premises, you know you’re surrounded by like-minded punters too. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to live in several cities blessed with such establishments. I have happy memories of them and can still reel off the films I watched on their screens.

 

© Theater Kino

 

For example, in the Japanese city of Sapporo, there was the Theater Kino, which coincidentally must have been one of the smallest cinemas in the country.  At it, I remember seeing David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog (1992), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and – yay! – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996).  At Cinema City in Norwich, I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008), Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009), Tom Hooper’s The Damned United (2009) and Sasha Gervasi’s hilarious but gruelling heavy metal documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008).  And at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon Tyne, I saw Kitano Takeshi’s Zatōishi (2003), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), and, before it went on general release, a special screening of 28 Days Later (2002) attended by director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland, who answered questions from the audience afterwards.  (I wanted to ask them how, if the rage-infected zombies had become so angry that they stopped eating food and eventually died of hunger, they didn’t also stop drinking water and die of thirst first, which would have ended the zombie apocalypse much sooner.  However, not wanting to rain on Danny and Alex’s parade, I didn’t.)

 

© Tyneside Cinema

 

I feel a bit hypocritical pontificating about the loss of the Filmhouse because it’s been a long time since I set foot there – as far as I can remember, the last movie I saw in it was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight back in 2016.  But I have an excuse.  For much of the last dozen years I’ve been living in Africa and Asia.  Still, with the Filmhouse’s closure, as with the closure of many a lovely old pub or lovely old shop, I suspect there’s currently a lot of people expressing outrage and grief about it on social media and in below-the-line comments on news websites who actually haven’t bought a ticket and watched anything on its premises for many years.  Unfortunately, there’s truth in the old capitalist adage: “If you don’t want to lose it… use it.”

 

Here’s a link to an online petition expressing support for the Filmhouse, Belmont and Edinburgh Film Festival and the 102 cinema and festival workers who have just lost their jobs.  And if there is an unexpectedly happy ending, and someone with deep, movie-loving pockets steps in and pulls the Filmhouse back from the brink, let’s hope folk show their appreciation by going to it and putting their bums on its seats again.

Posted on

London Bridge is down

 

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

 

London Bridge is down.  No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler.  I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor.  Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

 

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog.  Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

 

That’s been my view for most of my life.  Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth.  It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.”  This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town.  This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

 

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country.  Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

 

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed.  Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions.  This included the abolition of its monarchy.

 

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me.  Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’.  Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

 

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

 

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery.  Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past.  Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century.  I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

 

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media.  One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members.  Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids.  Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus.  And who can blame him?  If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

 

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit.  Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much.  Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this.  They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.”  Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with.  In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

 

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.”  Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then.  And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

 

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country.  This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something.  Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.”  Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

 

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

 

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country.  Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge.  The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this.  Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

 

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go.  That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history.  She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS).  She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one.  She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

 

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years.  Quite the reverse.  By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days.  Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8th.

 

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away.  When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine.  (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

 

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.  I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them.  The crowd went, “Hurrah!”  Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface.  While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag.  The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again.  Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

 

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

 

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

Posted on

Grovel, Britannia

 

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

 

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70th year of her reign on the British throne.  I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family.  It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

 

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them.  They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward.  Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

 

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper.  It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

 

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth.  It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy.  This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town.  This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run.  And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long.  She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

 

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police.  The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

 

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy.  That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down.  The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain?  Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

 

That was then, however.  Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country.  Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

 

From pixabay.com / © Ben Kerckx

 

Now I just want the whole thing gone.  Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me.  My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein.  (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19.  Aye, right.)  It’s more to do with the state of Britain.  The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

 

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past.  Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

 

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment.  The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government.  I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

 

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s.  In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

 

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies.  There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’.  Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have.  It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on.  It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

 

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society.  Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever.  This is never more obvious than in the country’s press.  British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

 

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

 

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee.  There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen.  Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.”  No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are.  She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

 

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone.  Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them.  But obviously, that isn’t going to happen.  The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly.  And as for the country they’re supposed to represent…  Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.

