Sting – Blood and Porridge

May 8, 2025May 8, 2025

Nostalgic wallows 4: the snooker

For the first time in years, I’ve been reminded that the sport of snooker still exists. This is because of the headlines that have accompanied the final of the 2025 World Snooker Championship, which a few days ago was won for the first time by a Chinese player, Zhao Xintong. His victory has led to speculation that snooker, already popular in China, will rise to ‘another level’ there. Mind you, this new association with China will probably cause Donald Trump to slap tariffs of 145% on all snooker-related imports to the USA.

Anyway, snooker being in the news again has prompted me to dust down and repost this nostalgic piece about the long-ago days when snooker was exciting, all the time…

I learned many things from my maternal grandmother before she passed away in 1997 at the venerable age of 93. One of them was a fascination with the late 1970s / early 1980s phenomenon that was televised snooker.

During the 1970s most of my family, immediate and extended, had lived in Northern Ireland. In 1977, however, my parents bought a small farm in the south of Scotland and that became the new home for them, me and my siblings. My grandmother, then in her seventies, soon got into the habit of crossing the Irish Sea and visiting us in Scotland. However, because of the distance and effort involved in travelling, she would make the most of it and stay for a few weeks at a time.

Since my grandmother was an avid viewer of TV programmes, this meant that, while she resided in our house, we had to relinquish control of our television set to her. Unfortunately for me, she seemed addicted to every soap opera going, from the humble British ones like Coronation Street (1960-present), Crossroads (1964-88) and Emmerdale Farm (1972-present) to the opulent American ones like Dallas (1978-91) and Dynasty (1981-89), all of which I considered to be televisual brain-death.

However, one unexpected thing I noticed when she came to stay was that she was also a big fan of the sport of snooker, which had recently taken off in popularity and was attracting big TV audiences. At some point, I started watching it with her, with the result I became hooked on it too for a few years.

Here’s an example of how much my grandmother was into the snooker. One time she arrived with us while the World Snooker Championship – sponsored until 2005 by the tobacco company Embassy – was underway and was being broadcast live on BBC2. Some matches took place early in the morning, so she’d rise early to watch them. One morning my mother entered the living room, where my grandmother was immersed in a TV snooker game, and noticed she was wearing a cardigan that was inside out. A label protruded from the knitted collar behind her neck. My mother pointed this out, but she just sighed and nodded at the TV screen. “I can’t take it off and change it round just now,” she said. “If I did, I’d cause bad luck for Alex.”

From wikipedia.org / © Bigpad

The Alex she worried she might inflict bad luck on if she put her inside-out cardigan on the right way was Alexander Gordon Higgins, ‘Hurricane’ Higgins as he was known to snooker fans. He was famed for his mercurial abilities. On a good day he’d play brilliantly. On a shit day he’d play… well, shit. He was also famed for his mercurial temperament, which I’ll talk about in a minute. He was of working-class Protestant stock from Belfast in Northern Ireland, which was one of the reasons why my grandmother loved him. I remember a couple of times watching TV with her when Higgins fluffed an important shot. “Oh Alex!” she’d lament. “Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex…”

As snooker had risen to prominence, so had Higgins. He’d been playing from the age of seven, first in Belfast’s Jampot Club and YMCA; and by 1968, before he turned 20, he’d won the All-Ireland and Northern Ireland Amateur Snooker Championships. Physically slight, Higgins had for a time in the 1960s intended to become a jockey rather than a professional snooker player. I suspect this was part of the spell he cast later over my grandmother and ladies of a similar age, when he was still scrawny and undernourished-looking. Those ladies just wanted to feed him up and put some colour in his cheeks.

By 1972, Higgins had turned professional and he won that year’s World Snooker Championship, although this didn’t make much of a stir in the public consciousness because technology wasn’t ready for the sport yet. As the game required its players to sink all the red balls on the table, and then pocket in order the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black ones, you needed to watch it on a colour television to know what was going on. And in British homes, colour TV sets didn’t outnumber black-and-white ones until 1976. I remember an uncle acquiring a colour TV before 1976, but the colours refused to be contained by the outlines on the screen and would swim across them, which made it migraine-inducing to watch.

However, once everyone could watch snooker in proper colour, the sport took off and its leading players became stars. What’s fascinating, and retrospectively rather sad, is that many of those guys weren’t cut out to be stars. They didn’t have the glitz of other big British sporting names of the 1970s, such as elegant playboy racing driver James Hunt or permed heartthrob footballer Kevin Keegan. Often, they’d grown up learning to play snooker in the booze-sodden, cigarette-fogged environments of pubs and club and hadn’t received much of a formal education. From the way Higgins behaved at the snooker table and away from it, you sometimes wondered if he’d had any opportunity to develop social skills at all. It must have been discombobulating for them to suddenly find themselves in the national limelight, suddenly become big media names and suddenly be chasing big sums of prize money.

Among this collection of misfits, oddballs and eccentrics there was, besides Higgins, Welshman Ray Reardon, already in his forties when snooker made him famous. Not one to modify his appearance and style to match the expectations of stardom, Reardon sported an imposing widow’s peak; and that and the way he stalked hungrily around the table earned him the nickname of ‘Dracula’. Then there was the ashen-faced Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White of Tooting, London, who wasn’t yet out of his teens by the end of the 1970s, who slightly resembled Johnny Depp in his Edward Scissorhands period and who came across as a younger, marginally less troubled version of Higgins. From the age of eight or nine, he’d played truant from school so he could practise in his local snooker hall.

