Jasper Kent: The Danilov Quintet; wrapping up

As fate works out, I first tried to use this thing as a way to ramble about books with Jasper Kent’s The Twelve, and here I am after a two year hiatus trying to get back in the saddle with some thoughts about the rest of what turned out to be the Danilov Quintet. 

After I bought and read Thirteen Years Later, I let Kent drift. A few years back I hoovered up the other three books and put them into my Kindle queue, but it took a lot of lockdown to get me to the point where I decided to see how it all worked out for those crazy Danilovs. Push, I said to myself, and it’s a block of three books off the queue.

When I was grumping about Thirteen Years Later ten years ago, I grumped about the focus on Iuda being a mistake. I didn’t know how committed Kent was to that mistake. Never mind the Danilovs; Iuda’s the connective tissue through all five books. He’s in all of them, and he’s the puppet master of an awful lot of the action. Sure, the big bad is your actual canonical Dracula, but the engine for the books is Iuda trying to play Dracula off against everyone else out of some weird mixture of morbid curiosity and the impulse to be awful just for the sake of being awful. 

So, how does it all go? Well, I was right that the fourth book would have the Russo-Turkish War in it, but not in any terribly important way. I was right that the last book would be the Revolution, but how easy was that to guess given the obsession with the Romanovs? In reality the action is anchored between Moscow and St Petersburg in all three books; there are outings to fun travel spots like Sebastopol and Yekaterinburg, but Kent keeps the things which matter in the cities which have always mattered the most to Russians and Russian-ologists. For the rest, the background is the general awfulness of the struggle between Tsarist Russia’s tiny middle class and the forces of Romanov autocracy. Which was a long grim slog from the efforts of the Decembrists to the Bolsheviks, and it’s hard to fight the idea that if the Romanovs had listened to the Decembrists, the two hundred years since then would have been a lot easier on everyone. 

Of course, while all of that’s going on, the Danilovs are fighting vampires, and if I were a smarter man I’d have some kind of idea of how that mirrors a fight for the soul of Russia. Anyhow, there’s a lot of vampires, and they don’t have a plan. Because most of them are stupid, and the one at the top is that particular kind of stupid that you get when no-one has the nerve to say no to you, and the one really smart one just seems to enjoy meanness for its own sake, which is no kind of plan for anything.

How much fun is any of this? Not very much. While the bad guys are bad, the Danilovs are not necesarily great company.  They’re mopey and self-absorbed, which is a very realistic thing for Russians under a curse to be, but not something that’s necessarily fun to read about.

So there’s not a lot of fun to be had. Most of it comes from the cleverness of Kent’s thinking. His notion on why vampires don’t show up in mirrors is a very clever one. Vampires look so awful that everyone, themselves included, just edits the reality out when they’re looking at them. But when they edit out what they see in the mirror, they can’t write over that missing reflection with anything else, so it all disappears. It’s clever, and he makes a very good plot point out of what happens when someone clever - Iuda, who else? - figures out how to make a mirror which vampires can see their reflections in.

The other bit of cleverness is in the fifth book. Which opens with the fun news that Dracula is dead, solving all the problems the other four books are obsessed with. With Dracula dead, he can’t threaten the Romanovs any more, and the Danilovs can relax their vigilance at last. I liked it that Dracula got killed, because Kent is true to the meta-canon. The events of the fourth book sent him off to London looking for a McGuffin, and he ran afoul of Van Helsing just as he did in the Stoker book and got schwacked. I like a bit of respect for the established verities. But what on earth is going to keep the Danilovs suitably miserable, other than the Ootober Revolution? 

A nutty plot to resurrect Dracula, what else? Which is when the whole thing really does start to feel more like the adventures of Iuda than anything to do with the Danilovs, since the nutbag in chief of the resurrection plot is Iuda’s first girlfriend, and when the resurrection does not quite go according to plan, it’s Iuda who gets brought back, not  Dracula. I had been really thinking Iuda was good and dead at the end of the fourth book and I was quite fine with that.