 

From pixabay.com / © Sabine Lang

Posted on

Daniel Craig’s Swann song

 

© Eon Productions

 

At last!  Two years after its first scheduled release in November 2019 (abandoned when Danny Boyle, originally lined up to be director, departed from the project), and a year-and-a-half after its next scheduled release in April 2020 (abandoned because of the Covid-19 pandemic), and a couple of months after it went on release in the UK, the 25th James Bond movie No Time to Die has made it to Sri Lanka and I’ve been able to watch it on a big screen.

 

It was odd to finally see the movie in its 163-minute entirety.  I’d become accustomed to seeing it as a two-and-a-half-minute trailer during my infrequent trips to the cinema during the past two years.  Up it popped before Tenet (2020) last summer, up it popped again before Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) in May this year…  And when the No Time to Die trailer popped up yet again before I started watching Dune (2021) in a cinema a few weeks ago, I thought, ‘My God, am I ever going to see this thing as a film?’

 

Anyway, here are my thoughts on No Time to Die, which marks Daniel Craig’s final appearance as James Bond.  I’ll start by listing what I didn’t like about it, then what I did like about it, and then I’ll give my overall verdict.  I will, as much as I can, try to avoid spoilers.  But be warned that some spoilers will inevitably appear.

 

DIDN’T LIKE…

Rami Malek’s character

I’m not dissing Malek’s performance as the film’s big villain Lyutsifer Safin.  It’s just that he doesn’t get enough time to establish Safin as a character or a threat.  Yes, he’s effective in No Time to Die’s opening sequence, which with its arty snowbound setting, violence and jump-scares resembles something from an especially stylish 1970s giallo movie.  But after that we hardly see him again until the film’s final reel.  Also, while a twisted and unsettling connection clearly exists between him and Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann character, the love of Bond’s life, we frustratingly never learn much about it.  Contrast that with 1999’s The World is Not Enough, which was a generally clunky Bond entry.  But at least it was more disturbing in how it depicted the warped relationship between Bond’s nominal love interest Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) and psychotic bad guy Renard (Robert Carlisle).

 

© Eon Productions

 

Rami Malek’s character’s age

Also, Rami Malek looks too young to be the same character who menaced Madeleine Swann when she was a child, as seen in that opening sequence, and who menaces her again as an adult.  My partner watched the film with me and speculated that, because he’s disfigured, his damaged facial skin might have slowed the development of wrinkles…  But no, I’m not buying it.

 

While we’re on the subject of age, I was perturbed that when Bond goes to mourn at the tomb of Vespa Lynd (Eva Green), his late and much-lamented love interest in Casino Royale (2006), a plaque on the tomb-door informs us that she was 23 years old when she died.  What?  In Casino Royale she was working as an agent with the British Treasury’s Financial Action Task Force.  I know her character was young and something of a whizz-kid, but surely she wasn’t that whizz-kiddish to have landed such a job and such responsibilities at the age of 23?

 

Blofeld’s bionic eye

Despite having been banged up in Belmarsh Prison since the events of 2015’s Spectre, it transpires that Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) has been secretly running his Spectre organisation from his cell with the use of a sneaky high-tech bionic eye (replacing the eye he lost in the helicopter crash at Spectre’s finale).  We even get a daft scene where, during a Spectre party, Blofeld manages to orchestrate and comment on events via a bionic-eye-receiver that a minion is carrying around on a tray.  Where did this bionic eye come from?  How did Spectre smuggle it into him at Belmarsh?  Was it Blofeld’s birthday, and a visitor managed to get it to him hidden inside a birthday cake?  And why didn’t the prison’s security systems – which seem pretty thorough, considering that Blofeld only gets to meet visitors inside a mobile metal cage, which is shuttled along tramlines to the meeting area – let this past them?  No, it’s a total failure of plot-logic.