© ITC Entertainment

Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White and Ray ‘Dracula’ Reardon, incidentally, inspired an odd little movie called Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1987) directed by the much-admired Alan Clarke. The title characters, obviously modelled on White and Reardon, were played by Phil Daniels and Alun Armstrong. The film has received the accolade of being ‘undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history.’

Another unconventional figure was Higgins’ fellow Northern Irishman Dennis Taylor, who suffered from bad eyesight. Ordinary glasses weren’t much use to Taylor at the snooker table because, when he bent over it to take a shot, his weak eyes would end up looking over the top of the glasses rather than through them. So he had to wear a pair of specially designed glasses with heightened lenses that made him resemble a non-spangly incarnation of Elton John.

From wikipedia.org / © John Dobson

Meanwhile, some glamour was injected into the snooker world by the Latin-looking, vaguely Antonio Banderas-esque Silvino Francisco, who was actually South African; and by the white-clad Kirk Stevens, a handsome lad with the all-important 1970s perm, who hailed from Toronto.

Stevens was one of a triumvirate of Canadian players who found fame as snooker players back then, which meant it was the first, possibly only, time that your average British person on the street could name three famous Canadians off the top of their heads. Also from Canada was Cliff Thorburn, who was known as ‘the Grinder’ for his remorselessly methodical style of play and who resembled a better-groomed Donald Sutherland; and Thorburn’s fellow British Columbian ‘Big’ Bill Werbeniuk, whose weight was in the region of 20 stones. The hefty Werbeniuk suffered from a tremor and to subdue this when playing he relied on beer: lots of beer. According to his Wikipedia entry, he’d typically have knocked back six pints before the start of a match and he could get through 40 to 50 pints in a day. One urban myth at the time was that Werbeniuk had all this beer medically prescribed to him by a doctor and got it for free. More feasible was a story in the British press about him claiming the price of half-a-dozen pints each match-day as a tax-deductible expense.

Thus, snooker back then offered an array of peculiar characters whom you’d find in few other sports, constantly having their ups and downs, which I imagine was another reason why it appealed to my soap-opera-mad grandmother.

Some of the downs they suffered were spectacular. In his autobiography, Jimmy White confessed to taking crack cocaine for a few mad months in the 1980s, while Kirk Stevens owned up to having a general cocaine problem during the same period. Stevens’ admission came after the final of the 1985 British Open, in which he’d played Silvino Francisco. The South African accused Stevens of being as ‘high as a kite’ during the match. Not that Francisco could complain too much, for in 1997 he was arrested and jailed for three years for smuggling cannabis with a street value of £155,000.

In the late 1980s Cliff Thorburn was heavily fined and banned from a couple of tournaments for failing a cocaine test; and to complete the Canadian drugs hat-trick, Bill Werbeniuk quit the sport after getting into trouble for taking the drug Inderal, which snooker’s governing body listed as a forbidden substance. To be fair to Werbeniuk, he was taking Inderal on the advice of his doctors, who thought it might help to curb his ruinous alcohol consumption.

Alex Higgins, meanwhile, was in a league of his own. An unabashed pisshead, he somewhat inevitably ended up in the orbit of the hellraising movie star Oliver Reed. However, if you’re to believe some of the stories, Reed found him hard to put up with – and vented his frustrations by, for instance, chasing Higgins around his mansion with an axe and feeding him a pretend hangover cure made out of perfume and washing-up liquid. Neither was Higgins afraid of drugs. According to fellow snooker-player John Virgo, he once asked clean-living popstar Sting at a concert if he had any ‘gear’. “Yes,” said Sting, “we’ve got some baseball caps and T-shirts left.” “No,” retorted a disgusted Higgins. “Not that kind of gear. I mean the kind of gear that goes up your nose!”

Higgins logged up a long and unflattering list of misdemeanours. He got into trouble for pissing into a potted plant during a tournament in 1982. (Virgo: “As he later argued, they were fake plants in the pot, so he ‘wasn’t being cruel to the flowers’”). He headbutted a tournament director in 1986 after refusing to provide a urine sample for a drugs test. He ended up playing in the 1989 European Open on crutches and with an ankle in plaster after falling 25 feet from a ledge outside the windows of his girlfriend’s apartment – he’d been trying to climb into the apartment after having a row with her. He punched a press officer in 1990. And the same year, he threatened to have the mild-mannered Dennis Taylor shot, which was no laughing matter since Higgins and Taylor belonged to either side of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide and Higgins came from Belfast’s Sandy Row area, notorious for its links with the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Defence Association.

The result was a slow, painful but inevitable erosion of Higgin’s playing ability, his emotional stability, his finances and his popularity. By the late 1990s, I couldn’t argue when an Irish friend dismissed him out of hand as ‘an unmannerly wee pup.’

