Phonomancy Track 1: Scott Walker

In recent months, I've kinda sorta gotten addicted to Phonogram, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's fantastic comic about music and the power it has on our lives. Even if you don't normally read comics, it's very well-written and features lovely artwork; I'd start with The Singles Club, it's a good introduction. In the spirit of this, I'm doing an ongoing series of posts about some of my favourite musicians and acts.

Today, we'll start with one of the most influential, and one of the most enigmatic men in rock music.

It's difficult to talk about Scott Walker without speaking in hushed tones, without treating him as some sort of minor musical god, and shading his history in such a way to make him seem like legend. To be fair, the man has led a very interesting life. A Californian high school drop-out with a taste for European art and culture, this is a man who at one point was the most adored young singer in the United Kingdom, and now unwinds by doing interior decorating. His work nowadays is like the soundtrack to a Kafka story, nightmarish existentialist soundscapes laced with surreal humour, in between producing Pulp records and collaborating with Bat for Lashes. His music has influenced so many, particularly his records from the 1960's, he's like Year Zero for indie music: David Bowie, the Smiths, Neil Hannon, Jarvis Cocker, Goldfrapp, Damon Albarn, Radiohead (to the point "Creep" was informally dubbed "(their) Scott Walker song")

If you're into alternative rock, understand that Walker is probably your favourite musician's favourite musician.

Born Noel Scott Engel in 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, Walker was nomadic from an early age. His father worked as a geologist, meaning the family moved across America, settling in California. Walker was kicked out of high school and says he spent his time hitchhiking around the States; this was the beatnik era, where hundreds of wide-eyed disciples of Kerouac set about hitting the open road on would-be spiritual journeys. These people are pretty much ten-a-penny nowadays with the rise of the gap year, but in the late 1950s, this was bold exciting stuff. And it was while playing bass guitar on the Sunset Strip that he and his friend John Maus got the call from Gary Leeds to come to "swinging London", a trip that would change everything.

Scott and John had been performing across California for a while now as the Walker Brothers; John was annoyed at people pronouncing his surname as "Moose" and so adopted a stage name. Scott also took the surname "Walker" - both tall, blond and handsome, they could be mistaken for brothers, and there was a nice ring to the name "The Fabulous Walker Brothers". Given that they never played their own instruments, instead using experienced session players - Gary wouldn't even play drums live - the sheen of plastic to the name is fitting. While they were regulars on the Sunset Strip, particularly Whisky-A-Go-Go, they never had any breakout success, but Gary Leeds, the soon-to-be third Walker Brother, had recently come back from a tour in the UK with singer P. J. Proby, and encouraged Scott and John to take a visit to the swinging scene. They ended up signed to Phillips Records by John Franz - and, conveniently, avoiding the draft for Vietnam.

In 1965, London was rapidly becoming the hippest place to be, daddy-o, especially when it came to music. The British Invasion had begun, with The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who all making waves in the US, psychedelic rock was laying down the roots for the oncoming wave of prog (acts like Pink Floyd and Cream), and Radio Caroline was merrily broadcasting all kinds of rock music the BBC wouldn't play from its two stubborn ships in Felixstowe and Harwich.

It was the time to be young and gay and merry, but the Walker Brothers offered an immediate contrast. For one, rather than British musicians conquering the Colonies, they were three young handsome American gentlemen coming over to grace the Sceptred Isle, elegantly dressed and effortlessly cool, compared to the Stones' rugged sneering "don't give a hoot" attitude and the Beatles' cheeky fresh-faced teenybopper reputation. They sang of doomed romance and loneliness from songsmiths like Bacharach, Gaye and Newman, with a rich full Wall of Sound-esque comprised of big sweeping orchestras amongst tight rhythm guitars; a sense of melancholy hung about their work, one that resonated with a Britain that still had scars from the war.

More than anything else, though, they had Scott's voice. Back on the Strip, he'd just been the bass player while John was lead vocalist, and an early Walker Brothers cut, "Pretty Girls Everywhere", featured him as such, but failed to go anywhere. For the song "Love Her", a deeper voice was required, and it was this rather than "Pretty Girls" that got radio attention. Since then, Scott had become the de facto face of the group. And oh, what a voice, dear reader. Just so you know I'm not waxing romantic, listen to one of their best songs, a cover of Frankie Valli's "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore):

Those of you who watch The Walking Dead may recognise this from one of the first trailers. It's a cracking song in its own right, and Scott's voice is one of the main selling points, a smooth deep baritone that pleads with his sweetheart to shed loneliness and let him in, or else the celestial bodies themselves will cease to be. It's a sentiment so overwhelmingly romantic it sounds downright hysterical when put in text divorced from the music, but then everything about this is big and grand and clawing its way towards Heaven.

At one point, the Walker Brothers were the biggest thing in Britain. Their official fan club had more members than The Beatles' did, although this is not to say they had more fans altogether than the Fab Four. They were massive, is me point, and their concerts would last maybe one or two minutes before screaming fans would rush the stage. This didn't sit easy with the shy introverted Scott, who never got used to the wild attention and was always more interested in music. The resulting tensions, creative differences (for there are always creative differences, it would seem) and a reported suicide attempt by Scott led to the group splitting up, with Scott pursuing a solo career.

The first hint of Scott's ambitions as a musician lay in the B-side to the single "Deadlier than the Male", a baroque little number called "Archangel". Six months before "Whiter Shade of Pale", the Gothic organ refrain was recorded at the Leicester Square Odeon, using the cinema's in-house pipe organ. Inspired by Bach and filled just as much with images of kitchen-sink drama as it was the supernatural, the single failed to get further than the Top 30, and so "Archangel", with its Gothic depiction of post-war London, sadly went unnoticed.

The self-described "classic bore at the party", Scott's interests were cultural and intellectual, particularly classical music and European cinema, and so he got a kick out of seeing characters from Ealing comedies inhabiting the streets of London. It was while drinking at the London Playboy Club that he was introduced, by a girl who took him back to her place, to Jacques Brel, the Flemish chanteur who Scott declared to be "the most significant singer-songwriter in the world". A painfully shy man whose live performances always resulted in him sweating more than Lee Evans in a walk-in oven, and who sang of gonorrhea, sadomasochism, Amsterdam, sons lost in war and the cowardice of men, Scott identified with Brel instantly, and it was through English covers of his work that he began to strike out as the thinking man's pop idol. Breaking free of the teen idol image is always a tricky one, but I can't imagine a more violent attempt to burst out of that cocoon than by singing songs about "authentic queers and phony virgins":

"Jackie" remains one of my favourite Scott songs. Not because it features my name or anything, that's coincidence (and it's pronounced "Jacques-y" in the song anyway). It's how brash and bold and outright rude it is, how punk it is before "punk" even became a word (Julian Cope, of post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes, is a passionate Walker fan), yet it's set to such a storming, uplifting orchestral backing. Thank Angela Morley, then Wally Stott, for the fantastic arrangements, which she would provide for Scott's four solo albums. Any singer who claims influence from Brel, they were introduced through Scott; Brel sang as though he were terrified of the hurricane he was unleashing, whereas Scott sang with style and panache, like Apollo at the Royal Albert Hall.

The albums soon became dominated with his own compositions, and he began to emerge as a singer-songwriter more and more with every release. The common assumption is that there are two iterations of Walker: the intellectual crooner, like Sinatra for the Left Bank; and the modernist composer who came along out of nowhere. The division isn't quite that simple as people believe; you had the influence of Brel on tracks like "The Girls from the Streets" and "Montague Terrace (In Blue)", but what seems to pop up more often is the vivid, dreamlike fantastical imagery that would dominate his modern work. I'm going to try and let them speak for themselves,  so listen to the posted tracks, but I'll also include some choice excerpts.