Credit where credit is due; Kent pulls that off. Iuda winds up sharing a body with the last surviving Danilov, and they alternate not just control of the body, but control of the narrative. Kent gives us two very different narrative voices, and a set of clever challenges for the two squabbling occupants of one body. It keeps the suspense going very well through the book and right up to an incredibly downbeat ending. Yes, sure the day is saved and the vampire plague put to bed at terrible cost, but Kent makes sure in the epilogue to remind the reader that nothing good is going to happen in Russia any time soon.

So, a bit of a slog, and it took me a long time to get there. On balance it was sort of worth the effort, but it’s not something I’m coming back to.

Unlike this on-again off-again rambling. I’m not a John Wick levels of thinking I’m back, but it’s time to get back on the horse.

 

Glass

So, there we were at the end of Split, being told that it was a stealth continuation of Unbreakable. And thus, fast forward two years, and Glass gets the whole band back together. Second Samuel L Jackson related post of the week. Say this for M Night Shyamalan, he thinks nothing of getting back Samuel L Jackson and then giving him nothing to say until half way through the movie. Jackson’s Mr Glass is practically a prop until the third act, when he shakes off his catatonia and starts talking. Up until then the stage directions are “Drool. No, not that much."

This leaves the heavy lifting to James McAvoy, who once again brings way too much personality to the role of The Horde. In one way, it’s great and creepy, and in another way, it’s just … off. Bruce Willis continues his late career streak of somehow not quite phoning his performance in, because actually picking up the phone would be more work than he’s feeling ready for.

And I’m not being quite fair. Shyamalan has two problems. The first is that he started so audaciously strong that he gets judged by the good stuff. The second is that he keeps trying to pull that off again, which isn’t possible. So he’s getting in his own way. Including by thinking that there’s any point in him doing cameos in his own movies. When Hitchcock did it, it was fleeting; a nod to the fans. He didn’t give himself lines and a backstory.

Shyamalan’s got a second wind since he started tanking in big budget movies. Small budgets work better for him; he’s got less pressure and expectation, and low budgets mean you have to be clever with the script and the actors. You have to suggest things which big money productions just show people, and suggestion is always a better way to pull the audience in. Glass is on the pricier end of his low budget renaissance, but it’s still on a shoestring, which works out for him. It’s fun that he keeps threatening a big finish with buildings and gen-pop in hella peril from a superhero showdown, and then stages the climax in a hospital car park with the property damage limited to dents in a police car and a van. It’s somehow even more fun that this was the plan all along.

Still, he’s still pushing away at the twists, heaven help him. Sarah Pauley is the one person in the movie with a regular job, and she seems to be objectively terrible at it. She’s the shrink who’s got just three days to talk The Horde, Mr Glass and whatever David Dunn calls himself this week into not believing that they’re superheroes. This does not go well. It goes so not well that if they had prizes for worst prison psychiatrist ever, her face would be on the statuettes. How the hell did she even get the job? Ah, well, there’s a twist there. She was not, in turns out, trying to do the job well in the first place. Good twist. Then there’s the twist on the twist, and I was going, ah now, give me a break.

Mileage may vary on this. In a way, watching Mr Glass win in the end is quite fulfilling. It’s a jump too far for me, but it might work for other people. The one thing I do hope is that the real twist is that this isn’t Shyamalan setting up a whole bunch of new movies. Whether you like what he’s done with this 20 years-in-the-making trilogy or not, he’s pushing his luck if he doesn’t quit while he’s ahead.

The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight is a very honest piece of work, in that it advertises its intentions right at the start. The opening credits take forever, and do nothing to advance the plot. I wonder why this is two hours and 48 minutes long, I thought as it started. Because it’s not afraid to indulge itself in boring your arse all the way off your body. The smart move at this point, before anyone says a word and six or seven minutes of snow have filled the screen, is to look over at the person who suggested giving it a shot and say “How about The Villainess instead?” I did not make the smart move. I never do.