From wikipedia.org / © Joni-Pekka Luomali

Even before those characters began to self-implode amid booze, drugs and violence, the future of snooker had materialised in the form of Englishman Steve Davis. He would dominate the sport during the 1980s, when he won six world titles and was ranked world number one for seven years in a row. Davis was scandal-free in his behaviour but also, unfortunately, relentlessly robotic in his playing style and deadly dull in his personality. It was no surprise when the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image (1984-96) featured a sketch where Davis tries to jive up his image by giving himself a new nickname, to rival Alex Higgins’ ‘Hurricane’ and Jimmy White’s ‘Whirlwind’. Eventually, he chooses ‘Interesting’.

Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis, in effect, created the mould for the snooker players who would follow. A new generation of them were growing up, less conditioned by the boozy, seedy world of pubs and clubs from which many of their predecessors had emerged. They were better equipped to withstand the pressure of public and media attention and go sensibly about the business of winning tournaments and making money. For these pragmatic types, snooker was more of a job than an obsessive passion.

Still, some of my fondest snooker memories come from seeing the seemingly invulnerable Davis get beaten in a crucial game by a less organised, more human opponent. There was, for example, the final of the UK Championship in 1983 when Davis went up against Higgins and soon had a seven-frames-to-nil advantage. Miraculously, Higgins managed to pull himself together and eventually beat Davis 16-15 to win the competition.

Even better was the 1985 World Championship where Davis played Taylor and again built up a seemingly unassailable early lead, of eight frames to nil. But Taylor rallied and the lead seesawed between them, and eventually both players ended up on 17 frames each. Late on in the deciding frame, victory was decided by whoever could pocket the black first – which Taylor managed to do. My jubilation at Taylor’s win was marred by the fact that I and many others were watching the final that night in the Hillhead Bar at Aberdeen University’s Hillhead Halls of Residence. The final frame went on beyond midnight and beyond the bar’s closing time. Desperate to get us all out of the place, some absolute sadist in the bar-staff pulled the plug on the TV seconds before Taylor took that final, all-important shot at the black.

I’ve written humorously about them, but things didn’t end well for some of those snooker players. Kirk Stevens returned to Canada where, broke, he had to eke a living as a construction worker, landscape gardener, lumberjack and car salesman before he finally got back onto the local snooker circuit. Silvino Francisco, before the nadir of his cannabis arrest, was already in an ignominious situation, having to earn cash by working in a mate’s fish-and-chip shop. Bill Werbeniuk was unemployed and on disability benefits prior to his death in 2003.

From wikipedia.org / © The Royal Bar

Higgins’ end was pitiful. Diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, and subjected to radiotherapy treatment that destroyed his teeth and made it difficult for him to eat even the meagre amounts of food that he’d survived on previously, Higgins refused to curtail his heavy drinking and smoking. In 2010, having become dependent on disability payments just as Werbeniuk had, Higgins was found dead in his Belfast flat. His demise was attributed to a mixture of malnutrition, pneumonia and bronchitis. Photographs of him taken towards the end of his life show a shrivelled, shrunken figure that looked more like Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter movies than a human being. I’m relieved my Hurricane-loving grandmother didn’t live long enough to see him in such a state.

With nearly all its old characters retired or dead, I’ve paid little attention to the snooker world in the last quarter-century. Indeed, looking at recent lists of champions, the only names I recognise are those of Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins. Still, for its modern players, it’s no doubt a saner and safer, though blander, sport nowadays.

But one nice thing I’ve noticed is that Steve Davis, once the embodiment of everything I found mind-numbingly boring about snooker, is actually quite cool nowadays. Since hanging up his snooker cue, he’s reinvented himself as a radio, club and festival DJ specialising in trancey, dancy electronic music. He collaborates with British-Iranian musician and composer Kavus Torabi and they’ve even formed an electronica band called the Utopia Strong, which released albums in 2019 and 2022.

So it turns out that Davis got it right with his tactics. He came across as a clean-living dullard in his youth but crucially he preserved his faculties, health and finances. And now, in his snooker retirement, he’s become Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis at last.

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Knight

January 19, 2025January 24, 2025

The man from another place has gone to another place

From wikipedia.org / © Georges Biard

For the past few days, I’ve felt like wearing a black armband while I sip my cups of coffee. That’s because David Lynch, visionary maker of movies, short films, TV shows, web series, music videos and commercials, and artist, musician and actor to boot, passed away on January 15^th.

In his cinematic output, Lynch was surely one of the most American of film directors. His work was suffused with Americana, both the cosy variety populated by porches, picket fences, lawns, sprinklers, diners, coffee, pie and kindly, neighbourly folk; and the flashier variety whereby bequiffed, leather-jacketed Elvis wannabes and peroxide blondes cruised along endless highways in big, finned sports cars. This being Lynch, though, submerged beneath the Americana and frequently bubbling to its surface were things altogether weirder, darker, more surreal and twisted. There was as much Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and William S. Burroughs in his work as there was Edward Hopper, Frank Capra and Ray Bradbury. Meanwhile, though Lynch’s themes, motifs, imagery and stylistic touches felt unique – no wonder ‘Lynchian’ became a word – he wasn’t afraid to dress his visions in the clothes of familiar genres: horror, thriller, crime noir, science fiction and – something Lynch didn’t get enough credit for – comedy.

Anyway, here’s a guide to my favourite parts of the David Lynch film-and-TV universe.