While doing Poetry last semester, I looked to Scott's lyrics an awful lot, particularly for Romantic-era poetry. I love the way he gives abstract images and concepts weight and sensation - "thoughts like shattered stone", "scent of secrets", "fist filled with illusions", and a salesman who "smells like miracles" (from "Rosemary").

Also from Scott 3, we had "It's Raining Today", and people wondering how modern Walker came about need listen no further than the first couple of seconds and its unearthly string section - not quite discordant but not really musical either, it hangs over the record and sets the tone so well.

His first few solo albums were top sellers, but that run of good fortune came to an end with Scott 4, which failed to chart and was soon deleted, with Walker slowly fading from the limelight in the process. There are many theories as to why 4 failed to chart while Scotts 1-3 did; the most common is it being released under the name "Noel Scott Engel", while Scott attributes it to most of the songs being written in 3/4. Personally, I think people were just getting tired of this particular brand of chamber pop dripping in syrupy orchestrations. Musical tastes were changing: King Crimson, Deep Purple and Procol Harum were leading the charge of the Progressive Rock Brigade; the Stones had their legendary Hyde Park concert in tribute to Brian Jones; and so there was no real want or need for his brand of velvety ballads.

A shame, as some of his finest work is on Scott 4:

Now entering a period of recording covers of other people's songs to earn a living, Scott had - culturally speaking at least - fallen by the wayside. 1975 marked a Walker Brothers reunion, more out of desperation if anything; their brand of MOR charm appealed to their new demographics of housewives and mothers, and they achieved some limited success, including a UK Top Ten single with a pretty nice cover of Tom Rush's "No Regrets".

And then Nite Flights happened.

With their record label about to collapse and nobody really caring one way or the other what happened to them next, Scott, John and Gary decided to go all out on their final release, the experimental rock album Nite Flights. The album is more like a set of three solo LPs bundled together than a coherent album; Scott writes four tracks, Gary follows it up with two of his own, and John closes it out with another four. Scott's compositions received the most attention: they're darker, punchier, more foreboding, and full to the seams with abstract dreamlike images and creations made flesh, indebted to David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy with Brian Eno. I still have no idea what the "sunfighters locked in right angle rooms" are, neither do I know what a "nite flight" could possibly be, but damnit, it's arresting and striking. The masterpiece has to be "The Electrician", an eerie menacing ode to sadism and torture that sees Scott mutilate his baritone into something jarring and angular, and may be familiar to viewers of Bronson:

I still haven't heard anything quite like this in recent memory.

After Nite Flights, Scott disappeared. Well, he might as well have, there's little to no information available about what he got up to in the time between then and his 1984 album Climate of Hunter, which was somehow even more ambient, spaced-out and disjointed than any of his four tracks on Nite Flights. A cult following had sprung up around this time, spearheaded by Julian Cope re-releasing twelve of Scott's original songs as an LP called Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker. Climate took a while to release; a notoriously slow writer and composer, Scott hired a cottage in the New Forest and spent his time trying to capture the resulting isolation in music form. It's a very odd, polarising album, with "Sleepwalking Woman" and its gentle orchestra being the closest to a "traditional" Walker piece.

This is about as "pop" as Scott would get after a while, working with contemporary musicians like Billy Ocean and Evan Parker and bearing some resemblance to New Wave and post-punk. But even as poppy as these songs sound, they're still pretty strange, with a kind of spaciness about them that would seem out-of-place anywhere but here. Half the tracks didn't even get names. Reportedly the lowest selling album in Virgin Records' catalogue, time will no doubt be kinder to it.

It would be another eleven years before the release of Tilt, an avant-garde nightmare of an album filled with bleak modernist imagery and a synthesis of classical, industrial and electronica. If Climate of Hunter was ahead of its time, then Tilt is the kind of pop music that would probably be made around 2105. Scott went through the underworld of his own depression and nightmares and emerged, like Orpheus, bringing dark new treasures with him. I listened to it in full a while ago with some trepidation, as every review of it indicated it was full of doom, doom and new caffeine-free doom. I actually quite liked it, but it isn't something I'd buy and you need to adjust to it; Tilt isn't here to entertain you, it wants you to shut up, sit down, and get lost in the dreamworld.

There's a palpable aura of menace around it; you'll start singling out individual instruments and sounds thinking they sound nice, but there's something...off about them, not quite discordant but not sounding right. Tunes and melodies are stretched to breaking point, as though your enjoyment is being tested, and the bizarre stream-of-consciousness lyrics only add to the unsettling nature: "halo(es) of locust", "Lemon Bloody Cola", "a man with brain grass", and the weird reference to To Have and to Have Not - "Ya know how to whistle put ya lips together and blow". It's like the soundtrack to a Samuel Beckett piece, or a Francis Bacon painting; maybe T.S. Eliot, as there always seems to be a method to his madness. (Plus, American living in London, seems like a natural fit.)

"Farmer in the City" is still an achingly beautiful track, though:

He released another album in 2006 called The Drift, but I can't really comment on that one. I had enough trouble listening to Tilt, and The Drift is, if anything, much more uncomfortable. Just listening to a couple of tracks is draining, so I'll leave that task to stronger bloggers than I. His newest album, 2012's Bish Bosch, is a bit easier, and the absurdist humour shines through more. One track, "SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter)", has the narrator listing off some simple but effective one-liners at random intervals, which are welcome relief from the tight tension in-between - the song is mostly acapella, and no that doesn't make things easier. I'll admit to getting a grim chuckle from the final track, "The Day the 'Conducator' Died (An Xmas Song)", with the execution of Ceaușescu followed by the opening bars of "Jingle Bells". Because nothing spells Christmas quite like a dictator and his wife meeting death by firing squad!

I'll freely admit, his 60s stuff is more my bag. Tilt and The Drift require a certain mindset to listen to/appreciate, and even though I enjoyed the former more than I expected, it's not an easy album at all. I do have to respect a man who can remain so enigmatic even in modern day, where I can look up every cough I've made on Google PhlegmWatch, and who can afford to do his own thing musically, even if it's not my thing.

But the 60s albums, Scotts 1-4, they feel timeless. I don't know anybody else who can sing about heartbreak quite so beautifully and yet not feel self-indulgent. Bands like The Cure cry and scream out their frustrations and worries to whoever and invite you to have a good old wallow in darkness. I never get that with Scott Walker. It's like stepping into a bath, or a baptismal font; you just let everything negative and horrible wash away into the aether, chased out by angelic strings and heroic trumpets. Scott invites you to get lost in his dreams, worlds where boys fly away on balloons, where you can shake hands with Charles de Gaulle, reminisce about train window girls, and follow two young soldiers limping their way back home. His is a voice that still manages to sound hauntingly beautiful no matter how sharp and tortured he makes it in Tilt or Bish Bosch.

It's the voice of an archangel - magnificent yet terrible.

My Clique Should Be Cancelled

So there I am, having a nice day in Winchester with Nana Connell, and I check Twitter and what do I find? Tony Harris, comic book artist of Starman and Ex Machina fame, has caused a furore on the Internet for this baffingly misogynistic post about female cosplayers:

I'm not replicating the full text, because both the content and the atrocious grammar make my head hurt, but you get the idea, right? Harris has appointed himself Guardian of the Nerds, and those harlots shan't get past him to poison the well. According to royal decree by His Harrisness, the vast majority of female cosplayers are all posers and whores who love getting to walk around convention halls half-naked and pray upon the weak frightened little virginal nerd, soaking up adulation like Babylonian storm-witches. But they're also unattractive, as they only have "Big Boobies", not "GREAT Boobies", so truly they are the deadliest kind of female, sirens to geeky sailors.