The thing about Tarantino is that no matter how much his movies go wrong in general, there’s usually at least one scene that’s worth looking at again. Take Inglourious Basterds, which is kind of a hot mess, but still has two electric scenes with Christoph Waltz to balance out all the Basterd related nuttery. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino had finally got enough creative control to do whatever the hell he wanted, so he made a widescreen movie where all the key scenes play in a confined space, and all the key players make you wish they’d died before the cameras started rolling. 

There’s no law that says that the characters in a movie have to be likeable. But if they’re not, they’d better be funny, breathtakingly charismatic, or have at least one facet which will make you care if they live or die. In one way. Tarantino gets this, because the characters who last the longest are played by the two most effortlessly charismatic actors in the cast, Samuel L Jackson and Walton Goggins. It’s a pity that they’re not funny or any kind of fun. Without those actors, they’d be just about unbearable. Even with them, I was thinking of one of my favourite ever Walton Goggins lines, from Predators, where he glibly announces that he was supposed to have been executed two days ago. This is another movie where that would have worked out fine.

The thing which really baffles me is that Tarantino went so nuts about widescreen. It’s one of a handful of movies shot in the last thirty or forty years in 65mm for projection from 70mm stock, and for the life of me, I can’t see anything in the movie which needed that kind of shooting quality. Tarantino was so determined about this that he forced a load of US cinemas to install 70mm projectors so that people would see the film as he’d imagined it. Peter goddam Jackson didn’t do that. Michael Mann might have released a few prints of Last of the Mohicans on 70mm, but that was shot on 35mm, and Last of the Mohicans is a genuinely gorgeous movie that made want a widescreen TV so that I could watch it on DVD properly. When I was watching The Hateful Eight on Netflix, there was no point where I thought to myself “I wish I’d seen this in a cinema so that I could really see this properly.” There’s nothing going on at any time which needs that level of splendour.

And I can’t help wondering. If Tarantino hadn’t been trying to make a good looking movie, would he have made something I actually wanted to watch?

The Favourite

This thing is going to get a lot of awards, because it’s a costume drama, and it’s weird, and it has knock-out performances from Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, but I sat through the whole thing trying to figure out how accurate it was.

Which is missing the point. This is a movie which has a bit in the middle where Tories are pelting a naked man with pomegranates. No explanation is ever offered for this; it’s just something which is happening, and Emma Stone runs around the edge of it, and that’s it. Weird stuff happened in the court of Queen Anne. Maybe they didn’t have TV or Facebook and it was just a matter of passing the time. Or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos is just nuts. That would fit with what I know about his prior art.

Anyhow, sweating the details of whether the Marlborough campaigns were planned and supported that way, or whether the British Prime Minister really was inseparable from his racing duck, is kind of missing the point. The Favourite is a movie about people being selfish and beastly to each other and how little good it does in the end. As I type this I find myself thinking that Yorgos Lanthimos could have done an interesting job of The Death of Stalin. The movie works because the characters pull you in. Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne is pathetic and yet subtly monstrous. Rachel Weisz’ Sarah Churchill is ruthless but somehow the only sane person in the palace, and Emma Stone’s Abigail is whatever she needs to be in the moment if that’s what will get her long term security and a place in society.

They’re all great; not great people, but great characters, and somehow more lively and compelling than the fops which otherwise populate the Court and make the decisions which wind up in the history books. As you watch the cabinet wheel and deal, it’s hard to resist the feeling that Sarah Churchill’s doing the only right thing by browbeating and manipulating them. It’s another one of those movies which reminds you that most decisions in history were made by people who were either drunk or hungover, because until recently, booze was safer to drink than water and no-one had invented aspirin.

Just don’t read the real story, because it will leave you a bit annoyed that the script simplified and telescoped a long game in which the players were even more closely related to each other than the movie suggests. 