Favourite Lynch cast

Lynch’s version of Dune (1984) was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics. (Dung, I remember the New Musical Express calling it.) Unfortunately, Dune’s old-school producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted the doorstop-sized and labyrinthine Frank Herbert novel on which it was based crammed into a regulation two-hour movie. The condensed result didn’t make much sense.

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

But Lynch never worked with a better troupe of actors. It even outshone the cast that, four decades later, Denis Villeneuve assembled for his telling of the story in 2022 and 2024. The Lynch Dune features Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and Dean Stockwell. Oh, and Sting – more on him in a minute.

Favourite Lynch collaborator

That would be Jack Nance, who played Henry Spencer, lead character in Eraserhead (1977), the film that put Lynch on the map. With his impassive features, bouffant, tight suit and peculiar gait, Nance contributes as much to the film’s atmosphere as the elements that today we’d regard as typically Lynchian – the mutant baby, the lady in the radiator, the flickering lights, the industrial noise. Thereafter, he was in all Lynch’s film projects (apart from 1980’s The Elephant Man) up to 1997’s Lost Highway. He most famously played the amiable, fishing-and-chess-obsessed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch and Mark Frost’s oddball, sometimes barmy, occasionally confounding TV murder whodunnit, which coincidentally was a soap opera, comedy, horror story and science-fiction drama too.

© AFI Center for Advanced Studies / Libra Films

Nance’s life was hardly a bed of roses. His film work was intermittent and in the mid-1980s he worked as a hotel clerk to make ends meet. His second wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s niece) committed suicide. And he had severe alcohol problems. During the filming of Blue Velvet (1986), he was in such a state that Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper! – had to drive him to a rehabilitation centre. In 1996, Nance died of a subdural hematoma, resulting from a ‘blunt force trauma’. The previous day his face was bruised and he told friends that he’d been punched during a brawl he’d got into with some strangers in a doughnut shop. Lynch said in tribute: “There’s not another actor I can think of who could fill his shoes. I had roles in my head for future films that I was saving for Jack. I cannot think of anyone else who could do it.”

Favourite Lynch funny bit

The other day at work I was discussing Lynch’s passing with a colleague. I started enthusing about the sequence where Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe try to rob a feed store in Wild at Heart (1991) and how funny it was: “Willem Dafoe trips and falls on his shotgun and it goes off and you see the top of his head flying up in the air… Meanwhile, there’s a wounded clerk who’s had his hand blown off at the wrist… His colleague comforts him by saying modern surgery can reattach his hand… And then you see a dog running away outside with the hand in its mouth…”

At this point I realised my colleague wasn’t laughing with me, but was looking decidedly queasy. He didn’t seem happy to be reminded of that sequence. Which shows humour is subjective. Still, I think the attempted robbery in Wild at Heart is Lynch’s funniest moment.

© PolyGram / Propaganda Films / Samuel Goldwyn Company

Favourite Lynch musical bit

Lynch was a musician, so music played a big role in his films – right from Eraserhead, when the lady in the radiator sings In Heaven. In his final major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the long-awaited third season of his celebrated TV show, music wasn’t so much an element as a fixture. Each episode ended with a scene in the Roadhouse, the bar / concert venue in the town of Twin Peaks, where a musical act would be performing. Given Twin Peaks’ small size and remote location, the Roadhouse attracted some unfeasibly big names: Julee Cruise, the Cactus Blossoms, Rebekah Del Rio with Moby on guitar, and one Edward Louis Severson – Eddie Vedder to you and me.

But in my opinion, the act that rounds off Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is best of all. It’s the fearsome electro-metal juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, whom the Roadhouse MC introduces as the Nine Inch Nails, no less.

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

Favourite Lynch musician in an acting role

Lynch was also fond of putting singers and musicians in his casts. Many remember Sting playing Feyd-Rautha Harknonnen, evil nephew of the equally-evil Baron Harkonnen, in Dune. I’m not a fan of Sting’s acting but visually, with his spiky blonde hair, lean frame and daft codpiece, he was striking. Indeed, when I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 and Austen Butler strolled into view as Feyd-Rautha, my first thought was: “Oh look, there’s what’s-his-name in the Sting role!”

© Twin Peaks Productions / New Line Cinema / CiBy 2000

However, my favourite Lynchian musical-cameo comes in the middle of Twin Peaks’ cinematic prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). This is when David Bowie pops up as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who’s been mysteriously missing for two years. One morning, he suddenly steps out of a lift at FBI headquarters. He proceeds to babble gibberish at FBI agents and Twin Peaks regulars Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenthal and Gordon Cole (Kyle MacLachlan, Miguel Ferrer and Lynch himself): “Who do you think this is, there…? I found something. And then there they were!” Then he narrates a trippy dream montage involving dwarves, killers, masks, disembodied mouths and long-nosed spectres. And then he vanishes into thin air. “He’s gone!” squawks McLachlan. “He was never here!” retorts Ferrer.

Bowie died early in 2016, before Twin Peaks: The Return began filming, which seemed to rule Philip Jeffries out of the third series’ storyline. However, Lynch did include Jeffries. Only now the disappearing agent is a giant teapot voiced by an actor called Nathan Frizell doing a Bowie impersonation.