 

How You Only Live Twice’s ‘Garden of Death’ gets shoehorned in

Ian Fleming’s 1964 novel You Only Live Twice is one of my favourite Bond books, largely because of its bizarre plot.  This has Blofeld retiring to Japan, acquiring a castle and taking up gardening.  Blofeld being Blofeld, though, the garden he cultivates around his castle is a Garden of Death.  It’s infested with poisonous vegetation and wildlife and dotted with boiling, sulphurous mud-pools.  Perversely, the garden’s lethal features begin to draw visitors – Japanese people who want to commit suicide head there to die.  I’d always hoped one day the Garden of Death would feature in a Bond film and it does, finally, in No Time to Die.  But it appears only for a couple of minutes while Safin gives the kidnapped Madeleine a tour of his headquarters and, as a setting, its potential is wasted.

 

The action finale

No Time to Die’s ending has proved controversial.  I have no problem with the events that occur in the last 20 minutes or so.  But I’m annoyed that the finale is rather fragmented and isn’t the big sustained rush of excitement I’d wanted for the end of Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond.  There’s a bit of action, then things stop for a while, then there’s another bit of action, then things stop again, then a bit more action, then another pause…  It isn’t so much Craig going out with a bang as with a stuttering series of pops.

 

Lashana Lynch’s excellent Nomi character features here but isn’t given enough to do.  Come to think of it, instead of just her and Bond being sent to infiltrate Safin’s lair, wouldn’t it have been better if they’d led an army of commandoes to attack the place?  That way, the action might have been more sustained, widespread and exciting.

 

© Eon Productions

 

LIKED…

Madeleine Swann’s arc

Lea Seydoux isn’t my favourite Bond-lady of the Daniel Craig era.  (Four days of the week, I worship at the temple of Eva Green.  The other three days, I worship at the temple of Naomie Harris, aka Miss Moneypenny.)  But at least her character Madeleine Swann gets to develop beyond the supposedly happy ending of Spectre and explore darker territory in No Time to Die.  This is a relief, as I’d heard rumours that the movie would be a re-tread of 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and I’d feared that her character’s only function would be to get bumped off early on, leaving Bond to spend the rest of the film on a simplistic revenge mission.

 

Ana de Armas and Lashana Lynch

Meanwhile, the other main actresses in No Time to Die are great.  De Armas (who co-starred with Craig in Rian Johnson’s splendid 2019 whodunnit Knives Out) is a delight as Paloma, the supposedly inexperienced CIA agent who’s assigned to help Bond with some espionage-related business in Cuba.  I shudder to think how a Roger Moore-era Bond movie would have portrayed her.  She’d have been a bumbling incompetent whose klutziness was a source of slapstick gags and mocking, sexist humour.  But here, when the shit hits the fan, Paloma proves to be more than capable.  Indeed, if the character has a fault, it’s that she’s not in the film long enough.

 

© Eon Productions

 

As I’ve said, Lynch’s Nomi character – whom, Bond discovers, has been made the new 007 in his absence – could have been given more to do too.  But she still makes an impact and if producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson want to stay in this version of the Bond-verse a little longer and give Nomi her own spinoff movies, I’d happily pay money to go and see them.

 

The regulars

One of the pleasures of Craig’s stint as Bond has been seeing the gradual reintroduction of the franchise’s regular characters, rebooted and played by new but dependable actors – Jeffrey Wright debuting as Felix Leiter in Casino Royale, Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner in Quantum of Solace (2008), Ralph Fiennes as the replacement for Judi Dench as M in Skyfall (2012), and Naomie Harris as Moneypenny and Ben Wishaw as Q also in Skyfall.  All are excellent again in No Time to Die.

 

I suspect the next Bond will be another reboot and we won’t be seeing these actors in these roles again – Wishaw has already remarked that this is probably his last outing as Q – which is a shame.  I haven’t enjoyed a Bond ensemble like this since Bernard Lee played M, Lois Maxwell played Moneypenny and Desmond Llewellyn played Q back in the days of Connery, Lazenby and Moore.