Bohemian Rhapsody: The Band was already together

There’s a whole lot of might-have-been in Bohemian Rhapsody. What would it have been like if they’d gone with plan A, and Sacha Baron Cohen had played Freddie Mercury? What would it have been like if Bryan Singer hadn’t been chucked off the set before it was all in the can? What would it have been like if Brian May and Roger Taylor had been told they could take their chances with history - but that’s just another version of what if they’d stuck with Sacha Baron Cohen.
We got what we got, and it says something about the movie that the two characters I was rooting for were Jim “Miami” Beach and John Deacon, as Queen’s lawyer and bass player respectively. They were not very rock and roll, and their quiet determination to look after their friends and get the job done struck a chord with me. There’s moment - blink and you’ll miss it - at the Wembley set where Joe Mazzello is standing there waiting for everything else to start. He’s stoically resting both arms along the top of his bass, and there’s something in that stance which recalls generations of soldiers leaning on their weapons, just daring the horde out there to come and get it. I liked Mazzello’s version of John Deacon.

Of course, these are not the big deal. The big deal is Rami Malek doing Freddie Mercury, and the recreation of the Live Aid set.

First off, thanks to Mr Robot, I’ll take a shot at anything which Rami Malek tries; he’s just an interesting actor with an awful lot of presence. And his Freddie is unsurprisingly good, especially when you consider he had to do every scene with a set of comedy teeth to get his overbite to match Freddie. I realised I’ve never heard Freddie Mercury do anything but sing, so I couldn’t just whether that ripe upper class drawl was spot on, but it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t given the trouble Malek went to to get everything else right.

And the Live Aid remake is very very good. It’s not seamless, but it works, and it catches a mood. It’s the best thing in the movie, and it ruins everything else.

It doesn’t ruin everything else by comparison; it’s not that it makes everything else look terrible. It’s that the movie needs the Live Aid set to be a catharsis for the band, a moment of reunion. It needs to be Freddie getting the band back together, in one last ditch squeeze into the Live Aid line-up which will make them give everything they’ve got. Except that it really wasn’t. Pretty much like he did with every other headliner, Bob Geldof bounced Queen into the show by announcing that they’d agreed before he’d even asked them; he dared half the pop stars in the world to call him a liar and themselves a bunch of goons who didn’t care about famine, and no-one called his bluff.

And Queen weren’t broken up at this point; they were still touring and working together, though at a much slower tempo than they had been. They weren’t getting on any worse than they had been, and Live Aid was just another job of work, even if was one they knocked out of the park. In a way, that’s a much more interesting story to tell, but it doesn’t hit Hollywood story beats, so the script just makes stuff up.

There’s been any amount of blowback about the way that the movie handles Freddie’s sexuality, and I’m way underqualified to pick that apart. The one thing I will say is that I find it pretty hard to believe that Freddie Mercury didn’t have a lot more fun than the movie lets us see. It’s fun to be rich and do what you want. You can go on all you like about how empty fame can be, and what it feels like when the party’s over, but while it’s happening, it’s fun. It’s almost like they decided that showing Freddie having one wouldn’t be tragic enough, or might have been too pro-drugs or pro-something else. I dunno. But talk about making decadence look dreary ...


Finally, for the pointless cameo spotters, check out Mike Myers putting in a couple of minutes as composite clueless record producer refusing to greenlight Bohemian Rhapsody as a single because it’s not the kind of song kids will bang their heads to in their cars. If you’re going to do that, the least you can do is have him do this face straight to camera:

Mortal Engines: Hester, I AM your father

I blogged on the books some time ago, and couldn’t stop myself commenting on Philip Reeve throwing some shade on Philip Pullman, who is either his drinking buddy or his evil nemesis, and I don’t want to find out which. But they’re drawing level now in a way I didn’t expect, since Mortal Engines looks like being another one shot frachise fizzle just the same way that The Golden Compass sank the notion of a franchise built on the Dark Materials trilogy.