David Bowie turned into a teapot. Only David Lynch could do that.

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

Favourite Lynch sad bit

Because of the nightmarish aspects of his works – it’s not the majority of their content, but it’s the stuff that lingers in viewers’ minds – Lynch isn’t readily associated with pathos. Yet there are moments in his films that I find incredibly sad. In The Elephant Man, for instance, it’s when the titular character John Merrick (John Hurt) escapes from the freak show owned by the evil Bytes (Freddie Jones), with the help of the show’s other inmates. A dwarf, played by Star Wars’ Kenny Baker, remarks ruefully: “Luck, my friend, luck. Who needs it more than we?” Or in Twin Peaks: The Return when Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) says a final goodbye to the ailing Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady. This is made more poignant by knowing that Log-Lady actress Catherine Coulson died early in the third season’s production.

But my number-one Lynch sad moment is probably the ending of The Straight Story (1999), when Alvin (Richard Farnworth) finally makes it to the shack of his unwell brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). They’re two old codgers, one using walking sticks and the other a Zimmer frame, and clearly aren’t used to expressing their feelings. But Lynch, with some basic dialogue (“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.”), some silence and some anxious, exhausted looks and expressions from his actors, conveys a huge amount of emotion.

© Asymmetrical Productions / Film4 / Buena Vista Productions

Favourite Lynch scary bit

Obviously, there are lots of scary bits in Lynch’s oeuvre. I imagine he’d have been miffed if you described his works as ‘horror’ films, but he more than earned his entry in any ‘Encyclopaedia of Horror’.

Particularly freaky to me were several things in Twin Peaks and its 2017 sequel. The image of Killer Bob (Frank Silva) crawling over a sofa in the original series was terrifying. Twin Peaks: The Return featured in its first episode a strange experiment involving a big glass box and a mass of surveillance equipment that eventually conjures up a phantom entity. Unfortunately for the guy monitoring the experiment – who’s inopportunely chosen this moment to have it off with his girlfriend – the entity is equipped with kitchen-blender fingers and It proceeds to reduce their heads to bloody confetti. Also horrific is a sequence in a later episode wherein Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) tries to calm a hysterical woman at the wheel of a stalled car and a convulsing, vomiting zombie-like creature slowly rises out of the seat beside her. This is never explained or referred to again – a perfect, scary Lynchian moment in other words.

And I remember sinking into my cinema seat, not wanting to look at the screen too much, during Lost Highway (1996), when Lynch’s camera starts prowling deep – deep – into the black recesses of the house belonging to Fred (Bill Pullman), the film’s initial hero. That sequence had a real primordial chill to it.

But for my money, the scariest Lynch moment is the ‘Winkie’s Diner’ sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001). A man sitting in the diner (Patrick Fischler) recounts two dreams he’s had, both of which take place there. In each dream he’s been possessed by an inexplicable fear – and a man with a hideous face living behind the diner, whom he can see ‘through the wall’, seems to be responsible. When a companion suggests he exorcises the memory of the dreams by checking behind the real diner, he reluctantly complies. So they venture along the side alleyway, and… What follows is one of the very few jump-scares in cinematic history that actually made me jump.

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Spelling Entertainment

Favourite Lynch speech

Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenthal, the arrogant FBI pathologist who assists Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, gets my vote here. During the first season, Albert is very vocal about his low opinion of the town of Twin Peaks, which results in him getting punched out by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean). During the second season, when Truman’s ready to punch him out again following a cutting jibe – “You might practise walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor” – Albert responds to the threat of violence with an impassioned speech explaining that he’s happy to be a knob-end if it helps him in the greater scheme of things, i.e. in the struggle against evil. Oh, and he’s a committed pacifist too.

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

No wonder Cooper tells the dumfounded Truman afterwards, “Albert’s path is a strange and difficult one.”

© De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

Favourite Lynch villain

There are a good many contenders for this too: Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, and Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen in Dune, who’s basically a levitating, leering sack of pus. But at the end of the day, my ‘Favourite Lynch Villain’ award has to go to Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

The scene where the black-clad, slick-haired Frank assaults Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whilst acting out a deranged sexual fantasy, screaming things like “Baby wants to f**k! Baby wants to f**k blue velvet!” and slurping gas out of a canister is astonishing. It’s made even more harrowing by the fact that the hapless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is hiding nearby in a closet and has to witness it all. This is the moment when the preppy, clean-cut Jeffrey discovers life is a lot more complicated, in a bad way, than he thought. No wonder he laments: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

So, thank you David Lynch. Your oeuvre was sometimes comfortingly genial, sometimes perplexingly weird, sometimes shockingly dark – but it was always fascinating. I raise a damn fine cup of coffee in your honour.

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

March 27, 2024March 29, 2024

It’s Timmy time

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, sequel to his 2021 sci-fi blockbuster Dune and an adaptation of the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, has been on release for a few weeks now. Though we’ve been busy recently moving apartment, my partner and I found time to watch it yesterday afternoon in our new neighbourhood’s cinema.

