Nicci French Blog

The Best Film of the Year

There's a nice quote in Blockbuster, Tom Shone's book about Hollywood movies:

'I was ten when Star Wars came out. It first appeared on my radar in the form of some publicity stills, which appeared in a British comic called 2000 A.D., and which caused me to adopt a posture closely modeled on that of a pointer dog who has just caught wind of his first pheasant - a position I held until my parents caved in and took me up to London to see the thing.'

IAnthony Lane wrote something similar about what he felt when he first heard that Speed was about a bus with a bomb on board that would explode if its speed dropped below fifty miles an hour. 

And I had much the same reaction when, a few months ago, I read on some movie site about a new film made by a young, unknown Welsh director in Indonesia - in Indonesian. A group of armed policemen enter a huge building to arrest the criminal kingpin who lives on the top floor. But it all goes wrong, the psychopathic inhabitants turn on them and they have to fight their way up, floor by floor. Using a special spectacular Indonesian martial art. 

I immediately contacted my two brothers and last night we went to see The Raid. Blimey. I think it's probably the best action film since Die Hard in 1988, and it makes Die Hard look like a Merchant-Ivory production. It was an extremely cheap production and, so far as I could tell, there is not a single computer-generated image in the whole movie, but it has some of the most extraordinary, kinetic action sequences I've ever seen. There were a couple of scenes that actually ended with the cinema audience cheering. It was like being part of a mob. In a good way.

The film has good taste about where to borrow from: John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, Walter Hill's The Warriors and Southern Comfort, John McTiernan's Die Hard and Predator, and the Honk Kong movies of John Woo. Great films all. 

One crucial quality of all of those is that the stakes are relatively low. One of the signs of the decreasing quality of the Die Hard sequels is that the thing the baddie wants keeps getting bigger: an airport, New York City, the whole of the US. In recent Bond films, what the villain wants is so vast (all the oil in the world? to start a nuclear war? to take over the world?) that you forget about it even while you're watching the movie. The Raid is about one villain in one building and that's it. That's all you know and all you need to know.

Admittedly, there weren't many women in the audience, and those that were there seemed to have been lured there under a misapprehension. 

PS There's a lovely review of it by Peter Bradshaw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take My Dog - Please

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in his new book that a lot of what we think of as principles, opinions, political convictions are really just a matter of instinct. 

For example, he says that research shows that you can tell whether someone is politically liberal or conservative according to the kind of dog they like. If you ask them which sort they would want, a liberal will want a dog that is gentle and relates to them as an equal, conservatives prefer a dog that is loyal and will respect them as an authority.

Which proves that I must be a conservative. Our dog does not relate to me as an equal, she relates to me as an inferior and her only loyalty is to someone holding her food bowl. Loyalty? Respect? Sounds good. Guns? The death penalty? Well, if I get some loyalty and respect, I can live with that.

 

Once Bitten, Twice Bitten

Joe Eszterhas (screenwriter of Basic Instinct and Showgirls) has had the mother of all fallouts with Mel Gibson. Gibson hired him to write a screenplay for a movie about the Maccabees (the Jewish rebel army, not the rock band). The elevator pitch was 'the Jewish Braveheart'.

Mel Gibson. Joe Eszterhas. The Jews. What could go wrong?

A nine-page letter from Eszterhas to Gibson marked 'Personal and Confidential' has just been leaked. 

To summarise, Eszterhas accuses Gibson of:

1) Anti-semitism.

2) Violent misogyny.

3) Uncontrolled violent temper.

4) Obscene denunciations of the Catholic church. 

and, perhaps most importantly,

5) It's six weeks since Eszterhas delivered his script and he's heard from Warner Bros. that they're not proceeding with the project and he's heard nothing from Gibson at all. 

You don't even need to read between the lines of Eszterhas's letter to infer that if Gibson had got straight back to him and told how much he loved the screenplay, then suddenly Estzterhas might have managed to live with 1,2,3 and 4.

It reminds me of an old screenwriter's joke:

A Hollywood screenwriter arrives home to find his street blocked off by fire engines and police cars. Flames are billowing from his house. A harrowed policeman takes him to one side:

    'I'm so sorry,' he says. 'Your agent came to your house. He killed your wife. Then he killed your children. He killed your dog, your cat. Then he set fire to the house.'

    There is a silence and then a slow, beatific smile spreaks across the screenwriter's face:

    'My agent came to my house?' he says.

