Gravity; Space for great direction

Gravity is a surprisingly short movie, until you start to think about how little plot it's got and how they'd have ruined it if they had to spin it out a bit longer. Cuaron and his team decided to keep it short and simple and get the short and simple thing exactly right. Better call, not least because if they'd run it up to the more usual two hour plus mark of a big budget movie, I'd probably have had a heart attack from the accumulated roller coaster shock.

For all the simplicity of the plot, there's a lot to think about in Gravity. For one thing, it hammers home just how precarious humanity's little toehold in space is. Everything is ridiculously difficult in space, and it only takes one small thing - any of millions of small things - to go wrong and kill you. For another thing, it gets you thinking about the fragility of things we've started to take for granted. The driver of the whole plot is that the Russians screw up destroying an obsolete satellite, scattering debris throughout its orbit. The debris knocks out more satellites, which splinter and knock out more, till a cascade of high speed shrapnel wipes out everything in its path, including the International Space Station and the Shuttle which George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are space-walking around. Clooney's Matt Kowalski comments drily "There goes half of America's Facebook." And most of its TV and phone networks, not to mention the internet and satnav.

Don't shrug. The internet and satnav now play nearly as big a role in making sure there's food in your supermarkets as farmers do. No internet, no inventory and ordering systems. A clean sweep through the satellites holding that stuff together; civilisation teeters. It's an old truism that no culture is more then four missed meals from anarchy.

Cuaron doesn't waste any time on the mere destruction of our modern way of life; he's got something much more immediate to sort out. Are Kowalski and Sandra Bullock's Ryan ("my father wanted a boy") Stone going to make it back to earth as anything more than glowing debris? As I keep saying, keep your action personal and immediate; none of us can really imagine the end of the world, but we can all imagine the end of our own world. Or, to quote Ryan Stone again, we all know we're going to die, but it's different when you know it's today.

Cuaron's calling card among people who care about movies is this famous scene from Children of Men. If you know anything about his work, you know it was done in a single take, using one of the most preposterously complicated camera rigs of all time. But when you're watching it, you're not thinking at all how complicated the shot must have been or how unlike normal editing and cutting it is; you're just immersed in the moment, drawn in and lulled until the action starts to become terrifying. Everyone's sat in a car talking backing and forth, and Cuaron found a way to make you feel that familiarity, that sense of being among the people in the car, so that when things start to go horribly wrong, it feels - as they always used to say about movies - as though you were there. Cuaron knows how to make a scene all about what's happening, and what's going to happen next.

Gravity was almost entirely CGI; it has only two actors and all the space scenes were - of course - done in computers, with just the actors' faces inserted by magic into the fake surrounds. But even when the action is inside the shattered space station or limping capsules, much of what you're seeing is CGI and painstaking choreography of actors jumping and swimming through things which they couldn't even see. The brilliance of Cuaron's work - his direction and his script - is that you never even think about how it's done; you're too busy hyperventilating as you try to figure out what's happening to the people and what might happen to them next. The vision of earth orbit and all the things flying around in it is perfect (probably technically wrong in all sorts of ways, but apparently flawless), but it's background to what really matters; people and what they're doing to survive.

It's a superb piece of work at a purely technical level, but it works as a movie because it's a wonderful piece of work at a human level. Yes, Clooney and Bullock are good actors, but in something as fake as an all-CGI movie, even good actors need a great director, and it's astonishing that someone could do something so technical and still have what it takes to get the best out of actors too. Apparently James Cameron is a huge admirer of the movie (and the computers to make it probably owe their existence to the grand loon of Avatar) but there's a telling little story about the difference between Cameron and Cuaron. Cameron's famous for pushing his actors to the point of near death and not caring very much, and that indifference to people tends to show in the results. Cuaron at one point had to put Bullock into a situation where she had to hold her breath through the whole take. And he held his breath with her, to make sure that he didn't push her beyond what was manageable for her. 

Ace Atkins: The Lost Ones

It was cheap, and I needed the distraction, so I checked out the follow-up to The Ranger. The Lost Ones is not at all bad. It's not Elmore Leonard good, let's dash that hope straight away, but it's not bad at all. The challenge for any silly little genre book is down to one simple question; do I want to know what happens next to these people? That's what keeps you going to the end of the book and what makes you look forward to the next one. It's the same thing that makes serialised TV works; we want a story. We want a story that will distract us from whatever's around us.

