I’ve always liked Derren Brown. I remember seeing him years ago performing card hustles and (by his own standards) simple mind-reading tricks on chat shows and naff entertainment programmes which barely lasted a series. After that I watched with interest as his star moved firmly towards the ascendent. His series Mind Control and then Tricks Of The Mind were a consistently fascinating mixture of sleight of hand, NLP, suggestion and showmanship. I loved the way he put one and frequently two over on members of the public and, pleasingly, po-faced celebrities. Around that time I saw him perform live in The Waterfront, Belfast, and was bamboozled by the range and scale of mental and physical stunts he pulled off so effortlessly. The show’s denouement involved a lengthy and convoluted routine  which involved making the entire audience think of a specific word. Just before the word was revealed I whispered “Symposium” under my breath. Sure enough, “Symposium” was the magic word. My brain reverberated like a boiled ham in a pot as Derren tore open a brown envelope which had been visible in an upstanding  clasp all evening to display the word written on a very long piece of paper. The auditorium rumbled with a collective intake of breath. My eyeballs juddered in their sockets and, a slight feeling of nausea notwithstanding, I was pretty astounded by what I had just witnessed and experienced. I felt like one of those mopes Derren diddled in Tricks Of The Mind: amazed at Derren’s audacity, envious of his ability and slightly irked that I possessed no such abilities.

Well done, Derren said. We’ve managed to transfer a word telepathically.  This, of course, was not the case, and after the applause subsided and the curtain came down Derren returned to the stage to explain how it was done. This has always been a key element of Derren’s act: the debunking of the fraudulent side of so-called “magic”. Derren tells you upfront that he has no supernatural or psychic abilities and he baulks at the idea that anybody does. Of course, this is another distraction technique, a means of making you feel at ease, an accomplice in his schemes, when he is in actuality tricking you in a different way. The verbal equivalent of asking to admire your watch while he is picking your pocket with the other hand. Nonetheless, I have always been intrigued by this  element of Derren’s performance. It is the same reason that I loved Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige: the combination of finding out how tricks were done coupled with the suspicion that there was something sinister or even supernatural going on at the same time. It’s a powerful dynamic which appeals to the human desire to be tricked but within certain parameters. It’s the same reason we watch Horror films: we want to be scared yet at the same time need to feel safe.

As Derren’s career has progressed it seems that he has become more interested in the debunking than the performing. The latter still plays a vital aspect of his routine, a slick, funny halfway house between Victorian parlour pranks and contemporary street hustle. The debunking, however, has taken centre stage. In recent years, Derren has made documentaries and one-off specials on psychics, mediums, people who claim to commune with alien species… all of whom are quite rightly shown up to the hucksters that they are. I don’t mind that. There are a lot of very dangerous people in the world who thrive both financially and egotistically on the weaknesses of others. There is no doubt that such people should be exposed and I am glad that somebody has the nerve to do so and do it in a non-pious way. 

Interestingly, when dealing with this brand of charlatan Derren is always open about, to use his phrase, “his days as a Christian.” Obviously, as a Christian myself I find it saddening that he has lost or left behind his faith though I can understand how his logical and rational mind has led him to this point. I can appreciate that someone so clearly intelligent would wrestle with the concept of faith and acceptance of a higher entity. What I find puzzling is Derren’s unabashed advocacy of people like Richard Dawkins, a gifted scientist who may claim to expose the shortcomings of religion when in actual fact his approach is a spiteful, bilious attack on Christianity. Or, to be frank, Christians themselves, whom he dismisses as unthinking, unreasoning idiots. I can respect any difference of opinion but when it resorts to childish name-calling and character assassination one really has to challenge the validity of the argument. One of the questions I have for Dawkins and Derren is the myth that faith is by nature blind, that there is no hard “evidence” for not just the existence of God but also his nature as a benevolent, paternal Creator. If I ever had the chance to sit  with Derren with a coffee or cold beverage then this is no doubt one of the things I would love to chat about. There is the danger with his work, much as I admire it, that it suggests that all faith is harmful, that any belief which cannot be explained through a simple “scientific” argument is therefore incorrect. I am not doubting that any belief system should be tested and probed. In fact, The Bible talks specifically about the dangers of being blindly led by the nose. Yet to dismiss any faith out of hand, as Dawkins does, is nonsensical and becomes a strange form of unchallenged faith in itself.