 

Connie Takes Me By Storm

Nicci:

Here's a book to fall in love with: London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins. Why had I never read it before? Published in 1945, it's been around all of my life and more, waiting for me, waiting for all of us, a joyful, gallivanting brick of a novel (over 700 dense pages), thick with characters and vivid with detail, broad in scope and deep in feeling. 

It is the late Thirties, in the shadow of the approaching war. In Dulcimer Street, near the Elephant and Castle, a motley cast of characters occupy the house owned by their landlady, the ferociously respectable Mrs Vizzard. There's a laddish mechanic and his adoring mother, an ageing chorus girl who now works in the cloakroom of a dubious club (the book would be worth reading for the character of Connie alone), a seedy medium down on his luck, a nasal night watchman who lives for his mealtimes and the snacks in between, and above all Mr and Mrs Josser (it comes as a shock near the end to discover their first names) - she grim and decent, he timid and adorable. The ordinary, the unglamorous, the kind of people who usually only have comic cameo roles in novels, but here take centre stage to become its heroes and heroines.  

I don't often laugh out loud when reading - but here I was snorting and hooting. It is one of the funniest novels I have ever read. Hilarious but also poignant, sparky, shrew and generous hearted. Dickens meets soap opera. 700 plus pages is not long enough. 

If you haven't already - read it now!

Suffolk Crime Shock Horror

Last night someone robbed the hole-in-the wall machine where Nicci gets her cash from. And they didn't just rob it. Someone drove up with a digger at 3.30 in the morning and demolished the entire wall of the bank. I noticed it while doing my shopping this morning in the high street: police! a taped-off crime scene! In Suffolk!

If this were a movie, the local police would be baffled and local novelist, Nicci French, would take a hand in the investigation. As it is, the local police are simply baffled.

In real life, solving crimes is left to the police. Come to think about it, the first three cases that come into my mind - Jeremy Bamber, the Yorkshire Ripper, Stephen Lawrence - might have been solved more quickly if a few crime novelists had got involved. 

 

You've Got Mail

I'm just reading through Leslie Marchand's epic complete edition of Byron's letters. They are completely captivating. I've just reached the period when - after the publication of his poem Childe Harold - he'd woken up and found himself famous, become the first great international celebrity. He was involved in a wild series of affairs, including with his half-sister, Augusta. The following is from a letter to Annabella Milbanke, the clever, prim, proper, ferocious woman he would later marry, with disastrous results. Nobody before him could have written this but dozens of writers afterwards (Rimbaud, Hemingway, Kerouac):

'The great object of life is Sensation - to feel that we exist - even though in great pain - it is this "craving void" which drives us to Gaming - to Battle - to Travel - to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.'

If ever a woman was warned in advance....

 

 

Vicious Cycle

 

 

It seemed such a good idea at the time. We were going to visit Nicci's parents in Worcestershire. I looked at a map and saw that we could cycle almost the whole way on the canal. We could cycle the last bit through lovely country lanes. It would take two days. I went online and booked a hotel on the banks of the canal about halfway along. It would be like those pre-First World War trips through England made by people like Edward Thomas and Hilaire Belloc. 

I forgot that there were other pre-First World War trips, like those made by Captain Scott and the good ship Titanic.

But there had been a month of dought and hot sunshine, so at least the weather would be good, right?

So two days ago we set off early in the morning, joining the Regents Canal at Kings Cross. The journey out of London is strange and interesting and really, really long. It was three and a half hours before we hit real countryside. Interesting fact: from Camden Lock it's twenty-seven miles until you reach the next lock, which means that it's completely flat.We cycled relentlessly past familiar names: Harefield (isn't there a heart hospital there?), Berkhamsted (where Graham Green went to the school where his father was the headmaster), Milton Keynes (in the seventies there used to be a TV commercial with the slogan: 'Someday, all cities will be like Milton Keynes.' I really hope not.). But it was all taking a bit too long, and then we got a puncture. And then there are towpaths and there are towpaths. Some are smooth and some are rough and some are rutted and some are like cycling through an unkempt lawn. 

Darkness started to fall and you don't want to be on a canal towpath in the middle of nowhere in pitch darkness. We were meeting one of our daughters at the hotel and she drove and rescued us.

Day two: this day must be shorter, right? In fact, the so-called towpath became even rougher and we got two punctures instead of one. Blackthorn blossom and Hawthorn blossom may look very pretty when you're cycling along, but we were forcibly reminded of why they have the word 'thorn' in their names. And then, for the first time in about six weeks, it started to rain. And get cold. Somewhere between the stage where Captain Scott shot his dogs and where Captain Oates wandered out in the snow, we got rescued again. If only Captain Scott had had a daughter.