The film’s opening 20 minutes weren’t a happy experience for us. Villeneuve immediately plunged us into the action, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their Fremen escorts Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) pinned down on the surface of the desert planet Arrakis by a squad of heavily-armed, black-clad goons from the villainous House of Harkonnen. The tension mounted as the two parties, hunting each other, snuck across the planet’s scorched landscapes of sand and rock… The soundtrack was unnervingly silent… And from right behind us came an incessant cacophony of rustling paper, crackling wrappers, slurpy masticating and greedy chomping. We were attending a 1.30 pm screening of Dune 2 and the couple sitting behind us had decided to guzzle a takeaway lunch while watching the film. I wished a giant Arrakis sandworm would surface directly under their seats and guzzle them.

Finally, the couple managed to finish their meal, their unwelcome sound effects abated and we were able to focus fully on Villeneuve’s movie. So, what did I think of it? Before I give my verdict, here’s a warning. In the entry ahead, there will be spoilers galore for Dune 2.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as its predecessor. Mind you, I expected that three years ago as I walked out of Dune 1. As I wrote at the time: “One thing I suspect makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.”

To be fair to Villeneuve and his co-writer John Spaihts, the ending they come up with here is less happy than the one I remember in Herbert’s novel, which I read as a teenager. But the plot, wherein Paul Atreides joins forces with the Fremen, Arrakis’s Bedouin-like natives, and they take on the scumbag Harkonnens, still feels emotionally less complex than that of the original film.

The first film saw Paul’s honourable, though imperialistic father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the House of Atreides, get tricked into taking stewardship of Arrakis. There, the House is destroyed by the brutal and grudgeful Harkonnens, with the connivance of the galactic Emperor (the ever-whispery Christopher Walken) and the Bene Gesserit, a female sect with Jedi-like powers who’re secretly manipulating events. Paul and Jessica are among the few survivors and the Fremen reluctantly take them under their wing.

I had some problems with Dune 2’s pacing. Much of the film takes place in the Arrakis desert, where Paul and his mum are gradually initiated into the ways of the natives. Some Fremen are particularly interested in Paul because he seems to fulfil a long-held prophecy about a messiah who’ll come from another world and not only lead them to freedom but make their sandy world green again. While I respect Villeneuve’s efforts at ‘world-building’ here, I feel this section goes on too long. He ladles on the Fremen’s rituals and lore, especially things involving hallucinogenic substances like the spice – the prized commodity, necessary for enabling space travel in the Dune universe, which makes Arrakis such a big political deal in the first place – and the Water of Life, a blue fluid extracted from baby sandworms, the planet’s main non-human lifeform. Though as any Scotsman will tell you, the Water of Life is actually whisky.

Also, the scenes where Paul argues with the Messiah-believing faction of the Freeman (headed by Bardem) that he isn’t really the Messiah put me in mind of the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian. While Chalamet tried to convince them that he wasn’t the Chosen One, I kept expecting to hear Terry Jones call out in his raspy old-lady voice: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

Conversely, towards the end, things feel rushed. As Paul and the Fremen escalate their attacks on the Harkonnens, who’ve taken over Arrakis and are trying to supervise its spice production, and the planet slips out of control, the Emperor and his daughter (Florence Pugh) are compelled to make an intervention. They head for Arrakis… And after their spaceship lands at the Harkonnens’ base, Paul and the forces of the Fremen simply turn up, unobserved and unannounced. Until then, we’ve been led to believe that they’re confined to the inhospitable, storm-ridden south of the planet, outside the Harkonnens’ control. How they arrive so quickly and easily, with legions of troops, a cavalry of sandworms and an arsenal of missiles, in the Harkonnens’ backyard is a mystery. It’s as if the planet of Arrakis has suddenly shrunk to being the size of the Isle of Wight.

Meanwhile, certain sub-plots from Herbert’s book don’t quite enrich the movie in the way they could have – or are cut altogether. The return of Paul’s faithful warrior-mentor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) happens abruptly. He just pops up all-of-a-sudden. I’d have liked to know how he survived the massacre in the previous film, especially as we last saw him about to engage the Harkonnens in desperate battle. Gurney brings with him an unexpected revelation about some ‘House Atomics’, nuclear missiles belonging to the Atreides that Duke Leto quietly stashed away on Arrakis. These become a handy bargaining chip for Paul when he points them at the all-important spice fields and are a deus ex machina if ever there was one. I can’t recall if these were in the book – if they were, I assume they were introduced less jarringly.

I do recall the book having an interesting twist whereby Gurney believes Jessica is the one who betrayed the Atreides to the Harkonnens. But there’s zero interaction between the two of them in Dune 2. Rebecca Ferguson, incidentally, deserves praise for her portrayal of Jessica, who grows into a sinister, if not chilling figure as she exerts more and more influence over the Fremen. Gurney would be right to distrust her.

Elsewhere, I was perplexed by the absence of Thufir Harat (Stephen McKinley Henderson in Dune 1). Thufir is a mentat, beings in the Dune universe who do the work of computers. Employed by Paul’s late father, he has a reasonable supporting role in the first film and it’s noticeable that he’s not around in Dune 2. In the novel, the Harkonnens enslave him after their bloody takeover, but then he secretly tries to undermine his new bosses whilst working in their headquarters. In Dune 2, his presence might have solved the problem of how Paul moves his forces to the proximity of the Harkonnens and the Emperor without anyone noticing – Thufir could have deactivated the monitoring systems. Anyway, the film leaves us to surmise that Thufir perished during the slaughter of the Atreides, though Villeneuve thanks McKinley Henderson in the credits, presumably for accepting the dropping of his character with good grace.