You know, shit like this is why it's so difficult being a part of nerd culture sometimes. The roots of nerddom stretch back to the high school rejects - the sci-fi fans, the horror aficionados, the computer whizzes, basically everyone who probably got stuffed in lockers, had their lunch money stolen and never went to prom. Rejection was the seed from which nerd culture sprung from. Nobody liked you in high school? Fear not, there was a whole sub-society you could go to, one that would accept you whoever you were.

Except that's not quite true, is it? From my experience, nerd culture has proven just as insular and unwelcoming as any high school jock or cheerleader; probably more so, actually, because at my old school, I got along with the "popular" crowd pretty well. (It's worth noting the speech marks as they never actually saw themselves as the "popular" crowd.) I've lost count of the amount of times I've been told my opinion is worthless because I haven't watched 20+ episodes of a show beforehand, or I wasn't familiar with the collected filmography of Guy Maddin or whoever. I'm aware that people don't often act on the Internet how they do in real life, and it may be some kind of defence mechanism like a puffer fish inflating its body, but it doesn't help our reputation as a bunch of self-indulgent misanthropic pack of jackals.

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory from Penny Arcade. Pay close attention, class.

To be fair to Harris, and to the scores of followers trying to keep the "barbarians" at the gate, I get where they're coming from. Nerddom is very much their little niche, and they don't want to see it dissolved away to nothing. That's a sentiment I share; I'm really annoyed by The Big Bang Theory and how it's considered something freaks and geeks. Here's the thing, though - the nerds have won. San Diego Comic-Con has become a major event the world pays attention to. David Tennant's tenure as the Doctor made geeks acceptable, even fashionable. People buy DVD boxsets and eagerly discuss Game of Thrones in public. Good Lord, a movie about the Avengers is one of the highest grossing films of all time! These are glorious days!

And you know what? As a culture of rejects, freaks and losers, we have no right to behave like we're still in high school, and excluding people from entering the clubhouse. Nerddom is not some sort of ivory tower we need to keep the proles out of - a guy from my school, a rugby player no less, is getting into mainstream comics because he loves The Dark Knight. This is a good thing. Christ, sports fans are pretty much the biggest examples of nerds there are. This is no longer exclusively our domain, and that's okay. We are not misers, jealously hoarding our secrets. If someone wants to dress up as a superhero and stomp about the convention centre, why not? Cosplay is just one gateway to geekery, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone that for the world. So is The Big Bang Theory, The Avengers, Game of Thrones, whatever it is you're interested in, please come in and don't be shy.

If you're passionate about fiction, about dressing up like fiction, discussing it and proud of it, then you're my brother and my friend, and I love you. Wave that geek banner high.

Veni Vidi Vici (A V for Vendetta review)

Artist unknown, found at PosterGeek.

Part of my November 5th tradition is to re-read V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's seminal work on the clash between totalitarianism and anarchy. Others have their bonfires and fireworks, and those are lovely sights, but I don't have much in the way of winter clothing at the time of writing, so give me a warm room to curl up in and read the delightful tale of a masked psychopath declaring war on Britain. This marked the start of Moore's dense writing style, with plots and themes and allusions and wheels within wheels. What makes it so definitive is how human it is. The politics and intricate narrative are a backdrop to a smaller story. It has a sprawling cast of characters, but everyone involved in V's plots has an arc: Evey Hammond, Adam Susan, harangued police inspector Eric Finch, the widowed Rose Almond. Just from a storytelling perspective, it's one of Moore's definitive works.

The comic's profile has been significantly raised, for better or worse, by the 2006 film, directed by James McTeigue and written by the Wachowskis (of The Matrix and Speed Racer fame), and since then, the main character has become the face of the protester, and the unofficial Bible of the Occupy movement. Unlike some fans of the comic, I really like the V for Vendetta film, and I think it's a decent adaptation. That said, however, there are problems I'd like to address.

For the uninitiated, the film takes place in the near future in a dystopian vision of London that's about one-part Orwell to two-parts Nazi Germany. Security cameras are everywhere, the streets are prowled by the government's secret police, and the vox populi is forced to swallow the jingoistic bullshit of Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), the Daily Mail-tastic "Voice of London". Into this picture comes V (Hugo Weaving/James Purefoy in some shots), a masked terrorist who wears the cloak, stovepipe hat and face of Guy Fawkes, and blows up the Old Bailey on November 5th, a day the country forgot. He declares war on the government, and announces he will attack the Houses of Parliament one year from now; in the midst of this, he rescues and recruits Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young woman who starts to wonder whether her masked saviour is vindicator or villain...

In recent years, V for Vendetta has become the number one favourite film for anarchists and libertarians, and V the poster child for the hacktivist organisation Anonymous - how many protesters have you seen wearing that Guy Fawkes mask on top of ordinary clothes? This is as much a reincarnation of Guy Fawkes as a symbol of freedom from repression, and here's the first problem I have with the film. In the comic, Moore and Lloyd devised the story as a battle between the two diametrically-opposing forces of anarchy and fascism, and made clear there was no right side to choose - V was depicted as being insane and ruthless, almost psychopathic, torturing his apprentice for weeks with the intent of making her his successor ("because I love you, and because I want to set you free" is never a good excuse, fellas), and not caring one jot for any innocent lives that got in the way. He pretended to have emotions but he was as hollow as the Guy's painted grin - broken by the government's experiments until he was both more and less than human.

The leader of the Norsefire party, Adam Susan (this is a question I wondered about in both the comic and the film - what sane person would elect a party calling themselves "Norsefire"? At best it conjures up image of men in their late-thirties casting +2 Magic at each other. I also wonder how they managed to get voted in since their election rallies are so obviously Nazi-themed it's not even funny), was also shown to have a sympathetic, more pitiful side - he installed a fascist government because he honestly believed that was the best for his people, even denying himself the usual comforts they themselves would be denied, and at the end genuinely wants to reconnect with the public.

"Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste."

So the film's decision to cast it as a basic good vs. evil story rings a bit false. It's all simplified, no real moral ambiguity to speak of - Adam Susan is now renamed Adam Sutler after the most direct of war profiteers (former Winston Smith John Hurt now playing Big Brother), and is a tyrannical despot with Hitler's hairdo, barking orders from behind a screen  and importing comforts by train at the expense of the public. The more direct antagonist is Peter Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith), head of the secret police and "an ice-cold sociopath, for whom the ends justify the means", just to highlight how eeeeevil the government is. Likewise, V is a more romantic ideal of a freedom fighter - cultured, intelligent, excellent swordsman, and made more human (he makes Evey breakfast, he has a mock swordfight with a suit of armour and acts embarrassed when Evey sees him, he appears to be romantically attracted to Evey in an utterly pointless romantic subplot). He more resembles Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo, an intentional comparison, having V's favourite film be the 1934 version with Robert Donat. We're given a clear protagonist and antagonist, and not to say Norsefire wasn't harsh in the comics, but that moral ambiguity between the two figureheads of fascism and anarchy has been virtually swept away.

This makes the decision to keep Evey's torture at the hands of V all the more questionable. Don't get me wrong, I actually like that this scene made it intact. It's a real gut-punch viscerally and emotionally, both the punishment Evey goes through, and the sad story of Valerie Page (Imogen Poots). The reveal still hits like a slap to the face, but it rings a bit false. Prior to this, Film!V has not exactly come out smelling of roses, disguising innocent people as himself and using them as decoys, but he's still somewhat honourable and noble. So seeing Film!V do something this monstrous is a contrast to what we've seen before, and raises the question of why Evey continues to associate herself with a man who tortured her physically and psychologically - at least in the comic we had the possibility of V being psychotic and Evey having her will broken, and Evey as a naïve ingénue. Film!Evey is a smart, opinionated young woman essentially having her personality being rewritten by a masked madman.