 

© Eon Productions

 

The fan service

As Casino Royale made clear, Craig’s Bond is a new Bond.  He’s not the same bloke as the one who encountered with Mr Kidd and Mr Wint in Diamonds are Forever (1971), or battled against Jaws in a space station in Moonraker (1980), or rampaged through downtown Moscow in a tank in Goldeneye (1995).  Still, it’s nice that No Time to Die contains references to the pre-Craig Bonds, though not so intrusively that they threaten the continuity established since 2006.  It’s cool, for example, that Bond drives the Aston Martin DB5 that Sean Connery drove in Goldfinger (1964), complete with similar gadgets, and we also see him climb into an Aston Martin V8 Advantage that Timothy Dalton drove in The Living Daylights (1987) – it’s even got the same number plate (B549 WUU)!  In MI6 headquarters, we see not only a framed portrait of Judi Dench’s M, but also one of Robert Brown, who played M during the late Roger Moore years and the Timothy Dalton ones.  Meanwhile, the title sequence echoes that of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by featuring a trident-holding Britannia figure, Union Jacks, clocks and hourglasses.

 

That said, I could have done with a little less of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s music on the No Time to Die soundtrack.  John Barry’s OHMSS theme accompanies one scene set in London and Louis Armstrong’s We Have All the Time in the World plays over the end credits.  This is wonderful, timeless music, of course, but it shows up the inferiority of No Time to Die’s theme song, sung by Billie Eilish – which, while it’s way better than Sam Smith’s dire The Writing’s on the Wall from Spectre, is still no classic.

 

Bond’s arc

Daniel Craig’s Bond movies have been a daring experiment.  Since Casino Royale, we’ve seen him carry out his first mission and make his first kill, fall in love, suffer tragedy, discover some uncomfortable truths about his upbringing and fall in love again.  In No Time to Die, he falls out of and back into love and has to make some difficult, final decisions.  Things haven’t always gone smoothly – Spectre, in particularly, had to do some clumsy retconning to the story – but generally it’s been a success.  Daniel Craig’s performance in the lead role has helped hugely, of course.  So, hats off to Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson for being bold and keeping their nerve.

 

Mind you, I was relieved to see the words JAMES BOND WILL RETURN at the very end.

 

VERDICT?

Well, I liked it more than Quantum of Solace and Spectre.  But due to the issues I’ve described above, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Casino Royale or Skyfall.  Which is a pity, because I’ve liked Daniel Craig’s Bond and wanted him to go out on the highest note possible.  As it stands, I think No Time to Die is pretty good, but it’s not going to alter the rankings in my top half-dozen, or possibly even my top ten, Bond movies.

 

© Eon Productions

Posted on

King rat

 

From horrornews.net

 

Another slightly-updated reposting for Halloween…  I originally wrote this in 2013, just after James Herbert’s death.

 

It’s fair to say that, back in the 1970s, the English novelist James Herbert increased literacy levels substantially among young males who otherwise wouldn’t have opened a book in their entire lives.  Not that Herbert, who died in 2013, ever got any thanks from Britain’s educators.  His X-rated novels of apocalyptic horror in the shabbier parts of 1970s London were the sort of items you furtively traded with your mates in school playgrounds, away from the prying and prudish eyes of teachers.

 

I was 13 when I bought a copy of Herbert’s second novel The Fog (1975), drawn by an irresistible reviewer’s comment on its back cover: “For goodness sake don’t leave this on Aunt Edna’s chair!”  An accompanying quote from the book itself was good too:  “Out of the yellowish fog a man appeared.  His eyes were fixed straight ahead and his lips were frozen in a smile.  In his hands he carried the severed, still bleeding head of his wife.”  A few mornings later, sitting in my form class at school, I passed the book to the boy sitting next to me and instructed him to read a chapter that’d I’d read the previous evening.  This was a chapter in which a group of boys at a posh boarding school go murderously insane and start beating and torturing their teachers to death.

 

I’d actually felt sick after reading that chapter, though by the next morning I was fortified and ready for more.  Anyway, I spent the next five minutes smugly watching my classmate as the colour drained from his face.  A final exclamation of disgust – “Yeee-uuuck!” – indicated that he’d reached the chapter’s last sentence.  That would’ve been the bit where the snotty deputy headmaster gets castrated with a pair of hedge-clippers.