Which leads us to Miracles For Sale, Derren’s new programme which was shown on Channel 4 last night (it’s no accident that it was broadcast on Easter Monday, but we’ll let that one slide). It was essentially an exposé of a particularly virulent brand of charlatan: faith healers who weedle an ungodly amount of money out of the sick, weak and needy. This practice is common throughout the world but is particularly endemic in the States where the power of cable television and the power of the Bible Belt combine to have maximum impact. The expansion of the Internet has also aided their cause, meaning that “healing services” can be uploaded to YouTube or streamed live so viewers can indeed see the lame walk, the deaf hear and the blind see.  These men, for they are mostly men, are claiming the miraculous power of Jesus Christ yet, as Derren pointed out, they have not provided any evidence to validate their claims. As he proceded to demonstrate throughout the show, their acts of healing were just another form of confidence trick which involved stooges, plants, in-ear microphones and the like. A shortened leg can be “healed” by slightly adjusting a slip-on shoe. A deaf person can be “cured” if they are only partially deaf to begin with. Arthritis, an ailment which afflicts several of my close relatives, can be remedied by lifting the sufferer’s leg until it hurts then easing it down again to relieve the discomfort and asking, “Has the pain subsided?”.

These are not the only weapons in the faith healer’s arsenal. Their “sermons”, for want of a more fitting word, are bolstered by the same kind of rhetorical techniques which shape any form of public speaking (pacing, pauses, rhetorical questions, pitch and timbre of voice etc.) yet in their case they are demanding money, not applause. They use music in the same manner that any traditional praise service would yet the subsequent collection amounts to thousands and thousands of dollars. Mircales, as Derren deftly pointed out, are not cheap.

There is no doubt that the people who perpetuate this perversion of Christian principles are guilty of abhorrent crimes. They are no different to those who run pyramid schemes or hoaxes or even those who walk into a bank with a shotgun and an empty sack. They are thieves and deserve to be locked up for their crimes and made to pay back everything that they have stolen and more. That aspect of the show was not in question. Derren clearly demonstrated the despicable ends these mountebanks will go to in order to achieve their goal. Pleasingly, he was very careful not to suggest that all Christian ministers are guilty of thievery and all Christian believers are guilty of being compliant sheep. In fact the show featured an epilogue with Derren speaking to camera about the intention behind the show was not to offend the faithful but to unmask faith healers as the rogues that they are along with their inverted “Prosperity Gospel” teachings.

However, for me there were several problems with Miracles For Sale. The main one was the involvement of Nathan, a member of the public who was picked out of a group of enthusiastic individuals who applied to an advert, planted by the show’s production team, to be a television presenter. Derren’s shows have always involved ordinary members of the public being taught to do extraordinary things such as predicting the outcome of a greyhound race or holding up a security truck, but here the dynamic was awkward from the beginning. Derren was going to train Nathan to be a pretend faith healer, to help him learn the same techniques and tricks that the sharp-suited, coiffured salesmen use in their daily scams. Naturally, this would involve a lot of deception and, not to put too fine a point on it, lying, something Nathan was uncomfortable with from the outset. There were moments when he was clearly distressed about telling half-truths or total falsehoods, not to the corrupt faith healers that they were targeting, but to members of their congregations, people who worked for them, people on the street and so on. Derren went to great lengths to defend this undercover approach, saying that one needed to be a hypocrite for a short while in order to expose the corruption rooted in the heart of this ministry. He contended that in this instance the ends did justify the means. However, as Nathan became more convincing in his role as slick, debonair “Pastor James” (his character has the same initials as Jesus Christ and it surely didn’t hurt that Nathan physically resembled Good News illustrations of the Son of Man) his ability to lie convincingly became equally slick and debonair. The show drew attention to this discomfiting transformation but that does not mean that it excused it.

Secondly, there was the persistent, nagging feeling that Derren was shooting fish in a barrel. The footage of  these other pastors supposedly channelling the Holy Spirit when in truth they were listening to in-ear microphones was both outlandishly amusing and pitiful. Surely anyone in their right mind can see that faith healers of this ilk are pretty unseemly individuals, though the shots of an excitable speaker condeming homosexuals appeared to have been chosen for particular effect, so I was left wondering why Derren went to such great lengths to show them up. Months of preparation and training led to a service from “Pastor James”, an evening of praise and healing. This would have been more impressive had it taken place in one of the sparkling, money-soaked arenas the head honchos use when liberating people from their money. Instead, it was performed in a decrepit-looking theatre. No flashbangs and fireworks. Just a stage and some lights and a big television screen bearing the likeness and name of the Pastor. Admittedly, the lowkey nature of the event was a knock-on effect of their decision not to employ and therefore lie to a Christian PR company in Texas but it did mean that the show ended on a muted note. There were many empty seats in the theatre and the producers evidently used tight camera shots to make it appear as if there were more people in attendance. Ironically, they might have been able to emulate the patter of the consummate faith healer but none of the professionalism. This evening involved some acts of “slaying people in the spirit”, as if to bang home Derren’s point about how unscrupulous these false prophets are, but it was closed with an odd speech from Pastor James, a carefully worded platitude advising those listening to think carefully about what they did with their money, that they should be wary of trusting anyone who purports to trade miracles for cash. I can appreciate Derren’s reasoning in including this statement. I understand that it was the final way of highlighting the corruption of faith healers still working in great numbers today. However, it fell largely flat because of both the lack of a substantial audience and, truth be told, the way that they responded. Many of them nodded and wept and prayed, just as they had done when “Pastor James” was talking about his time working as a healer in Uganda. The message was mishandled and therefore its impact was dampened.