Well, northern Mississippi may not be paradise but at least it's not Nordor, and I've been passing the time finding out what's happening in Tibbehah County in the last year or so. And it works. Atkins resisted the siren call of his Bubba, and eased Boom into the background in a clever and believable way. He found a way to put Johnny Stagg into the action without having him overshadow it; Johnny makes a much better landmark than villain. The balance of the characters and the place feels right; Quinn Colson is sinking back into his home place at a pace which feels credible, winning some of the battles, not really grappling with the war. 

I still can't quite figure the logistics of the County; sometimes it feels like a village, other times like there's a cast of thousands seething round the edges, neither size feeling quite right for a Sheriff's department with nine deputies. I suppose that, like all imaginary spaces, it's as big as it needs to be from one moment to the next. As long as it doesn't suddenly sprout a plutonium mine from one book to the next I shouldn't quibble; the important thing is that the County provides a place in which Colson can argue with his family, not quite romance his old crush from high school and intervene decisively in messy little backwoods crimes. It's a living, I guess. 

I'll even forgive the introduction of a history of abuse into the Colson back story because it's handled pretty well, echoing off some of the other stuff in the book and explaining some of the family messes, but not overshadowing everything else in the action.

In the end, though, it passes the simple test; when I got to the end, which is a nicely judged mix of mess and injustice, I was keen to see what happened next. 

Urban Waite: Dead If I Don't

The Terror of Living was a tough act to follow, and Dead If I Don't disappointed me by being merely good, rather than breathtaking. From reading the afterword, I suspect it was because Waite didn't get the time he needed to produce another blinder; there's a reference to the manuscript being overdue.

Like The Terror of Living, Dead If I Don't is about the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, this time in New Mexico rather than Washington State. One of the impressive things about The Terror of Living was Waite's knack of sketching in character after character and making them feel real and threatened. Somehow, Dead If I Don't doesn't land this. It's odd, because in his second book, Waite moved away from showing us a bunch of strangers just missing each other again and again, and instead tried to show us a set of small town people who've known each other for ages. It ought to have been easier to get a sense of them from the way that they keep mulling over their shared pasts, but somehow they never grab the imagination the way the characters of The Terror of Living did. 

I find myself struggling to find something clever to say about the book; it's a good book, but it's not essential reading. Ray Lamar's fate seems sealed from the moment we meet him, and the question for the book is not so much what's going to happen to him as what damage he's going to cause before it happens. It's difficult to make that a gripping story; the suspense is going to have to lie in what's in store for the side characters, and that in turn has to come out of how much we care about them. This might be where Waite has gone wrong; part of the story he's telling is about the way that Lamar and his friends and family have been sleepwalking through their lives since a tragedy ten years in the past. The problem is that they're still sleepwalking as all hell breaks loose around them, and somehow, their numbed responses to chaos are numbing for the reader as well. The result felt fuzzy and disconnected, when The Terror of Living was gripping and frightening.

Waite remains a very skilled writer, someone whose natural skill with language outclasses his chosen genre. The blown deadlines show here and there; Waite is a man who knows about people, not things, and you can see much more attention going into the perfect word for people's emotions than for things around them, which can be jarring when he's built up so much of a point about Lamar's skill with guns, and then has him thinking about how he's putting shotgun shells into a rifle. That's the kind of thing which gets fixed in the edit, but they seem to have run out of time.

I mentioned in my earlier post that Waite seemed to be working off a template which Cormac McCarthy uses; of the swirling pointlessness and inevitability of violence in the drug wars along America's borders, and in this book, Waite chose to locate the action in the 1990s, just as McCarthy put No Country for Old Men in the 1980s. The key misstep may have been to try to use a week's concentrated action as a way to reflect on a decade's wrongdoing by Ray Lamar himself; Waite didn't really give himself space to let us feel that decade of failure, and I'm still not sure if he was trying to make a larger point about the cartels' reign of terror through the 1980s and 1990s along the border. If he was, there's a better book which explores the same theme, Don Winslow's slow and heartbreaking The Power of the Dog.