 

I should say at this point that it wasn’t just teenage boys who were into Herbert’s novels.  For I remember a girl in my class called Alex Stassino who once, admirably, grossed out her female friends by reading aloud the description of the mass suicide at the start of Herbert’s 1980s novel The Dark.

 

© New English Library

 

Herbert’s first book was The Rats in 1974.  Despite a hostile review in the Observer by a young Martin Amis, who considered the violence in its pages “enough to make a rodent retch… and enough to make any human pitch the book aside,” the Great British public bought it in droves.  (Before The Rats’ publication, Herbert had worked at the same advertising agency as Amis’s chum Salman Rushdie.)   Though rats certainly weren’t new in horror fiction and films, and even though, like all his work, it was essentially pulp fiction, Herbert’s novel had two major selling-points.

 

Firstly, as the son of a fruit seller in London’s East End and someone who’d grown up around the corner from Reggie and Ronnie Kray, Herbert clearly had first-hand experience of the character-types and the localities in his book.  The story reeked of gritty and seedy authenticity as the rats – a strain of giant, mutant flesh-eaters – swarmed around disused canals, derelict buildings and plots of waste ground, preying on winos, down-and-outs, grubby comprehensive school kids and Jamaican immigrants working in the London tube.  I should say that, later in the book, they graduated to eating middle-class people too.  Secondly, Herbert’s approach to horror was a different one from that used by earlier British horror writers, such as the gentlemanly and clubbable Algernon Blackwood or Dennis Wheatley.  Unlike them, he left nothing to the imagination.

 

The Rats was followed by The Fog, which recounts what happens when a vaporous and madness-inducing chemical weapon leaks out of a laboratory and floats around southern England.  By the way, I remember how in 1982, after I’d left school, I was backpacking and hitchhiking around central and northern Europe in the company of a similar-aged guy called Andy, who was from Stevenage.  At one point, Andy-from-Stevenage and I got into a furious argument about The Fog.  By then we’d spent whole days waiting around entry roads onto various Autobahns without getting lifts and we’d managed to argue furiously about everything under the sun.  Andy-from-Stevenage’s beef with The Fog was that it was silly.  Especially silly, he reckoned, was the bit in it where an airline pilot goes murderously insane and, to get revenge on his wife’s lover, flies his passenger-filled jet-plane off course and smack-bang into a London skyscraper where that lover works.

 

“Jet-planes flying into skyscrapers,” raged Andy-from-Stevenage, “that’s too far-fetched!  That’d never happen in real life!”

 

© New English Library

 

In 1976, Herbert penned his first novel of the paranormal, The Survivor.  This had supernatural forces unleashed in the Berkshire town of Windsor after a devastating plane-crash there.  One set-piece in the novel describes nearby Eton College, the real-life alma mater of Boris Johnson and David Cameron, succumbing to a demonically-orchestrated fire.  Along with the gory boarding-school episode in The Fog, this suggests that working-class Herbert had a low opinion of England’s private-education system.

 

Meanwhile, The Spear (1978) was an updating of those old Dennis Wheatley occult thrillers like The Haunting of Toby Jugg and They Used Dark Forces, where the Nazis dabbled in black magic to help their war effort.  For topicality, Herbert threw the Arab-Israeli conflict into the mix.  Between The Survivor and The Spear, he wrote Fluke, an atypical fantasy story narrated by a dog suffering from troubling flashbacks to a previous life in which he’d been a man.  Eventually, he meets a wise badger who explains to him that, basically, the Buddhists had got it right.  Even Fluke contains streaks of grotty Herbert realism, though, with his canine characters spending their time hanging around London junkyards, eating garbage and getting down-and-dirty with on-heat bitches.

 

Herbert was not initially popular among traditional British horror writers and fans, no doubt because he upset cosy and middle-class notions of what horror should be about.  For somebody steeped in classic British tales of the uncanny like Charles Dickens’ The Signalman (1866) or M.R. James’s Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad (1904), being subjected to the gnawed-off faces and exploding heads of The Rats and The Fog was probably akin to how bearded, cerebral fans of progressive-rock bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis and Yes felt in 1977, when they first heard Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols played loud.