In summary, I found the show to be a brave attempt to tackle a problem which is a justifiable cause for concern. However, it was overlong at an hour and a half and as is often the case with “religious programming” did not feature much input from genuine Christian believers. We were told that Christians were consulted about the programme but it would have benefitted from more of their thoughts. At least then Miracles For Sale would not have seemed quite so one-sided. It might have revealed something more about why exactly people attend these services, what they are seeking when they get out the wallet or chequebook and place their faith in someone who, to quote Chaucer, could not care less if their soul goes blackberrying.

As I’ve said before, I’ve played videogames for a long time. Deep down I know that this is a fairly ridiculous pursuit. I realise that it is probably a waste of time, time that could be more profitably spent doing other, more profitable things. Then again, the same could be said of any hobby, be it journaling or scrapbooking or pressing flowers or whatever. Of course, the difference is that videogames are perpetually looked upon as the black sheep of the entertainment industry. They are often held up as having a corruptive, poisonous influence on young people who play them. It is said that in the most extreme cases they incite the player to commit random acts of brutal violence. I have always struggled with this conceit. I find it difficult to believe for several reasons but the most pronounced is that videogames are monitored by the PEGI, a classification board whose job and responsibility is to safeguard young people and who are, in my opinion, much more punitive than the increasingly lenient BBFC. I was recently asked to contribute to a feature on Radio Ulster about this very issue. During the live discussion a parent phoning in expressed concern that her son, aged 12, was playing too much Call Of Duty: Black Ops. Now, considering that the game box bears a fat red 18 this raises the question of why she would allow her son access to such a title. It seems to me that this is a common problem. On one hand there is the argument that videogames are  an idle pursuit with a mental age only children could appreciate yet on the other there is the contention that they put that same group at risk. It’s a strange dichotomy and one which certainly does not make any logical sense.

I write this as a father. I am very careful about what I allow my child to see on television and hear on my music system and I am even more cautious about what videogames I play if and when they are in the room. Age ratings exist for a reason and people more knowing than me about these matters have decided them with the best of intentions. One wouldn’t allow their child to go to the cinema to see an 18 or R rated movie so why would they buy them a copy of Fallout 3: New Vegas or Mortal Kombat?

Further, it is easy to blame videogames, whatever form they may take, for all manner of societal evils. They are the perfect scapegoat for drawing attention from the real problems which plague our world. If videogames are violent then one could argue that they are a mirror, rather than a lamp, for those problems. They certainly are not, as far as I see it, the cause. That is not to say that videogames cannot be plain nasty. For example, I stopped playing Kane And Lynch: Dog Days even though I had to review it, not just because it was lazily designed but because it was so relentlessly grim and foul-mouthed.

Finally, I firmly believe that videogames can be categorised as art. The best ones and even some of the mediocre ones are made by groups of very talented writers, producers, directors, designers, illustrators, animators and voice actors. They can be immersive, emotionally affecting journeys that appeal to the gamer’s imagination as much as they do to their need for letting off steam at the end of a hectic day. I’m sure that some would baulk at this argument but then they probably have never been caught up in the open world narrative of Red Dead Redemption or been terrified by the Dead Space series.

I think about this issue quite a lot. As I find my responsibilities changing I find myself considering the media I absorb. This is partly influenced by my Christian beliefs, a faith which is certainly a work in progress but one which I find myself more concerned about honing. I think it’s important that more Christians negotiate their way through the Arts. I personally believe that it is vital for believers to express the  Biblical response to these things without resorting to the classic, stereotypical tub-thumping. The truth does not have to be doled out with a side order of hypocritical judgement.