Ace Atkins: The Ranger

A long time ago, the man who ran the - now long closed - Murder Ink bookstore in Dawson Street vented his irritation to me about the decision to put the words "A Jane Whitefield Book" on the cover of the reprint of Vanishing Act.  His point, and it was a good one, was that this told the reader immediately that there would be a whole bunch more of these books, and thus removed any doubt about whether Jane Whitefield was really in danger. This was the thought of an absolute purist; on the one hand, it was his living to sell these books and people DO seem to buy things which they know there's more of, and on the other hand, if you'd ever read even one Thomas Perry book, you wouldn't be expecting the protagonist to bite it before the end. Right on the principle, maybe not picking the best example. But it was just that principle which made him go on to recommend Killing Suki Flood by Robert Leininger, a really gripping little noir which worked on a first read because it really did make you think that everything was on the line - it also works on a re-read because it's a well written book, full of sharp dialogue and clever observation.

I thought of that conversation every few minutes as I was reading The Ranger, because the kindle version I was reading had (Quinn Colson 1) at the top of every page, making it all too clear that no matter what else happened, Quinn Colson was going to be just fine. Which really undercut the mood which Atkins was trying to invoke all the way through the book, of a world in which bad things happen even when good people try to do the right thing. A writer does his best, and then some marketeer wrecks the mood with a badly chosen notion.

Well, in some imaginary world where I'd bought the book as a real book and presumably something that stupid didn't mar the top of every page, would it have been a better book? Probably. Was it a good book anyhow? Much to my surprise, it was.

I knew two things picking up the book; one was that Ace Atkins was easily the most cosmically juvenile author name I'd seen since I'd learnt how to read, and the other was that the estate of Robert B Parker had hired him to finish up Parker's last couple of manuscripts. Since I'm one of the people who think that a) Parker went to hell in a hand basket after about the fifth Spenser book [1], and b) his "completion" of  Poodle Springs is the literary equivalent of acting on the idea that the Mona Lisa would look better with ringlets and Ray-bans, my heart quailed rather at the notion that Parker's estate thought this guy would be just the fellow to finish what even Parker had balked at. Those misgivings apart, a quick glance at the style had me thinking it would at least be a fun read, and when it got cheap on kindle I bought a copy.

In a way, The Ranger is what Lee Child might have thought he was going to do before he realised how much money there was in giving us his gloriously moronic power fantasies instead. Quinn Colson is a US Army Ranger on leave, going back to his one dead horse town to discover it's a seething den of scum and villainy that makes Mos Eisley look like the nice parts of Monaco. So he sets to cleaning it all up, as heroes be wont to do in these narratives. If he'd been Jack Reacher, he'd have pounded on people right and left, effortless in his superiority, before wandering off into the night to wreak havoc in the sequel. Since, blessedly, he ain't Jack Reacher, he's neither so decisive nor so unstoppable, and therein lies much of the charm of the book.

Well, charm might be the wrong word. Tibebah County is somewhere between an out-take from Harlan County and the bleak world of Winter's Bone, without being quite as compelling as either of them - in fairness, not much is that good. The landscape and people are relentlessly messed up, and Atkins catches that; he's no Chandler, and he'll use the same simple words again and again rather than ring the changes, but there's an unsentimental solidness to Tibbehah, and to the little edge on glimpses of the ordinary lives bobbing on its surface.

It's not all brilliant. There's a Bubba Rogowski in the shape of a huge one armed black buddy for Quinn Colson, which left me feeling that Atkins was pushing his luck. And at least one of the villains doesn't make enough sense; Gowrie doesn't scale right. There's a moment when he switches from being some kind of stooge to the prince of darkness and we never see anything which helps that to make sense, even if you buy the notion that Quinn Colson has goaded him over the edge. But most of the side characters feel weathered and real, and all the bad decisions carry weight and consequences; this is a world where if you get hit in the face with a frying pan, you go to the hospital, and people who make bad decisions fret and try to renegotiate them rather than moving on like steam driven monoliths of certainty.

It all ends in a messy open-ended way, as much anything does in real life, but the openings are good ones; a sequel isn't a bad idea, or an excuse to throw Quinn Colson into someone else's woodchipper; there's unfinished business of all kinds in Tibbehah County. And I think I'm following it.

[1] In fairness, the writing was on the wall long before that. I actually wrote "Oh, come ON" in the margin of one of the more overwrought pages of the first or second book, almost the only time I ever wrote on a book.

Ben Aaronovitch: Whispers Under Ground

Let us all give thanks for e-books, and the way in which they let me catch up with someone's back catalogue without cluttering the house up. I have grumbled in the past about buying up a wedge of books only to discover that I didn't like the first one and won't be reading the others; somehow e-books are making it more straightforward for me to put my toe in the water and then come back and catch up if I like something. So a friend recommended Rivers of London, and that was good enough that I went on to read Moon Over Soho, which in turn was good enough that here I am, having finished Whispers Under Ground, all in under a month.