This also links to the problem of self-professed freedom fighters and anarchists using Guy Fawkes as a symbol of fighting oppression. It's true that Guy Fawkes was the last man to walk into Parliament with honest intentions, but not many people know what those intentions were. Fawkes wasn't trying to overthrow a totalitarian theocracy; on the contrary, he wanted to introduce another one. A devout Catholic who believed that England was under threat from Protestant occupation, Fawkes and twelve others sought to destroy the House of Lords and with it restore Catholic domination of the country. It was David Lloyd who decided on V wearing the Fawkes mask, both for visual impact and for the moral grey-area this created - he and Moore are clever men, and would have known about this. The film? Less so.

The other albatross around the film's neck is the 9/11 parallels. The comic operated under the politically naïve assumption that a near-miss from a nuclear weapon would be enough to drive Britain to the arms of fascists, or at least the far right. Can't you tell this was written during the Thatcher years? It doesn't show a great grasp of politics or the public by the authors' own admission, but it's preferable to this. To elaborate: Inspector Eric Finch (Stephen Rea) is summoned by V, who claims to be a whistleblower under the name William Rookwood (Rookwood being another Fawkes collaborator. You'd think an experienced detective would pick up on this, but whatever). What follows is a massive exposition dump where V helps to outline the real reason behind the St Mary's Disaster - Sutler, then Undersecretary for Justice, and Creedy ordered experimentation on political prisoners, including V, secretly to develop a virus potent enough to kill thousands. They dropped the virus at St Mary's Primary School, whereupon it spread across the country, killing 80,000 people. In order to seize power, Norsefire then blamed this on supposed Muslim terrorists, and those of you who've had to deal with the Truther movement can probably see the metaphor here.

SO HAVE I MENTIONED YET THESE GUYS ARE EVIL BECAUSE THEY TOTES ARE

Ignoring the fact that this is a massive stinking expodump, it's very easy to draw parallels between this and the long-standing conspiracy theory of 9/11 being a false-flag operation, and it sticks in my craw. I get that the Norsefire party are meant to be Nazis by any other name, but seriously? Are they all a bunch of moustache-twirlers who get their jollies by forcing tramps to fight to the death in secret thunderdomes? Yes, Creedy spearheaded the operation, but there's bound to be many people in Norsefire who would raise their hands and go "Um, isn't this a bit...evil?" Humans are fallible; if Norsefire consisted entirely of emotionless robots, maybe I'd believe it, but humans do have morals. Someone would object to this. No, not some"one"; most of the party would probably object to the slaughter of innocents, much less an entire school of children, and they most definitely wouldn't keep shtum about it. It's not like Norsefire could keep it hushed up with their iron fist over the media, this was before they came to power.

A character mentions the Milgram experiment as the ultimate proof that humans are bastards, and that's apparently proof enough that politicians will be on-board with their children being subjected to agonising deaths, disregarding the fact that it can't be applied to everything, including - what started the experiment to begin with - the Holocaust. Professor James Waller, who holds the depressing title of Chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, points out how Milgram's parameters clash with those running the concentration camps. For example, test subjects were told there would be no permanent damage to the shock victims, while the Holocaust perpetrators knew they were killing people. The subjects didn't know anything about the victims, and weren't motivated by xenophobia. More importantly, the subjects had no clear goals, no aims other than "do the thing", and even then, some of them still objected to what they had to do. Even those who persisted felt stressed or nauseous afterwards, while the architects of the Final Solution were very aware what they were doing, and what they hoped to accomplish, and had years to reflect on what they did, rather than the hour the subjects were permitted. If anything, Milgram proved that humans wouldn't willingly torture a human subject; they'd have to be cajoled into it.

V for Vendetta creates visual and thematic parallels to the Holocaust: mounds of bodies are seen outside the "resettlement camps", the subjects are all minorities and political prisoners, and, well, Norsefire itself. This "people will do whatever authority tells them to do" belief that the film is clearly shooting for is a bunch of Nihilism Lite bullshit I'd expect from the high school notebook of an angry Marilyn Manson fan. For all the many faults of the Matrix sequels, Reloaded at least got the audience to think about how unreliable belief systems can be. Even if everyone involved with the plan had no moral quandaries whatsoever, we're still left with a bunch of cartoon villains right out of fucking Captain Planet. The Wachowskis make a habit of uncomplicated Manichean conflicts in their work, with brave rebels standing up to The System. Speed Racer had its lead fighting against a decades-long system of corporate race fixing. Cloud Atlas had several of these stories: Sonmi~451 in Neo-Seoul, Timothy Cavendish in Aurora House, Adam Ewing and his wife in pre-Civil War America (his father-in-law opposes their decision to become abolitionists, saying "there's an order to things"). The Matrix movies even had it in its most literal form with the System being actual machines trapping humanity in a neverending saga. This has its place in those films, but V for Vendetta is more complicated a source material than that, so the clear-cut moral dichotomy just seems naïve and, worse, reductive.

What Creedy does in his spare time. He also drinks wine made from the blood of puppies. ADORABLE PUPPIES.

Despite my frustrations and these glaring flaws I've raised, don't think that the V for Vendetta film isn't worth your time. It's well-shot, there's clearly a lot of love for the comic there (jingoistic TV show Storm Saxon makes a background appearance), and the set design looks great - all throwbacks to 1950's England with posters for both Prothero's Voice of London program and Gordon Dietrich's (Stephen Fry) vaudeville comedy in that art deco-ish look. Even the font of the slogans and underneath the cameras seems authentic - probably because if you live around London, you've undoubtedly seen these about, on buses, trains, the Underground, and on government adverts. Portman's English accent ranges from South London to South Africa, mostly settling on RP, but she's still sympathetic and likeable as V's erstwhile protegé; and while the villains are evil stereotypes, they're well-acted stereotypes, Hurt giving the right mix of bluster and righteous thunder as Sutler, and Pigott-Smith cutting a sinister figure throughout. Roger Allam in particular should be singled out for how utterly smug and detestable he makes Prothero, despite having little screen time and being depicted mostly as a talking head. I wish Stephen Rea had more to do as Inspector Finch; he's Javert to V's Valjean, who works within a corrupt system to do all he can to help, but take him out of the film and you wouldn't even notice he's there, other than as someone for V to blab out the plot to.

V himself is suitably theatrical, blowing up the Old Bailey to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, quoting Macbeth as he enacts his vendetta, and of course the V speech. On paper, this comes across as pretentious and smug, like the Wachowskis were showing off their vocabulary. Combined with Weaving's charismatic baritone, however, it has its own pleasing rhythm when spoken. The film captures his look so perfectly as to be instantly iconic - a devil in black raiment with a ghoulish porcelain smile and silver daggers at his side, introduced standing in the middle of a stone archway. Director James McTiegue states in the commentary he chose this because it made for a startling introduction, framing him clearly for the viewer, while also throwing him in shadow, indicating he's a darker saviour than Evey accounted for. This trait is fumbled about in the film, but it's a hell of an introduction, and one that has cemented V as something of a modern cultural cornerstone.

(Yes, this is incredibly ostentatious. It is also really really cool.)

The human element, above all, endures. Dietrich, while so completely different to how he was in the comic (a closeted gay television presenter as opposed to a low-time criminal) that it's another case of Stephen Fry playing Stephen Fry, talks about how the government has forced him to hide his true self, and how he has "become the mask". It's quiet, it's understated, but there's weight to his words, and to his conflict, and speaks to the larger theme of becoming subsumed by another identity. To say nothing of how heart-rending Valerie's story is; despite her being virtually unknown until then, her suffering is made clear, and her refusal to surrender her dignity, "the very last inch of me", really does hit as hard as it did in the comic. I am so, so glad this scene made it in.