I remember seeing the first trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and feeling a chill; could it be that someone was going to make those books into a movie which would do them justice? Yup. Against the odds, Jackson did just that. Then he made The Hobbit and the less said about that the better. So there I was some months back seeing the trailers for a Peter Jackson production of Mortal Engines and feeling that same hopeful chill. Because once again, he’d got the look right, which is all you can really judge from a trailer.

You have to picture me going into the movie house, muttering “please don’t screw it up, please don’t screw it up” under my breath. Well, you don’t always get what you want.

Mortal Engines looks like 100 million dollars, to the extent that anything can really be said to look like that kind of money. It’s all up there on the screen, for better and for worse. And it runs along efficiently enough as a movie in which things happen. They happen one after another in a logical kind of way, stringing the big CGI setpieces together from the beginning to the middle to the big fight at the end and then the coda.

What it’s not is a GOOD story, or a new story, or a faithful adaptation of the book. It catches some of the look and feel of the world which Reeve created, but then it carves back a more complex story to something that winds up feeling like a shot by shot remake of Star Wars. The rebels are holding out in a fortress. A vast machine is bringing a death ray to blow them up. A rag tag fleet of aircraft have to try to stop it. There’s a key point of vulnerability in the vast machine which has to be flown into by a novice who has weirdly great talent. Gah. There’s even a moment when the big bad is standing on a gantry over a huge drop and tells a key character that he’s her father, and then she’s rescued by a passing aircraft. That was the point when I cracked and said “Hester, I AM your father.” 

What’s vexing about this is that most of the action had to be run in CGI, which means that they could have literally made the action whatever the hell they wanted it to be. It wasn’t one of those deals where the original book had come up with stuff you couldn’t match in the real world. None of this was happening in the real world anyhow. So what they chose to put on the screen is just what they thought would work dramatically as a reflection of the book. I can’t quite see how they could get it that wrong. They had to cut things from the text, obviously, because there’s a lot of incident in the book and there’s only so much of that which you can fit in. But they didn’t have to get the back half of the narrative so jarringly off, and they didn’t have to drop the ball so damn hard in serving the characters. Hester Shaw is a remarkable character in the books, but in the movie they’ve taken all the rough edges off her face and her character. Tom Natsworthy is an idiot in the books, and Robert Sheehan can’t quite sell Tom as an idiot, because he’s not given enough space to do it properly. There’s all that CGI world building to show off, and the running in between the action bits, and then the action bits, and there just isn’t the room for, you know, acting. Perhaps the poorest served character is Anna Fang, who has a great arc in the books for all that she’s often a plot engine, but here she’s just a kick ass martial arts wizard who has two expressions; sunglasses on, and sunglasses off.

So, there could have been three more movies, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to happen. Maybe Netflix will take a run at it in five years time.

Ralph Breaks the Internet

I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet a couple of weeks back, on the back of good internet buzz and the fact that I liked the cut of Vanellope’s jib in the trailers. And it was fun, I guess, but it didn’t exactly drive me to the keyboard to try to set my impressions down.

A couple of weeks on, I’m not sure what to say about it as a movie. It passes the time well. Vanellope is fun. The bit with all the Disney Princesses is smart and doesn’t wear out its welcome. The Easter egg in the middle of the credits...

Actually, that’s probably the bit which stuck with me. That little bit is simple, perfect, and silly. Ralph just keeps stuffing pancakes into a helpless rabbit until things go horribly wrong. It’s weightless and funny and reckless, and I found myself wishing the whole movie had been that way, even though it would probably have been just like wishing that I could have a movie which was all about the minions from Despicable Me.

Instead, it’s another one of those movies for kids in which an awkward doofus messes things up and then learns a valuable life lesson from all the things which went wrong. Which is - I think - also what happened in Wreck-It Ralph, the first movie. That might be why I didn’t bother with it at the time. 

And that’s somehow all I have to say after only a few days have gone by. It’s fun while it’s happening, but I’m struggling to think of anything I’d say to a friend to get them fired up to go and see it.