Take2 Guide to Steven Spielberg

Today marks the official release of the ebook "The Take2 Guide to Steven Spielberg", which was edited by Adam Zanzie, and features essays and reviews from Joseph McBride, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, Tom Carson and James Berardinelli. Oh, and me! You can find more information about the book here, and you can buy it from Amazon here.

Book Review: Keeping The British End Up

It's been a busy month for me where writing for hopelies.com is concerned. On top of the two Hope Lies on Television columns this month, I've written this book review of Keeping The British End Up by Simon Sheridan, which is a very thorough, entertaining and informative examination of the roots, development and decline of the British sex comedy.

As someone who grew up long after this style of film had fallen into obscurity and had only heard about the Confessions of a... series and its kind through hearsay and late night documentaries, I found it to be a very interesting examination of an era of British film-making that is sadly neglected. Maybe not because of their critical worth, but certainly in terms of their cultural and commercial impact, these films need to be given their due recognition as part of the fabric of British film history.

The Strain

By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan



A Boeing 777 lands at John F. Kennedy airport with its lights off and no response coming from the cockpit. Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the C.D.C. (Contagious Diseases Center) is called in to investigate. Once they open the plane, they discover that everyone inside, barring a few survivors, is dead, with most of them exsanguinated; drained of their blood. Goodweather and his team try to uncover the cause of this mysterious plague, only to find that some of the corpses have started to change, physically, and are coming back to life in search of sustenance.

I love Guillermo del Toro. Whether he's making small, Spanish-language offerings or huge Hollywood affairs, he brings a huge and unquenchable imagination to them, conjuring up images and ideas that are truly breathtaking. Now, he turns his hand to a novel, co-written by Chuck Hogan, that deals with a subject that his dealt with in two of his films; vampires.

Originally planned as a television series, a detailed procedural akin to The Wire, but with vampires, The Strain is a hugely imaginative, if occasionally sluggishly written, entry into the recently revived genre of vampire fiction. Of course, by dint of being a vampire novel, does owe a lot to Dracula - the opening chapters, in which a plane lands at J.F.K. with seemingly no one left alive on board, deliberately evoke the image of the wraithlike Demeter running aground at Whitby - it stands more in the tradition of Richard Matheson and his seminal work, I Am Legend. Del Toro and Hogan take a deliberate and methodical approach to the nature of vampirism, providing possible explanations for their weaknesses, the ways in which their digestive systems work and how the disease spreads from person to person.

The authors try something new with the vampire, or at least something different. The vampires are not swarthy, lustful types, they appear to be little more than savage beasts driven by their hunger, turning people into their own kind left and right in search of food. The descriptions of these creatures, with a vicious stinger that comes out of their necks, rather than the traditional elongated canines, is vivid and terrifying. They seem just human enough, but with that extra, oddly phallic detail to through things off. It's refreshing, after all the years of cultured, slightly wimpish vampires that we've seen and read about, to read something in vampires are truly malevolent beings that destroy things with no regard or notion of what they are doing.

By having Goodweather work for the C.D.C. the authors are given ample opportunities to pontificate on how vampires could exist in a rational world of science. Their attention to detail and the ceaseless logic of their approach heightens the terror at the heart of the novel by making it seem plausible, at least within the world of the novel. Drawing upon contemporary fears of biological warfare, pandemics and the inability of governments to protect their people, Del Toro and Hogan give their work an urgency that could easily be found in a 'straight' crime novel or the sort of science gone awry cautionary tales that the late Michael Crichton used to do so well.

However, this very same approach to the subject matter is occasionally the downfall of the novel since it can make some passages seem terribly dry, and information is sometimes repeated, to no great gains. The minutiae of how a group like the C.D.C. would work drag and stand in stark contrast to the wildly imaginative creations that are the vampires and the breathtaking pace at which some of the book progresses.

The disparate focus of the book is also an issue. After the plane is emptied of its cargo of dead and nearly dead passengers, the corpses start coming back to life, whilst those left alive slowly find themselves hungering for blood. The book follows each of the ''survivors'' as they return to their homes, as well as the lives of people who happen upon the walking dead, and in trying to encompass all these narratives Del Toro and Hogan wind up delivering stories that are rather samey.

Some of them are amazing, though. One involving a woman who keeps her turned husband locked up in the shed at the back of their house because she can't bear to lose him, is by turns horrific, moving and deeply unsettling. These moments are too rare, though, as the sublime is often surrounded by marshes of workmanlike writing that, whilst perfectly fine, often doesn't match the imagination that drives the book along.

Its the first entry in a trilogy, with the subsequent books following annually, and even with my misgivings about the mechanics of the plot, the scope of the story and the power of its imaginings has me positively salivating at the prospect of future installments. The book ends of a definite cliff-hanger, and if the titles of the second book, The Fall, is anything to go by, it seems that things will only get darker as time goes on. I can't wait to sink my teeth into it.

Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince

Or, Harry Potter and The Raging Hormones



Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) returns for his sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This year, he tries to figure out what Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) are up to, who is trying to off Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) and try to get information out of the new potions teacher, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent). Oh, and there's some stuff about kissing and some book.

By this point we are six films in and we know pretty much what to expect from a Harry Potter film; the three principle actors will be either good, functional or annoying (Radcliffe, Grint, Watson respectively), the supporting cast of thesps will be fantastic, regardless of how minor or important their roles are (Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn is the standout this time around, veering from awkward good-humour to deep personal tragedy in an instance) and the effects will be terrific. And, of course, things will get darker and scarier.

What is different this time around is the energy of the film and its tone. One of the major hurdles that confronted the Harry Potter films is that they have been hamstrung by J.K. Rowling's books. Now, I love the books, but any fan would have to admit that, after the major event of Goblet of Fire (the return of Voldemort) the series went into a holding pattern as we waited for the final showdown to come in Deathly Hallows. There were big events in the in-between books, deaths of notable characters and the introduction of the Horcruxes, but they are largely set up for what is to follow.

The previous film, The Order of the Phoenix, and this one have both had to deal with being essentially filler, and it is a remarkable achievement that the two stand up so well as films in their own right, even though not very much happens in either film apart from the hinted character deaths.

Much of the credit for this must be given to David Yates, who directed both Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince and is currently working on the two-part finale, The Deathly Hallows. Yates made his name as a director for the BBC, most notably directing the original TV series of State of Play, Paul Abbott's tense and dense journalism drama from 2003. It's quite surprising that he has so adeptly shifted from medium-budget drama to big-budget fantasy, but the series as a whole seems to have benefited from his involvement.

Much like Alfonso Cuaron, who directed the best film in the series, The Prisoner of Azkaban, Yates has a keen visual sense, coupled with an ability to square whimsy with darkness and a dramatist's grasp of emotions. Each shot in Half-Blood Prince is lovingly framed, each camera move seems imbued with a sense of the mystical, and every exchange drives the story, with little flab to slow it down.

This stems at least in part from Half-Blood Prince being the first film to be released after the books have all been published. Before, directors and writers were unsure what to cut and what to leave in, resulting in either sluggishly paced, overly faithful adaptations (Chris Columbus' first two offerings) or aimless, digressive pieces that kept as much as possible to avoid cutting anything that might be needed later (Goblet of Fire). Knowing now what needs to be in and what doesn't, Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves are able to focus on what matters and what will serve the final chapter of the story best. This gives the film its energy; gone are the extraneous plot divergences and lack of focus, replaced by a clear plot, even if it is one that is only leading up to an unhappy event. It's two and a half hours long and it didn't feel like it at all.

The other element that sets the film apart from its brethren is that it is funny. And not in the ''Oh, aren't those kids precocious'' way that the early films were or the slightly forced style of humour more recently adopted. It is genuinely funny and wittily written. It's like an odd mix of conspiracy thriller, horror and Richard Curtis. When not focusing on attempted murder and manipulation of an old man, the film spends its time detailing the love lives of its main characters. The very, very English repression of their emotions makes for a surprisingly funny comedy of manners, like Jane Austen with wands. Seeing these young people struggle with burgeoning emotions is surprisingly real, given the nature of the film, and apart from the frequent use of the word ''snogging'' (seriously, does anyone use that term past the age of 12?), a hangover from Rowling's rather awkward depictions of love in her novels, its surprisingly engaging.

Hangovers from Rowling's work do cause problems elsewhere, though, as the film comes undone slightly in its final act. It's been a while since I read the book, but I remember that the search for the identity of The Half-Blood Prince was one of the key plot threads and presented Harry with a personal mystery to solve that lasted all the way to the end of the book. Here, it plays an important part in an early scene, gets a cursory mention halfway through, then isn't mentioned until the Prince's identity is revealed.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, as I've said, the trimming of fat from the novel makes the film all the stronger, but it is really distracting when Harry mentions the Half-Blood Prince because he is so otherwise absent. It made me wonder if the film couldn't have been improved if they had removed that aspect entirely. It's not like films haven't done that before; where the hell was the Ultimatum in The Bourne Ultimatum?

Some fans have complained about changes to the story, particularly the way in which the end was staged, but I can't really find anything to complain about. The lack of a big battle makes the finale all the more powerful, the attack of the Weasly's house is a visually striking set-piece, and Harry's actions towards the end add an ambiguity that was lacking from the book.

Six films in and the series has all the right elements that have made it so good in the past but it also seems to have found the director that it needs to bring about a satisfactory conclusion. Here's hoping that Yates can shoulder the burden and give us the climax we all deserve.