Whispers Under Ground feels like a book that's marking time, noodling about with a plot which isn't pulling the master plot further forward, but instead throwing out tantalising hints of other, bigger plots which are coming down the road. For example, there are Chinese magicians, though no-one seems to know much about them and they walk on a for a few minutes and then stroll back off, leaving us none the wiser. I kind of agree with the approach, since it gives a picture of a much bigger world which is as puzzling to the characters as their world is to the reader. What I'm less convinced about is the way that the series big bad - and major villain of the previous book - stays off the radar through most of this book; in TV terms, Aaronovitch doesn't quite handle the balance between his monster of the week and his mythology. The foreground case doesn't feel big and threatening enough to justify the way in which the major threat introduced in Moon Over Soho fades into the background.

Quite why this doesn't work properly, I'm not sure. The foreground problem - a previously unknown culture living in the London Underground - is cleverly put together and subtly subverts a lot of the magical tosh which you'd expect in a more conventional piece of work. But despite the cleverness, it somehow doesn't spark. 

Still, the things I like are all still there; the constant asides about how things ought to work, and the sense of a sprawling clan of investigators living on the edges of things and gradually linking together. Three books in, I still want to know what Grant and Nightingale and May are going to get up to next. And the magic-ification of May is nicely explained without the use of anvils; it's not that she's naturally magical, but that the magical carnage wreaked on her in the first book has contaminated her somehow. That's clever, and gets us away from the vague misgivings I had at the end of the second book. 

And I have to admit I liked the way that Ireland is covered; Aaronovitch obviously had a good chat in a pub some evening with a Celtic Tiger survivor and caught the way not just that we feel about the collapse, but the way we talk about it. That's a good ear.

This isn't great art, but it's entertaining, and I will probably be writing something about Broken Homes whenever it gets cheap enough to be added to the stack of things in my iPad.

Chris Wooding: Ace of Skulls

And with this, it looks as though Chris Wooding has decided to ring down the curtain on the Ketty Jay. For those wondering if it’s closed out with the same gleeful ruthlessness as Serenity’s wrap-up of the Firefly saga; nope, Wooding choked on that one. The book is full of moments where it looks like he’s ganked another character, only to pull the camera back and show us that they’re just grazed and it will all be somewhat fine. This reaches the mild-irritation threshold when he stages a tearful funeral directly after yet another apparent death, only to pan out and show us that they’ve just solemnly buried the ship’s cat.

Foreboding turns out to be a limited resource, and after the first couple of times when it looks as if it’s all over for one or other of the reprobates we’ve come to know in the last three books, except that it’s not, you’re just flicking past the pathos to find out how he’s going to handwave them back into play.

So for all that the book ends with the band breaking up, I’m not ruling out an endless sequence of reunions in the future. Which would be fine, if Wooding can dial down the apocalypse level a bit. No genre writer ever seems to be able to write about mere local disaster; inevitably the heroes have to save the whole world. The first book in the sequence had me almost hoping that Wooding would keep things low key and scruffy and have a long running sequence of scrapes and idiocy for his crew to weather, but instead, each book has been a step on a path to the apocalypse, with the crew of the Ketty Jay stumbling up the food chain of a conspiracy which threatens the whole world and which only they can defeat. When I was talking about The Iron Jackal, I was feeling good about it, but I've got more misgivings now. It was nice when it was small time losers caught up in something they didn't understand, but somehow it's not quite so good when they're the only way to save the whole world.

In pondering why this is not just wrong, but unnecessary, I find I have to run all the way back to one of the first grown up books I ever read, the long out of print Desmond Bagley thriller High Citadel. It’s a fun little book which has a motley band of survivors of a botched hi-jacking holed up in the Andes trying to hold off a bunch of rebels who want to come and whack the President they’ve just deposed. The stakes are reasonably high for the survivors, but at the very most they’re worrying about who’s running a single banana republic. And that turns out to be plenty of motivation for everyone. In the 60s and 70s bookstores were full of books like that, genre trash which piled up just enough pressure to justify a bit of heroism. Somehow, SF and its wider ecosystem has never gone down that road; no matter how low key things might look at first, there’s always some cosmic Armageddon hovering over the climax.