 

© New English Library

 

It didn’t help Herbert’s image that his books’ success spawned a wave of badly-written and even bloodier imitators.  In his wake, a whole paperback sub-genre became known in the book trade as ‘nasties’.  This was years before the term was used in relation to films, as in Britain’s ‘video-nasty’ hysteria of the early 1980s.  Among the writers cashing in were Shaun Hutson, whose breakthrough novel was Slugs (1982).  This began with the yummy line: “The slug’s eye stalks waved slowly as it moved towards the crimson lump on which several of its companions were already feeding.”  There was also Guy N Smith, who was both a tweedy pipe-smoking countryside game expert and a schlock-horror writer.  When he wasn’t writing novels about giant carnivorous crabs – Night of the Crabs (1976), Killer Crabs (1978), Crabs on the Rampage (1981) – he was penning non-fiction tomes like Ferreting and Trapping for Amateur Gamekeepers (1976) and Moles and their Control (1980). Actually, I love the idea of Guy N. Smith (who, alas, passed away from Covid-19 at the end of last year) even if I never cared much for his books.

 

It wasn’t until 1981, when Stephen King wrote Danse Macabre, his non-fiction study of the horror genre, that Herbert finally got some respect in the field.  In Danse Macabre, King said approvingly of Herbert that he “does not just write, he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror.”

 

Around the early 1980s I lost interest in James Herbert, largely, I’m sure, because I was no longer a sensation-hungry teenager.  The Dark (1980) seemed merely a supernatural retread of The Fog, while Lair (1979) was a perfunctory sequel to The Rats.  I have to say, though, that his third Rats novel, Doman (1984), which was set in a near-future London after it’d been decimated by a nuclear attack, was about the bleakest and most gruelling thing I’d ever read.  Even in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), the human survivors of the holocaust didn’t have to contend with giant carnivorous rodents.  And during the 1980s and 1990s, Herbert’s books became increasingly concerned with supernatural themes and lacked the lethal edge of his earlier eco-horror ones.  That said, people whose opinions I respect say that Creed (1990) and The Others (1999) are good.

 

Those 1970s novels could’ve become great films.  Indeed, they appeared during a time when directors like Gary Sherman, who made 1972’s Deathline, and Pete Walker, who made 1974’s Frightmare, were moving British horror movies away from the realm of gothic costume dramas and making them more contemporary, nihilistic and graphic, just as Herbert was doing in fiction.  But soon afterwards, the British film industry all-but-disappeared down the plughole.  John Hough, who’d directed the well-regarded Twins of Evil (1972) and Legend of Hell House (1973), hoped to make a film of The Dark, with a script by the famous horror-movie starlet Ingrid Pitt (who was a good friend of Herbert’s), but the project came to nothing.  The Rats and Fluke were eventually filmed in 1982 and 1995, but in North America, losing the working-class London ambience that’d made the books distinctive.  The Survivor was filmed in 1981 in Australia and thus it didn’t work either.

 

© New English Library

 

Ironically, the film with the strongest flavour of his books isn’t a James Herbert adaptation at all.  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) – at least during its first half, when Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris are stalked through a deserted London by victims of a ‘rage’-inducing virus – feels like The Fog without the fog.  And during the scene in the tunnel, where Murphy, Harris and Brendan Gleason encounter a tide of scuttling rats, it’s obvious which 1970s horror paperback Boyle and his scriptwriter Alex Garland are tapping into.

 

Incredibly, considering the unsavoury things that went on in his books, the establishment saw fit to honour Herbert shortly before his death by giving him the Order of the British Empire.  Perhaps somebody in the Royal Family had accidentally left a copy of The Fog on the Queen’s chair.  And perhaps the Queen had enjoyed the bit with the hedge-clippers.