Above all else, however, I recommend this film on the grounds that it was the first real Alan Moore work to be adapted for the screen with a considerable degree of success. Moore's works are notoriously difficult to film (the author even considering Watchmen, his magnum opus, unfilmable), being very dense and layered in such a way that requires re-reading. His comics are designed to show off what the comic medium can produce that no others can, so to capture the spirit of his work in film is a tremendous feat in and of itself. From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were so far-removed from the source material they might as well have been different films altogether, but V for Vendetta maintains some of Moore's DNA. It's a film that still raises questions in the audience's mind, that forces them to ask: "What price, freedom?" It's the rare kind of action blockbuster that dares to challenge the viewer to think, to ponder, to stimulate new thought; and if nothing else, that's most definitely worth a watch.

Cruel Summer (A dissection of 500 Days of Summer)

Oh, I'm not going to make any friends with this one. 500 Days of Summer, or Open-Brackets-500-Closed-Brackets Days of Summer to use its proper title, is something of a sacred cow amongst teenagers and young adults. It's been praised by everyone and their dog and their dog's bone for being original, engaging, witty, and having two breakout performances from Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, who have since become big names (the former appearing in two Christopher Nolan films, and the latter getting her own primetime sitcom New Girl). It is, in short, something everybody in the known universe loves and adores.

And yet, somehow, I don't.

"This is not a love story because look guys, they're not actually kissing! This is totes original!"

Don't get me wrong, OB500CBDOS isn't necessarily a bad film. On the contrary, it's very well-made. It's well-shot, has a well-selected soundtrack, Levitt and Deschanel do well with the roles they're given, and this film can boast probably the best Han Solo cameo in history. There's an excellent scene near the end that uses split-screen to depict what a character thinks will happen, and what will actually happen; again, very well done.

You'll notice I'm using "well" as an adjective a lot in that paragraph, and that's because OB500CBDOS (hey, the filmmakers decided to put their title partially in brackets for no reason, I have every right to be a dick about that) is just...well. When you ask someone how they've been, they'll go "I'm well, thank you", meaning they're just alright, nothing special. It's a handsomely put together film, it's in high spirits, ergo it's well. But that's really all I can say in its favour; the professionalism of it is its most notable feature. You could make the case there's something almost too perfect about how it's set up, right down to the soundtrack having a song from every time period of pop music to appeal to everyone, but I'll leave that to more capable hands than mine.

There are all other problems I could lay at the film's door like jury duty notices - the tweeness of Levitt's Tom having one of those "mature-beyond-her-years" little sisters that are ten-a-penny in offbeat indie comedies, the fact that arranged chronologically the plot is pretty simplistic, the confusing parody of The Seventh Seal which goes nowhere, and the fact that if you've seen Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind you can probably guess what's happening - but those aren't my biggest problems with Days.

My problem is the character of Summer Finn.

...I think I may have made her mad.

I'll admit up front that I'm not a big fan of Zooey Deschanel. I'm sure she's a lovely person, and she's pretty attractive, but I've never been in love with her like so many other people seem to be. Like Days, there's something almost too perfect about her; she plays the ukelele, she's learning circus tricks, she's named after a goddamn J.D. Salinger novel...it's like she's programmed to be the perfect adorable oddball hipster goddess. That said, her performance isn't bad, she does all she can with Summer. The problem is that Summer is not a very strong character. Even calling her a "character" feels a bit generous, she's basically an object.

There's a relatively new trope in fiction called the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl". Coined by Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club in his review of Elizabethtown, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a stunningly attractive, upbeat, "quirky" stock character/plot device (take your pick) who exists solely to teach the soulful brooding main character to stop living such an emotionless cynical life and start having fun. Note that the MPDG need not necessarily be female; what defines an MPDG is the fact they only exist solely for the main character's development, and get none of their own. See also: Natalie Portman in Garden State, Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

This almost certainly applies to Summer, who doesn't have a personality, just quirks. Quirks are there to add a bit of spice to a personality; Jayne Cobb's ridiculous hat in Firefly, Dale Cooper's love of black coffee and cherry pie in Twin Peaks, David's admiration of Peter O'Toole in Prometheus - they add to an existing base, like a spot of cinnamon on a cake. Summer is almost entirely made of quirks - her favourite Beatle is Ringo because he's nobody's favourite Beatle, she used a Belle & Sebastian lyric as a yearbook quote, she shouts "PENIS!" in public parks for no reason because zanyyyyyyy - which is sort of like having a character but not really, and is like making a cake entirely of cinnamon. And as everyone who's done the Cinnamon Challenge can tell you, that's not very tasty.

Outside of that, note how in the film Tom only gets back into his dream of being an architect after Summer encourages him to do so. I bring this up because I don't recall ever learning anything about Summer's goals and aspirations, nor do we learn anything about her inner life, her emotions, why she never wants a serious relationship. She's simply a prop that Tom uses to make himself feel better. You could argue, like the director, that this MPDG-ness is intentional; Tom's often considered an unreliable narrator, considering he sees The Graduate as a story of love conquering all, and the film may be from his perspective. Summer's deliberately one-dimensional, because that's how Tom sees her.

There's weight to that argument, but my counterargument would be "Why don't we get to see Summer's side of the story? Wouldn't seeing her emotions and her troubles make for a more balanced story? You'd also get dramatic irony as we would see things Tom wouldn't. Summer clearly has problems with romance and is a troubled individual, so why can't we see that? Why do we have to see things from Tom's eyes? I don't like Tom - he's selfish, childish, and has his own ideas of relationships that he forces onto someone without actually, y'know, talking about it with her. Is he really that much of a twat that he won't ask why she has problems with relationships?"

Indeed, there's a real undercurrent of sexism going on in Days. The eureka moment that causes Tom to fall in love with Summer because she listens to the Smiths. Not a bad starting point for a potential relationship, but the Smiths are not some obscure band few people have heard of, girls who like the Smiths aren't hard to come by, and he puts her on a pedestal over something cosmetic. If Summer had instead given him a slice of homemade chocolate cake, and he decided to pursue her romantically over that, you couldn't even hear the dialogue for all the claims of sexism. Same principle here.

The film opens with the delightful caption: "The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch." Giving the writer the benefit of the doubt that his ex wasn't named Jenny Beckman, this is still a mean, spiteful way of opening your quirky little romantic drama-comedy.

Furthermore, for all the claims that Tom is an unreliable narrator, sympathies are still with him. He never asks Summer why she doesn't want to be his girlfriend, he just assumes she will be. Summer is seen by him as the miracle cure to his life when they're together, and as a heartless bitch when they're not. This is a classic example of the "Nice Guy" complex: a guy acts kind and gentle and sweet to a woman in the hopes of romantic conquest, then angrily rails against her when she turns him down, bitching and moaning about how "WOMEN NEVER WANT NICE GUYS" like a total fucking tool.

The Nice Guy attitude is one called out time and time again, and rightfully so. But we're still expected to like Tom, because he's "cute" and "sweet" and doesn't really know how love works, and we never really know anything about Summer. In case we were left in any doubt, the film ends with the revelation that Summer - who says time and time again that she doesn't want anything serious - has gotten married to someone else, meaning she's a hypocrite. Or, more likely, she's found someone who actually treats her like a human being and not a magical fairy who will wave her wand and make your life better just like that. Worse, the last minute shows Tom hitting it off with a girl named Autumn over something they both like, with the implication that this whole song and dance will happen all over again, and Tom has learnt nothing from his relationship with Summer, because he's a moron.