Ironically, in the first adaptation of Dune, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch, which tried to shoehorn the entire novel into two hours and 17 minutes of running time and was derided for leaving so much out, Thufir is shown surviving the Atreides’ massacre and becoming the Harkonnens’ slave. In that version, he was played by Freddie Jones, father of Toby Jones, with big, spidery eyebrows.

All that said, I did enjoy Dune 2. The film was generally impressive and there were moments where I went, “Wow!” Following on from Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), it’s good to see Villeneuve again treat a science- fiction story with high seriousness. And I like how, for all that the male characters hog the screen and flaunt their testosterone, it’s implied that the female characters, as portrayed by Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux, are the ones really running the show.

Also great is Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnens. The scenes set on their home planet truly capture their fascistic, creepy, sado-masochistic awfulness, resembling black-and-white footage of rallies in Nazi Germany but populated by the bald-headed Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise. Even their fireworks look dark and perverted. And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychopathic nephew of arch-villain Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s drafted in to quell the Fremen’s resistance and restore order on Arrakis, Austin Butler gives possibly the best performance in the film. (In the old David Lynch movie, Feyd-Rautha was the character played by the reggae-loving Geordie, Sting.)

Though Butler just about manages to steal the show, it is one of those films that’s helped immeasurably by its ensemble cast. That includes Timothée Chalamet who, as Paul, has the hardest acting task – he could have ended up a dull goody two shoes or, as he agonises over whether or not he should proclaim himself the Messiah, a whiny pain in the neck. But Chalamet avoids both pitfalls.

Lastly, watching Dune 2, I realised it featured no fewer than three James Bond villains – Walken (Max Zorin in 1986’s A View to a Kill), Bardem (Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall) and Dave Bautista (Mr Hinx in 2016’s Spectre). For good measure, you get a Bond lady too, Lea Seydoux who played Madeline Swann in Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die. Yes, I know. It’s sad that I notice these things.

November 18, 2021March 27, 2024

Spice-world: the movie

Like everywhere else, one sector in Sri Lanka heavily hit by Covid-19 was the country’s cinemas. In Colombo, establishments like the Liberty, Savoy and Regal had stood closed-up, empty and silent for so long that I’d begun to doubt if they’d ever open their doors again. However, with the Sri Lankan Covid-19 death toll down (for now), the authorities have permitted cinemas to reopen, albeit working at a reduced capacity. During the first half of November, their auditoriums could only be 25% full. For the month’s second half, the maximum capacity has been increased to 50%. To do our bit to help Sri Lanka’s beleaguered cinema industry, myself and a mate went a few days ago to the Scope multiplex at Colombo City Centre shopping mall. There, we watched Dune, this year’s big-budget, Denis Villeneuve-directed adaptation of the famous 1965 science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert. Or at least, Villeneuve’s adaptation of the first half of it, as Dune is one fat book.

And we had no regrets about seeing Dune in a cinema. It’s a visually majestic creation that needs to be seen on a big screen to be properly appreciated. In fact, you’ll be committing a minor crime against celluloid if you watch it in reduced form on a TV or laptop screen. And if you dare to watch it on a phone-screen… Well, you don’t deserve to live.

I have to say, though, that I read Herbert’s novel as a teenager and it was no favourite of mine. In part, my being unimpressed by it was probably down to bloody-mindedness. A lot of earnest, nerdy people gushed about how great it was, which probably predisposed me to not liking it. This was similar to my less-than-enthusiastic reaction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-worshipped Lord of the Rings – although unlike Rings, I did read Dune to the end. (With Rings, I gave up four-fifths of the way through.) Also, it didn’t help that I read Dune a couple of years after Star Wars (1977) came out. Many of the book’s plot elements – a scheming galactic empire, a desert planet, an elite sect with psychic powers – had recently featured in George Lucas’s sci-fi / fantasy blockbuster, so they seemed less fresh than they had in 1965.

Though I found Lord of the Rings overrated on the page, I did enjoy the movies that Peter Jackson made of it in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Well, apart from the last half-hour of the final one, The Return of the King, which consisted of nothing but various characters getting married. A second-rate reading experience can, with an excellent cast, a great director and all the epic locations and special effects that Hollywood money can buy, be turned into a first-rate viewing experience.

And so it is with Dune.

Its cast is wonderful – Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Timothée Chalamet, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Jason Mamoa, Charlotte Rampling, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Javier Bardem – and director Villeneuve has already helmed two of the past decade’s greatest sci-fi movies, Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). And its 165-million-dollar budget has been put to good use. The filming locations in the UAE and Jordan really do transport you to the film’s main setting, the endlessly sandy and murderously hot desert-planet Arrakis; while the special effects, conjuring up fleets of spacecraft that stand like gigantic, angular cathedrals when they’re parked on planets’ surfaces, but look as tiny and inconsequential as pollen-grains when they’re bobbing in the black void of space, are stunning. Hence, the absolute necessity to see Dune on a large screen.