 

A while back, I read a James Herbert novel for the first time in decades.  This was after I read a piece by the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker, in which Brooker suggested that Herbert’s novel ’48 (1996) was better than James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).  He was joking, of course, but knowing Brooker I suspect he was only half-joking.  My curiosity piqued, I tracked down a copy of ’48, which is set in a parallel universe in the year 1948, after London has been devastated by a ‘blood plague’ unleashed by Hitler in the final days of World War II.  A tiny band of uninfected survivors are pursued around the empty, crumbling city by a larger band of infected and vampire-like survivors, who believe that by consuming the uninfected ones’ blood they can rid themselves of the plague before it kills them.  The bad guys are led by a former associate of Oswald Mosley and style themselves on Mosley’s blackshirts.

 

Reading like a cross between Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and an Alastair Maclean war novel, I was surprised at how enjoyable ’48 turned out to be.  Admittedly, Herbert’s meat-and-two-veg prose style would never win any literary awards.  But it was hectically paced, it had just enough character development to maintain one’s interest in the players, its descriptions of a devastated 1940s London were convincing and it made shameless use of the city’s landmarks – Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge – when staging its action set-pieces.

 

It would, incidentally, make a pretty good film.  Are you reading this, Danny Boyle?

 

© HarperPrism

Posted on

Zee-lanka

 

© Navin Weeraratne

 

In the old days, ‘overkill’ was a necessary, even a desirable component of a zombie-holocaust story.  There had to be a large and increasing amount of killing.  This would ensure there was a large and increasing number of dead people, who would then come back to life as zombies.  In turn, this would  ensure there was a large and increasing number of zombies posing a large and increasing threat to the small and decreasing number of human beings who were battling to survive.

 

Unfortunately, as far as zombies are concerned, ‘overkill’ has now taken on a different meaning.  These days there’s just too many movies, TV shows, books, graphic novels, comics and computer games featuring the bloody things.

 

They’re everywhere.  In the movie world alone, they’re in mega-budgeted Hollywood blockbusters, like 2013’s World War Z, and in low-budget rubbish, like last year’s ultra-opportunistic Corona Zombies.  They’re in Scottish movies, like 2008’s The Dead Outside.  They’re in high-school movies, like 2012’s Detention of the Dead.  They’re in musicals, like 2018’s Z-O-M-B-I-E-S.  They’re in Christmas movies, like 2012‘s Christmas with the Dead.  Why, they’re even in Scottish / high-school / musical / Christmas movies like 2017’s Anna and the Apocalypse.

 

Today, in other words, zombies are ubiquitous.  And they’re predictable.  And dare I say it, they’re boring.

 

But having got all that off my chest, I have to admit I enjoyed Navin Weeraratne’s 2018 novel Zeelam, which is about modern-day Sri Lanka suffering its own zombie apocalypse.  The expected story-elements are all present and correct – bites, infections, ‘conjunctivitis-red eyes’, mayhem and lots of blood, gore and grue – but the book is helped by having a strong dose of social commentary too.

 

And social commentary is something I believe all good zombie stories should have.  For example, the first three zombie movies made by George A. Romero, the visionary filmmaker who created the template for zombie holocausts, commented on the civil rights movement and Vietnam War (in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead), mindless consumerism (in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead) and the stupidity of the military (in 1986’s Day of the Dead).  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflected a modern Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon and terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ had entered the popular vocabulary, while its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007), was an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq.  And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) satirised a twenty-something slacker generation who couldn’t tell if someone was a zombie or just pissed, hungover or stoned.  Carrying on the tradition, Zeelam takes multiple swipes at the institutional and societal shortcomings of modern Sri Lanka.  But more about that in a minute.

 

Zeelam has two main characters.  One is Ruven Daniels, a member of a military response team whom we first see being sent to deal with an incident at Colombo’s posh Hilton Hotel. There, zombies – ‘zees’ as they’ve become known in Sri Lankan parlance – have suddenly appeared during a children’s birthday party attended by rich ‘Colombo 7’ housewives and their pampered offspring.  The ensuing carnage takes place under a PA system blasting out Bryan Adams’ The Summer of 69.  (“I love this song!” enthuses one of Ruven’s comrades.)  The other is Dinuka Fernando, a woman working for an NGO trying to prevent the zombie infections, which are caused by a virus being spread by mosquitoes.  Dinuka is a kick-ass character who goes about her duties armed with a Japanese katana.  Unsurprisingly, that katana is deployed with increasing frequency as the novel approaches its climax.