When I first saw (500) Days of Summer, I really liked it, although looking back, I can't remember why. I guess I was disarmed by how charming the two main actors were, even if their characters are either idiots or complete cyphers, and the Han Solo cameo. I don't hate this film - with very rare exceptions, usually Adam Sandler-related, I never hate a film - but it's really frustrating. There's real story potential for a romantic drama about a guy who idealises love so much, he doesn't actually know who he's in love with, but the writers missed a real trick by not letting us see Summer's side. At the end of the day, all (500) Days of Summer is, is something very charming and well-made but ultimately hollow and spiteful, a cinematic sociopath.

"The thing about Manic Pixie Dream Girls...they've got soulless eyes. Wide eyes. Like a doll's eyes."

On bookmarks, favourites, and ports of call on the Internet

...Huh. It's been a while.

Haven't used this for film reviews for a few reasons: Most of them have gone to Splendid Fred, an online magazine run by students and staff of Winchester. The ones currently up are a re-edit of my Prometheus review, a look at Rock of Ages (long story short, it sucks), and a look at The Fall, a lesser-known little gem. Furthermore, there's just not a lot of films to write about. I could review The Dark Knight Rises, but at this stage it would feel like cheerleading, and I feel the need to sit down and rewatch it a few times before reviewing. The Man Who Fell to Earth was, and still is, on the agenda, but until I can sort out a few problems with my TV, that's on the backburner.

So there I am, browsing the web, feeling the need to dust off the cobwebs, when I notice this little blog post by a friend of mine. Then another one, talking about how much you can tell about a person based on their bookmarks. Might as well join in, and at least turn the bookmark bar tag into a thing.

1) That Guy With the Glasses.

The advent of YouTube has given rise to Internet reviewers, people who set up a camera and talk/rant about whatever little corner of pop culture they specialise in - anime, video games, music, film, and cartoons. A few years ago, Doug Walker came in playing the Nostalgia Critic, a cynical manchild with emotional problems who reviews (i.e. rants) cartoons and films from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. From there, he blossomed into an Internet celebrity, forming his own website where fellow nerds can wax lyrical about their specialist subject.

Said subjects are very diverse - along with the usual rigmarole of video games and anime (which is most of what the Internet talks about anyway), we have comic books, pop music, arthouse films, direct-to-video films, exploitation flicks, rap music...chances are there's something on the menu for you.

If you want personal picks, Todd in the Shadows is always a winner, as is Brows Held High if you feel like broadening your horizons some. The site is also in the middle of their third feature length web film (yes, THIRD) To Boldly Flee; earlier efforts, Kickassia and Suburban Knights, are well worth your time.

2) Topless Robot.

This is better than you think it sounds, honest. I'm a disciple of Cracked and Something Awful, so my sense of humour veers toward the dry and scathing, and as nerd blogs go, they don't come much more dry and scathing than Rob Bricken's offering. Covering nerdy interests like action figures, anime, TV shows, video games, films and anything that caters to a geeky palette, Topless Robot has gained popularity through its contests for free T-shirts that yield hilarious results...and Fan Fiction Friday, where Rob reads a horrible pornographic fan fiction and mocks it, because if he has to hurt, we all hurt too.

All joking aside, I always come here because it's a damn good laugh, and if you've been on the Internet enough to actually read fan fiction, it's always welcome to watch Rob take vengeance on it.

3) The A.V. Club.

An offshoot of satirical newspaper The Onion, The A.V. Club went from merely being the entertainment arm to its own beast; still connected to The Onion, but with its own identity. Reviewing pop culture esoterica, The A.V. Club isn't satirical, but its reviews are witty, intelligent and thoughtful, often containing extensive essays on certain films or albums. Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops column, later resurrected as My World of Flops, is a thing of beauty, particularly when he finds a lesser-know gem, and gives it much needed care and attention.

Really, what separates The A.V. Club from most, if not all, of the websites I visit is the fact that the comment section is probably one of the best on the Internet, and not just because the comments don't make me want to slash my wrists. Fans of dark and sarcastic humour, you've found a new home, or at least one that doesn't require you to pay a fee like Something Awful or is full of child porn (*coughRedditcough*). A.V. members are sharp-tongued, bitingly sarky, and wildly enthusiastic; what other community will quote classic Simpsons episodes at every passing opportunity?

Can't think of one? Then you should visit The A.V. Club.

4) Tumblr.

I have no idea why this is still on here. I joined Tumblr a while ago and gave it a shot, but I got bored and annoyed with it within a few months. Don't get me wrong, there are parts of it I liked - you do get really cool people on there, like Wil Wheaton, Kieron Gillen, Bryan Lee O'Malley and Trolling Chris Brown (because seriously, fuck Chris Brown). But those were few and far between, and I got really tired of every ten seconds of a show being turned into GIFs, the endless circlejerks in communities ("You're pretty!" "Aw shucks, no I'm not!", etc. etc.), and - the final straw - the amount of special little snowflakes infesting it.

You know the ones I mean. If you follow Tumblr dot TXT on Twitter (and if you don't, frankly, why the hell not?), there are countless displays of self-serious idiocy that get featured on there. You can't make a joke out there without someone going "Um, actually, I'm a bisexual white female otherkin who believes they're really a cat, and what you're saying is really offensive but then you're a cisgendered male how could you possibly understand and I'm going to spend 1500 words explaining why you're wrong and include the words 'male privilege' or 'cis privilege' somewhere and" FUCKING ENOUGH.

These are the sort of people who don't like it when you say 'idiot' because "DAT'S ABLEIST LANGWICH!", and I have no time for these special little snowflakes who think there's always something unique and special about them, and are utterly unable to take a joke. If you've found a community you identify with, that's cool, that's the beauty of the Internet. But for God's sake, have a sense of humour.

...Damn, that felt good.

5) Netflix.

I'd imagine most people probably have Netflix already through Facebook and its free trial for a month. For those who don't, Netflix is a subscription service that lets you stream films and TV shows on your computer for a small monthly fee. When it first launched in the UK and Ireland, the selection was decent, but still lacking; as more and more people sign up to it, though, it grows wider, and now you have stuff like Drive, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Pulp Fiction, Firefly, Misfits and countless others.

Guilty as I am saying this, I do watch stuff online that I'm not technically supposed to, but I justify this by the shows/films not being available anywhere legally/trying before I buy. Those are my excuses, I'm sticking to them, and Netflix certainly saves me the hassle of Googling for sites to stream movies on that a) don't require a plug-in and b) won't fuck up my laptop with some exotic new Trojan virus. There's a very good roster of films and TV, and the more people use it, the more stuff becomes available, meaning more people use it, and so on and so forth in a happy circle of business.

There's a reason more people use iTunes and Spotify nowdays than pirating music, although not to begrudge anyone who does; it's simply good business to have what we want on demand. Netflix is the first step on the film front, and as a film geek, I welcome that.

Aaaaand that's about all you're getting. There are a lot of bookmarks, and to go into all of them with the amount of detail I have with these is getting into overkill territory. Besides, this probably paints a better picture of me as a user. My fellow bloggers, what do you have bookmarked?

The bookmark tag will be a thing, whether you like it or not. Credit to Abby Harris for the idea.

Not Every Flowering Dream May Bloom (A Prometheus review)

I imagine by now that all of you interested in Prometheus probably know how it's going to go down, who will die and what the big mystery is because the promotional campaign for this pretty much tells you everything. Say what you will about The Dark Knight Rises' lacklustre marketing; at least the trailers preserved some degree of intrigue.