Denis Villeneuve, of course, isn’t the first filmmaker to bring Dune to the screen, for an earlier cinematic version of it had appeared in 1984, directed by that genius of visionary weirdness, David Lynch. The 1984 Dune was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics – I remember the New Musical Express retitling it Dung – but I didn’t think it was that bad. Lynch added some delightfully bizarre touches to the story and he arguably had an even better cast of actors than Villeneuve: Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and the great (and now, sadly, late) Dean Stockwell. Sting was in it too.

Alas, Lynch’s producer was old-school movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted Dune to be a regulation two-hour movie. Cramming all the events of Herbert’s doorstop-sized book into that caused massive problems for the script. Early on, Lynch had wisely envisioned Dune as two movies, and then proposed it as a three-hour film, but this cut no ice with old Dino.

I remember going to see Lynch’s Dune at a cinema in Aberdeen with my girlfriend of the time. Having read the book I was familiar with the plot, which goes like this… (Beware – spoilers are coming.) In the distant 102^nd century, the galaxy is ruled by an empire that incorporates a number of powerful families, or Houses. One of these, the House Atreides, headed by the well-meaning Duke Leto (Isaacs in the new Dune, Prochnow in the old one), his ‘concubine’ Lady Jessica (Ferguson now, Annis then) and their son, the young Paul (Chalamet now, MacLachlan then), is entrusted with running the desert-planet Arrakis. Arrakis is vital for the Empire because a mysterious ‘spice’- in reality a consciousness-expanding drug – is mined there and its properties enable spaceship-navigators to find their way through interstellar space. The planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the reclusive and Bedouin-like Fremen, are suspicious of the Atreides because previously the Empire had put them under control of another House, the Harkonnen, who treated them genocidally.

Before Leto can win hearts and minds on Arrakis, the Harkonnen launch an attack to retake the planet, with the Emperor’s blessing – the whole manoeuvre has been a plot to get rid of the potentially troublesome Atreides. The Atreides are wiped out, save for Paul and his mother Jessica, who flee into the planet’s deserts. They now have the formidable task of rallying the distrustful Fremen and persuading them to retake Arrakis from the homicidal Harkonnen – which, in the book’s later stages, they do.

Villenueve’s film ends with Paul and Jessica fleeing the Harkonnen – a second Dune movie, which will tell the remaining story, has now been greenlighted. Poor old Lynch, though, had to squash everything into just over two hours. I remembering being in an Aberdonian pub after seeing his Dune with my ex-girlfriend, who hadn’t read the book. I spent about an hour trying to explain the film’s plot to her, which she’d been flummoxed by.

Villeneuve’s Dune only covers half of the book and is still 19 minutes longer than Lynch’s version, so obviously the story gets more space to breath. This also enables Villeneuve to do a lot of the important sci-fi business of ‘world-building’. It’s gratifying too that Dune’s secondary characters, the various soldiers, courtiers and allies of the House Atreides, like Gurney Halleck (Brolin now, Stewart then), Duncan Idaho (Mamoa now, Jordan then), Thufir Hawat (McKinley Henderson now, Jones then) and Dr Liet-Kynes (Duncan-Brewster now, von Sydow then) get much more time to establish themselves and win the audience’s sympathy. In the compressed 1984 Dune, their roles were brief and their deaths, if they occurred, were blink-and-you’ll-miss-them events.

Certain critics have sniped at this new version of Dune for being humourless. Now while I admit to counting a total of three jokes during the film’s entire 157-minute running time – it’s telling that two of those jokes turn up in the trailer – I have to say I found it refreshing to experience a science fiction film willing to treat its subject matter seriously and not populate it with, say, bumbling comedy droids or wisecracking bipedal rodents. In effect, those critics are showing their snobbery. They’re protesting: “But this is just science fiction! It’s not, it can’t be serious! You’ve got to have bumbling comedy droids in it! And wisecracking aliens!” So, stuff ’em.

One thing David Lynch’s Dune was memorable for was its depiction of the Harkonnen. Played by Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Brad Dourif and Sting, they were a grotesque, evilly-perverted bunch – no more so than McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, who was a levitating, leering sack of pus. Probably wisely, Villeneuve doesn’t try to out-Lynch Lynch here and makes his Harkonnen a more sombre lot, communicating their malevolence through stillness rather than histrionics. Stellan Skarsgard is especially effective as a brooding, Brando-esque Baron.

I read somewhere that Frank Herbert intended the good guys, the Atreides, to be descended from the Greeks on faraway, long-ago earth, although some visual and verbal references to bullfighting in both his book and Villeneuve’s film suggest they’re Spaniards. However, when the Duke, his family and courtiers arrive on Arrakis, the film shows them being led out of their spaceship by a bagpiper… which implies they’re actually Scottish. Well, their home planet’s name is Caladan, which sounds like ‘Caledonia’. One of them is called Duncan and another is called Gurney – Scots gurn a lot. And by half-time they’ve already been slaughtered. So yup, I think they’re Scottish.

One thing I believe makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.

Anyway, for now, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Dune completes a science-fictional hat-trick for Villeneuve. Perhaps it’s not quite as impressive a run as Stanley Kubrick achieved with the sci-fi or sci-fi-related Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1972), but it’s still pretty amazing. Let’s hope he can knock Dune 2 out of the park and make this triumphant threesome a foursome.