 

The zombies in Zeelam aren’t the dead-come-back-to-life ones portrayed in Romero’s films.  They’re more in the style of 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, people infected by a virus that sends them into a terrifying, murderous, red-eyed frenzy.  Weeraratne has his characters hypothesise that the virus was present in Sri Lanka for decades already in a less aggressive form.  Originally, it manifested itself in the country’s high levels of domestic violence, which didn’t receive much coverage because attentions were focused on the Sri Lankan Civil War from 1983 to 2009 – which itself became an outlet for the violence caused by the virus.  But now it’s mutated into something more devastating and its effects can no longer be concealed behind the walls of peoples’ homes or camouflaged by the mayhem of the battlefield.

 

Thus, though Weeraratne’s zombie scenario is imaginary, the context that gave rise to it isn’t.  Indeed, the text is peppered with superscript numbers that refer the reader to a lengthy appendix of endnotes.  Here, Weeraratne provides links to real-life studies, reports and news items about Sri Lanka and its relationship with violence, showing that he’s grounded his ideas in depressing reality.

 

Zeelam is also interesting because the virus is shown to create different types of infections.  These range from fully fledged, ‘berserker’ zombies to asymptomatic people who merely carry the virus around in them.  Most intriguingly, there’s a category called ‘sleepers’, who only show their zombie tendencies at night and are perfectly human-like during the day.  Indeed, among the book’s supporting cast is a character, a government inspector called Siripala Fonesaka, who spends his days desperately trying to cover up the monstrous things he’s done at night.

 

This diversity makes the threat posed by the zombies more hydra-like and difficult to deal with.  Also, it helps Zeelam to dodge the criticism I made at the start of this entry, that zombie stories have become too dull and predictable.  However, I have to say the pedant in me wished Weeraratne had explained these variations in the virus’s effects with the same scientific rigour with which he described the virus’s origins.  How, for example, does sunlight temporarily neutralise the virus in the sleepers?

 

As I’ve said, just as George A. Romero’s zombie movies highlighted the shortcomings of American society, and just as Danny Boyle painted an unflattering portrait of modern-day Britain in 28 Days Later, so Weeraratne spends much of Zeelam taking potshots at the frustrations and annoyances of 21st century Sri Lanka.  These include venal and corrupt politicians – the outbreak at the Hilton Hotel in the novel’s opening pages is the consequence of a seedy MP booking in there with a prostitute – and bungling, incalcitrant bureaucrats, and elements of the armed forces who in their minds have never stopped fighting the Civil War and pose as a big a threat to the public as the zombies do.

 

Then there’s the country’s class system.  Weeraratne doesn’t show the people at the top of the pile in a particularly sympathetic light.  When Ruven’s men cordon off a neighbourhood where an outbreak is in progress, one privileged young asshole rolls up in a fancy car and demands to be allowed to drive through because his father is ‘a judge’.  In a corresponding endnote, Weeraratne describes how he once heard someone say the exact same thing when people objected to him parking on a double-yellow line in Havelock Town.

 

Later, an alumnus of one of Colombo’s prestigious private schools, and thus an entitled member of the city’s ‘old-school-tie’ network, meets a humiliating end at the blade of Dinuka’s katana.  Described by Weeraratne with obvious relish, his death involves, shall we say, the relaxation of sphincter muscles.  This amused me because in the real world the school in question is at the top of my street.

 

114 pages long, Zeelam is a slim volume, and its impact is slightly lessened by a number of typos.  You sometimes wonder what was distracting the proof-reader from their duties — were they struggling against an encroaching zombie infection at the time?  But as an enjoyably gory piece of entertainment that doesn’t pull its satirical punches, it’s still pretty tasty.

 

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