So don't go into Prometheus expecting to have your lid blown off by some big epoch-shattering reveal that will change how you perceive life as you know it. Also don't go into Prometheus expecting a straight-up prequel to Alien, because while it slides into the overall continuity well enough and shares some similar themes, it's a different beast and makes its own territory, for better or worse. It's in the Alien universe, in the same way that The Avengers is in the same universe as Thor and the Iron Man films, but it shouldn't be compared to Alien. It should be judged on its own terms. How does it hold up?

Well...

Poster by Ibraheem Youssef.

Loving the Alien (A rambling appreciation of Alien)

With Prometheus coming out this week, it seems now would be a good time to review where the germs of the film started, in what is definitely not a shameless attempt at ratcheting up my blog's traffic several notches. I know there are countless other reviewers out there who broke out their copies in time for a retrospective, but this doesn't apply to me. I'm not a horror film fan - I'm ridiculously easy to startle, and just a casual glance of the horror shelves at HMV reveals countless direct-to-video schlock where gore is spilt and beautiful women are disfigured.

So when I sat down to watch Alien on Blu-Ray (£6 for a new copy, no less), this really was virgin territory for me. Considering that sci-fi and horror media don't usually occupy large spaces of pop culture, the impact this film has had is impressive - it made names of Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver and arguably H.R. Giger. It birthed a truly iconic movie monster, one that would still captivate and horrify even to this day. It is the Little Film That Could - what started as a humble B-movie became one of the most influential films of all time.

Let's see if it holds up after the jump. (Warning - one of the images here may be NSFW. You'll know it when you see it.)

Normally there'd be an alternative poster, but why bother when the official poster is this damn good?

Long Live the King

This has been on my to-do pile for a while now, ever since I started covering the films leading up to Avengers. It's an issue that's been ripe for discussion in the comic book community, both because it relates directly to Marvel's big blockbuster trump card for 2012, and because it ties into the very thorny issue of comic creator rights. It's been addressed elsewhere on many other blogs and websites, but I suspect my readership (yes, all five of you) have never heard of this, so I think it's fair to bring it to your attention.

The gentleman in the middle there with the cigar is Jack Kirby. Most of you probably don't know who he is, but he was one of the most influential and innovative comic creators the industry has ever seen. He is also the man responsible, along with Stan Lee, for the Avengers.

Assembly Required (An Avengers review)

Well, it was all leading up to this, wasn't it? If you need a refresher, I've compiled a page leading to all my previous reviews here.

Poster by Matt Ferguson. Check out his deviantArt page here.

This is it. The big one. The one Marvel was building up to all this time, one that's taken five years, five films and about $1bn to pull together. Just the preparation for this has been something new for filmmaking - characters from different films interacting together in the same universe. We got glimpses of it in a few Tarantino-related projects (Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction is the brother of Mr Blonde from Reservoir Dogs), but nothing on this scale, a world where a science fiction franchise, a monster movie, a swords-and-sorcery epic and a WWII-era pulp actioner exist comfortably side-by-side.

For the flagship title of this universe, and Marvel's only dog in the fight for best summer blockbuster, Avengers needed careful guiding. After all, otherwise you've spent five films leading up to a dud, and nobody wants that - not audiences, not executives, not the studios and certainly not the fans. Marvel scored a coup by getting nerd god Joss Whedon to both write and direct, but since Whedon has only one film credit to his name, and no experience with directing big-budget blockbusters, this was still a risk. A script is only as good as its direction, and while nobody was really doubting Avengers would provide high-octane action, the Marvel Studios films had a reputation for providing good plot and characters. That's quite a juggling act, and one that couldn't afford failure.

I've no doubt that Avengers is going to kill at the box office and make enough money that Disney could potentially give all its employees a vacation for a week. But has all that time been worth it? Find out after the jump.

All Night I Want the Young American (A Captain America: The First Avenger review)

With one more day to go until Avengers Assemble reach these shores, I've been covering the Marvel Cinematic Universe film by film. Having taken down both Iron Man films, The Incredible Hulk, and Thor, that leaves just one left. Ironically enough, it's also about the First Avenger.

Poster by Tyler Stout.

If Thor was considered a hard enough sell, imagine the headaches you'd get with making a film about Captain America. For one thing, the Captain has had two failed films made about him already. The first was an amazingly cheap 1979 two-hour TV film starring human airhorn Reb Brown in the title role, which contained a grand total of one fight scene and didn't feature the title character in his Evil Knievel-esque costume for over an hour; and the second was a more ambitious 1990 affair that only saw theatrical release in the USSR (no, I'm not making that up), and had the dubious honour of the son of J. D. Salinger playing the protagonist. Both of these films depicted Captain America as ineffectual weaklings who acted downright cowardly at times - not a good start.

Even if you ignore the track record, look at the character himself. He was designed as a propaganda figure by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941, as you'd imagine any character whose first cover featured him punching out Hitler, with a ridiculous uniform that has never exactly looked good in live action, which is something of a tough sell internationally (if they'd released a Captain America film in 2005 in Britain, when about half the population hated America, it would have been torn apart). Personality-wise, like Superman, it's often difficult to write for Captain America because...what the hell can you do? He believes in freedom, truth, justice, and keeping people safe. He's ridiculously well-mannered. Physically, he's nigh-superhuman, and he's a brilliant tactician. Bit of a dull character on paper, and not one that lends itself to Hollywood's usual three-act films that demand character arcs - what one could you give to the Captain that would stick?

Somehow, director Joe Johnston (the man behind the excellent Rocketeer movie), writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and actor Chris Evans found a way to make this work. How well? Stand at attention, soldiers, we're reviewing Captain America: The First Avenger after the jump at oh-right-fucking-now hours. Fall in!

I Wanna Be Your Sledgehammer (A Thor review)

Two more days until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, meaning there are two more Marvel Cinematic Universe films to look at. We've already looked at Iron Man and its sequel, plus The Incredible Hulk, so let's press on with the fourth film in the inventory.

Poster by Olly Moss.

Marvel faced an interesting challenge with the last two films before Avengers; how can we get Thor and Captain America on the silver screen without them looking silly? Of all the superheroes to adapt to film, they had to sell a guy in LARPer gear who spoke in Shakespearian prose and swung around a magic hammer, and a soldier in propagandistic American garb with little wings on the side of his head, to audiences across the world without getting laughed out the door. Thor was also high fantasy, a genre that has never really done well critically or commercially. For every Conan or Lord of the Rings that managed to strike a chord with audiences, you had an Eragon, a Dungeons and Dragons, and several dozen Krulls or Hawk the Slayers that bombed HARD.

At the time of its release, however, Marvel once again had good fortune. Prior to Thor's release, HBO had begun airing its epic medieval fantasy saga Game of Thrones, which pushed the original book's political intrigue and scheming amoral characters to the surface, and was picking up enough praise that fantasy looked like it would have a second chance of popularity. Thor itself sweetens the pill somewhat by putting a more sci-fi bent on it - the Norse gods are in fact an alien culture whose frequent visits to Earth resulted in worship from the locals - and setting a good deal of the film in contemporary America, but it still traffics in fantasy tropes, and it still grossed nearly $450m at the international box office. What with Game of Thrones  currently storming the ratings, maybe medieval fantasy's getting a second wind in pop culture.

Thor managed to rise to the challenge well enough, but does it still hold up on a second viewing? If ye be worthy, we're reviewing the Viking god of thunder's cinematic début after the jump.

New Coat of Paint (An Iron Man 2 review)

With three more days to go until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, that leaves three more Marvel Cinematic Universe films to review. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk are down, so let's move on to the third.

Poster by Mike Saputo.