So the expedition was not entirely a success. As I write this, I am not exactly injured, though I do emit a plaintive whimpering sound when sitting down or standing up or climbing stairs.

On the positive side: we love canals. We still love them. They are like secret country lanes in the middle of a city and like mysterious silent still roads in the countryside. Outside Warwick we cycled past twenty-one locks in less than two miles. I take a childlish pleasure cycling over aqueducts and looking down on a railway, a river, or the London North Circular. And we're still alive, so really we're more like Amundsen than Scott.

 

 

 

Terrifying freedom

Nicci:
We've just seen Theatre Complicité's The Master and Margarita at the Barbican. The Devil and his lecherous cat come to Stalin's Russia to wreak havoc. It's terrific: a preposterous blizzard of spectacle, a thrilling mixture of comedy, terror, vaudeville, farce, magic realism, satire and multimedia hallucinations. Bulgakov started to write his great allegory about Stalinism in 1928, but then burned the manuscript in 1930, started again, and was still revising it four weeks before his death in 1940. A full version was not published in Russia until 1973. It was written in a time of ferocious repression and fear and it stands today as a novel of irrepressible freedom. In his room, in the pages of his novel, Bulgakov could do anything and think about everything: think about God, mercy, love, desire, redemption, madness, cowardice, hope; have a naked woman fly through the skies; break open the doors of the lunatic asylum; let imagination flood and flame through the grim grey Moscow streets; break through the oppressive social realism of the time with a rick cacophony of styles. Say no to terror and yes to life. Fabulous.

The Very Dickens

I'm just listening to, and very much enjoying The Pickwick Papers. It's a young man's book, full of inexhaustible high spirits. In the first couple of hundred pages you can feel Dickens discovering his volcanic powers. It almost scorches you. There are lots of fine books and essays about Dickens, but my favourite is by G.K. Chesterton, and my favourite passage is about The Pickwick Papers (it should best be read while listening to something like Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending):

'To the level of "Sketches by Boz" he never afterwards descended. To the level of "The Pickwick Papers" it is doubtful if he ever afterwards rose. "Pickwick," indeed, is not a good novel; but it is not a bad novel, for it is not a novel at all. In one sense, indeed, it is something nobler than a novel, for no novel with a plot and a proper termination could emit that sense of everlasting youth - a sense as of the gods gone wandering in England. This is not a novel, for all novels have an end; and "Pickwick," properly speaking, has no end - he is equal unto the angels. The point at which, as a fact, we find the printed matter terminates is not an end in any artistic sense of the word. Even as a boy I believed there were some more pages that were torn out of my copy, and I am looking for them still.The book might have been cut short anywhere else. It might have been cut short after Mr. Pickwick was released by Mr. Nupkins, or after Mr. Pickwick was fished out of the water, or at a hundred other places. And we should still have known that this was not really the story's end. We should have known that Mr. Pickwick was still having the same high adentures on the same high roads. As it happens the book ends after Mr. Pickwick has taken a house in the neighbourhood of Dulwich. But we know he did not stop there. We know he broke out, that he took again the road of the high adventures; we know that if we take it ourselves in any acre of England, we may come suddenly upon him in a lane.'

 

 

 

My Fantasy Week with Marilyn

We just watched My Week with Marilyn. It's based on the 'true story' of young Colin Clark (brother of Alan, son of Kenneth Clark) when he was an assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl. The first third or so of the film is very enjoyable, Kenneth Branagh's impersonation of Laurence Olivier is hilarious and Michelle Williams is delightful as Monroe. But here are some of things I don't believe really happened:

1) That Clark spent the night in her bed.

2) That he took her on an improvised of Windsor Castle.

3) Ditto of his old school, Eton College.

4) That he went skinny dipping with Marilyn. 'Imagine skinnydipping with Marilyn!' David Denby rhapsodized in the New Yorker. I think that's exactly what Colin Clark did do: imagine it.

Like many films based on true stories, My Week with Marilyn is actually based on other movies. Specifically, The King's Speech, in which a minor historical character's role in history is wildly exaggerated (Australian speech therapist helps Britain win the war). The story is based on the amusing 1982 comedy, My Favourite Year, in which a young writer on a TV talk show has to spend a few days chaperoning a wildly unreliably movie star (Peter O'Toole playing a character based on Errol Flynn).

Does it matter if it's all a fantasy? Not really, if the film is good. This could have been a wonderful comedy about the damage Monroe did to everyone around her during the production of a catastrophic movie. But somewhere along the line they lost their nerve.