Most SF actually needs to wind everything up to eleven for much the same reasons that Michael Bay needs to distract us from the shallowness of his movies by blowing everything up, but Wooding, as I've commented before, is capable of making a series of books about real characters changing and developing as they lurch from one disaster to the next. He's good enough to keep it small and real, and yet he had to go bigger and bigger. 

And to some extent this makes sense; he was so determined to develop his characters that he couldn't just keep them moving from one minor disaster to the other liking the unchanging puppets of network TV; as they wised up, inevitably they were going to break up, and so the sequence always had to have an endgame. I just wish he'd had enough confidence in his own ability to make that endgame about the people, not their world.

Gangster Squad; another lesson in poor management technique

On a scale of one to ten for "You got that job how, exactly?" John Lithgow's crime boss in Cliffhanger comes in at eleventy billion and a bit, simply because it's hard to understand how someone could be clever enough to figure out how to rob a plane in midair, charismatic enough to get a whole gang to give it a try, and yet visibly monkeyshit crazy enough to think that "When they err, murder them." is a viable management technique. Using the same scale, Sean Penn's Mickey Cohen rates about a seven or eight, tops, because there's no moment during the movie which suggests that we're in the presence of a sophisticated mind; clearly Mickey is the product of an eco-system which prizes pure atavistic murderousness over mere subtlety.

Since the movie Gangster Squad is also the product of an eco-system which … well you can see where I'm going here … this insight into Mickey's psychology is spelled out for us in a voice-over which stops short of explaining where Los Angeles is and what its average rainfall was in each month during 1949. Mickey is bad news, ruling by fear and whatever he has to do to generate more fear. So we meet him having a guy ripped in half by two cars. On the one hand, I'm not sure if it works as we're shown it, and on the other I bet that never happened in real life, but then again the movie ends with a shoot-out which rivals the storming of the bunker in Hell is for Heroes, so it might be that real life wasn't a big influence (the movie opens with the title card "inspired by real events", the Hollywood get-out-of-jail-free card for making stuff up entirely but at least getting the hats right). 

While it's not much of a shock to see that Mickey treats his rivals poorly, it's depressing to see Hollywood continue to push the idea that the essence of effective leadership is instant hideous death for anyone associated with a setback. Mickey's pimping academy gets raided; his response is to burn it down, with the manager inside. Mickey's heroin shipment gets intercepted; his response is to have his subordinates drill a hole in the sole survivor's head. This left me wondering why the LAPD thought they needed a Gangster Squad. Given Mickey's efforts to make the gangster lifestyle profoundly unattractive for anyone living within a twenty mile radius, there didn't seem to be much call for a secondary effort to discourage people from joining his forces. I'd have figured all they really needed was one guy in a nice suit to sidle up to all the aspiring crims and whisper out of the side of his mouth "That Mickey, huh? Kind of a dick. Really would make you think about moving to Florida, wouldn't it?"

Because movie world, no more than the real world, does not run on the basis of my common sense ideas, Chief Parker (growled, rather than performed, by Nick Nolte) went another way, empowering Josh Brolin to put together a dirty half dozen or so and go round breaking the law on an epic scale to slow Mickey up somewhat. I have to admit, this was why I watched the thing at all. In addition to the ever reliable Josh, we had Ryan Gosling and Robert Patrick. They're always fun, particularly Robert Patrick, who's growing into a more affordable and less annoying Jon Voight. Anyhow, they put the hurt on Mickey something wicked, pausing from time to time to take casualties in the most predictable way possible. This is yet another one of those movies which allows every doomed character one last speech about their hopes, dreams and doubts, and then having duly humanised them just enough, schwacks the holy hell out of them. In Hollywood, if you want to live forever, get a job on the good team, act as much like an asshole as you can while still staying almost likeable, and never, ever waver. The moment you show weakness, compassion or humanity, you're a goner. Also, avoid having a kid, or anything which might play like a kid. No pets. Don't mentor anyone; I cannot emphasise enough just how suicidal it is for a law man to have a young protege who needs to learn just one more lesson.

And why is all this worrying? Well, it's the impact of all this violence on weak and easily influenced minds. Specifically, the weak and easily influenced minds of senior managers everywhere, who will learn from this movie that; effective management involves killing the survivors of any setback, regardless of whether they were involved; it's always a mistake to show kindness or human emotion; it's suicidal ever to share the secrets of effective work with anyone junior to you; and rules are really just for the little people; big people are above such things.