With The Avengers finally announced and moving forward as a project following Iron Man's strong box office opening in May 2008, Marvel were really beginning to lay the foundations for the film's May 2012 release. Samuel L. Jackson signed an unprecedented nine-picture deal to play Nick Fury in any films Marvel Studios produced. Thor and Captain America went into production, with the creative teams working together to create a world where modern sci-fi, high fantasy and WW2-era adventure could comfortably coincide. And, of course, we'd get an Iron Man sequel, both to show closer ties to Avengers, and because - financially speaking - Ol' Shellhead was Marvel's cinematic golden boy.

By the time Iron Man hit the cinemas, Iron Man's reputation in the comics was dire. Following the controversial Civil War event, Tony Stark now had a reputation as a mechanised crypto-fascist, imprisoning rogue superheroes in what I can best describe as Super-Guantánamo Bay without trial. He later became Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and did such a bad job that when Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, took over in his steed, this was seen as an improvement. But then, comic fans were treated to the sight of Robert Downey Jr. playing a deadpan dry-witted Tony Stark and building revolutionary technology in caves with a box of scraps, and Matt Fraction began his run on the title, taking a similar track. Fraction's run is often celebrated, often condemned, but as a comic reader relatively new to Iron Man (apart from the animated series and its kickass intro), I'm enjoying how inventive it is.

And it is this run that influences the film reviewed today, with Fraction working as a creative consultant, for better or worse. Does it hold up to the original? Let's find out after the jump as we dust off the armour and look at Iron Man 2.

Strongest One There Is? (An Incredible Hulk review)

With four days to go until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, I've decided to review the five Marvel Cinematic Universe films leading up to it, in order of release, one day at a time. Iron Man has already been reviewed here, so let's take a look at its sister film.

Poster by Marko Manev.

Cast your minds back to 2003, and the release of Hulk. Directed by Ang Lee and starring Eric Bana as the titular meek scientist-turned-green goliath, audiences had gone in expecting a rousing blockbuster of summer fun where Hulk smash stuff, and Hulk smash stuff a lot. What they got was a sombre, cerebral, brooding exploration of a brilliant scientist still reeling years later from his abusive past, who blows off steam through his destructive monstrous alter-ego. When put like that, it sounds like an arthouse film. It sounds like a comic Harvey Pekar or Daniel Clowes would write, published by Vertigo as a deconstruction of the Hulk concept. You can understand why audiences felt betrayed, especially since the marketing and advertising made them think they were getting just another dumb action flick.

Hulk was not a financial success, but it did brisk enough business to warrant a continuation of the franchise. Marvel Studios were in charge of producing the next film, which was a reboot, but one that picked up from where the original left off. They hired Louis Letterier, best known for directing Jason Statham vehicle The Transporter, to make it a more traditional "Hulk smash" affair, adhering close to the TV show and Bruce Jones' run on the character. Edward Norton signed on to play Bruce Banner, and ended up rewriting Zak Penn's script significantly (though he remains uncredited for it). Most significantly, Marvel Studios got Robert Downey Jr to make a quick cameo as Tony Stark, talking about "putting a team together". They were serious about putting an Avengers film together, enough that Stark Industries, Nick Fury and SHIELD even get quick mentions.

But what of the film itself? Make sure you're firmly behind lead shielding because we're looking at The Incredible Hulk.

Fresh from the Foundary (An Iron Man review - contains spoilers)

With five days to go until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, I've decided to review the five Marvel Cinematic Universe films leading up to it, in order of release, one day at a time. For the first review, it seems only right to go back to where it all started.

Poster by Jesse Phillips.

2008 was something of a red-banner year for the superhero film, and did this in a one-two punch. The first came from Iron Man, which surprised many critics by showing the broken beating heart behind its main character's titanium-alloy shell; this was a blockbuster that focused on the story and the characters rather than the visual effects (impressive though they were), and was rewarded for it, grossing $585m worldwide. It would have been the superhero film of the year, if that other superhero film hadn't come along and blown everyone's collective brains out.

Nevertheless, Iron Man undoubtedly started the deluge. Superhero films and comic book adaptations had been a license to print money for a while now, but with 2008, they really were earning that paycheck. Plus, you had that famous after-credit scene, both laying the foundation for a larger cinematic universe that had never been attempted before, and inspiring countless jokes about eye-patched spymaster Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) turning up at the end of every film to recruit the characters for the "Avenger Initiative". Marvel have always been fortunate that their superheroes translate so well to film: X-Men, Spider-Man, the Hulk and Blade proved lucrative, whereas DC can only really boast Batman and Superman (Watchmen underperformed financially, and Green Lantern...we don't talk about Green Lantern).

With the preamble out of the way, get your arc reactors pumping as we look at Iron Man.

The SOPAid (so-pah-eye-eed)

I also do Poetry for Creative Writing, and one of the assignments was to write a satirical epic. I can't remember if there was a word limit, but that's never really bothered me. This is about the struggle against SOPA.

H+ (a short story)

My first assignment for Fictional Writing, got solid marks, reposted here for your entertainment. A speculative fiction piece about the increasing role technology plays in our world. Enjoy.

(Image not mine. Actually I'm not sure who did make it.)

Right.

I can't remember precisely how many blogs I'm on now. Probably fourth or fifth at best guess, but I have a legitimate reason for this one. The last Blogspot I created was created with an email address I no longer use, and posting there meant signing out from Gmail over and over again. It got boring, as you can imagine, so I've decided to start afresh. Again. I've made that promise more than the cretins who post "This year was soooooo shit, roll on 20XX this is my year!" every December 31st without fail.

Anyway. About me. I'm a student at the University of Winchester, located in the South West of England, studying Creative Writing and Film Studies, though I'll be dropping the latter next year. Bit disappointing, since I'm a massive cinephile, and have been a film geek since I was 11, but I wanted to do more Creative Writing, and frankly one of my Film lecturers scares me. I'd like to be a professional writer, but I'm also looking into becoming a copy-editor. There are millions who want to be writers, and those millions will need editors and guides.

I've entertained the possibility of writing for comics. Most of the money I spend on iTunes is buying comics digitally and while the industry could do with some severe tightening up, the medium itself will always endure. If you've considered getting into comics but are wary of the whole superhero thing or the decades of convoluted backstory (and frankly I don't blame you), I recommend comics published by Vertigo, Image and Icon Comics. These are creator-owned companies, where the stories are limited only by the imagination of the writers and artists. For more specific recommendations, you can't go wrong with The Sandman, Fables, American Vampire, Transmetropolitan, Y: The Last Man, Scalped, Godland and The Walking Dead (yes, as in the TV show! It's based on the comics), to name but a few.

Favourite writers? From the world of novels: Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Michael Chabon, Douglas Adams, George R. R. Martin, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Pratchett. From comics: Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore (natch), Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire, Gail Simone, Naoki Urasawa, Mark Waid, Jonathan Hickman, Brian Azzarello, Greg Rucka.

Just a few.

David Bowie is probably my favourite musician of all time, to the point where m'colleague in Creative Writing says I have a little Bowie in my head. She's not that far off, truth be told, and it's through him I've started to broaden my tastes in music. Recently I've been listening to Scott Walker, a former teen idol who became a sort of Left Bank-style Frank Sinatra and later an avant-garde composer. I grew up during the glory days of Britpop, so I prefer his 60's stuff; it sounds like actual music, for one thing. Not to dismiss his modern material, it's just not for me.

I don't really blog in the traditional sense - that is, using this as a public diary. I prefer to think of this as an online notebook, and expect less posts about me complaining about my day because Waterstone's didn't have the book I wanted, and more reviews, short stories, poems, memoirs, and anything else I have to do for my degree. Feel free to comment on these, I do appreciate constructive criticism. As a writer, I thrive off it.