The main reason that I am considering these issues is that I recently wrote some copy on Bulletstorm, a game which invited the wrath of the world’s more puritanical press. This is a difficult game to defend. Yes, it is juvenile. Yes, it is very violent but only within far-fetched and in reality rather silly videogame parameters. What Bulletstorm does not do, as some journalists in America tried to argue, is promote murder and rape. And again it raises the issue of exactly what an age rating is for. How can serious-minded reporters suggest that games like Bulletstorm will corrupt children when they are not designed to be played by children. If parents are either willing to break the law or do not take much of an interest in what their children are playing in their bedrooms then blame has to be placed elsewhere.

Here’s the piece…

You do a football slide along the ground, shooting a mutant grunt into the air. You unload two barrels of buckshot into his trunk, bisecting him with a thunder crack, and both parts are impaled on an overgrown cactus. The words “Torpedo”, “Topless” and “Pricked” appear onscreen like BIFFs and POWs in a comic book, accompanied by buckets of animated blood squibs and the kerching! of multiple points being racked up. This sounds pretty unpleasant when starkly described in print but in action it’s so cartoonish and wilfully far-fetched that it raises more guffaws than heckles. This is, however, a quality that the media’s self-appointed moral arbiters have missed. Bulletstorm, the latest rock-and-rolling shooter from Epic Games, the studio behind the none more macho Gears Of War franchise, has swaggered its way into a whole heap of trouble for its parade of non-stop ultraviolence and profanity. The unrelenting brutality or aforementioned “Skillshots”, most of which are rooted in obvious sexual innuendo, have invited yet more criticism upon the gaming medium, with critics again carping that it’s dangerous and downright corruptive. There are, of course, several problems with this argument. Firstly, videogames are censored and rated by boards such as the PEGI who are much more punitive than the BBFC, for example. If they brand a game’s box art with an 18 certificate it means exactly that: this is not for young eyes. If a parent permits their pre-teen child to play Call Of Duty it’s certainly not the game company’s fault. Secondly, if a title is given a high age rating then surely the consumer should be permitted to decide for themselves if they should play it or not. It’s only logical. We don’t sell cigarettes to people and then tell them that they can’t have them, regardless of how damaging they are. That’s not how free choice or free trade works. Finally, the recent brouhaha irritates because the naysayers have spent no time playing the actual game or conducting interviews with its makers. In short: doing their research. If they had done so they would know that the most salty material dissipates after thirty minutes. It then transforms into a fun and well structured score attack game which is truly no more violent than Space Invaders. Both of them involve killing aliens, though graphics have improved somewhat since 1978.

I vivdly remember the first time I saw Twin Peaks. Even though it was longer ago than I would care to consider, the impact of this odd, little show was so discombobulating that the thought of it still judders. I was at home in my parents’ house and it was around 9pm on a school night. There had been a lot of feverish talk in the press about this bizarre blend of murder mystery, soap opera and esoteric thriller which had already caused quite the stir in America and was due to do the same over here. Being a precocious young man with an eye for the unusual I knew that I had to check it out.Showtime came, I had my homework done for the night (I say that but I know that I probably hadn’t bothered doing my homework), and I was nestled into a comfy chair. Little did I know the level of weirdness which was about to slap me in the face. Had I seen any of David Lynch’s work at that point then I might have girded my loins but I was entering virgin territory here. I hadn’t previously followed any television series with any great enthusiasm or interest so was unprepared for how consuming the medium could be. It was probably the first long-running serial on which I became really hooked. This was in the days before DVD box-sets (or DVDs, for that matter) and bit-torrent so you really did have to wait until the following week if you wanted to know what happened next.

It’s been said many, many times before but Twin Peaks was really, really weird. And it got weirder and weirder as the show went on. From spirits trapped in doorknobs to a dancing, backwards gabbling dwarf to a malevolent, denim-clad demon… it’s safe to say that there was nothing else on television quite like it – and there probably hasn’t been since.

I recently wrote a piece on the show to tie in with the release of the long-delayed release of season two on DVD. The funny thing is that I hadn’t watched the programme since it originally aired but it is remarkably clear in my mind nonetheless. I can recall scenes and entire episodes without too much effort. I am not the biggest David Lynch fan. In fact, as I have grown older and perhaps more conservative in my tastes I have become less keen to watch his movies, which are for the most part incredibly unpleasant and salacious. Twin Peaks, however, was tempered by the fact that it was made for a network, so Lynch had to rein in the truly outre material.

It’s still pretty weird, mind you…

AND THEN I SEE A DARKNESS: TWENTY YEARS OF TWIN PEAKS

 It begins, as all good stories begin, with the discovery of a dead body. But from there spirals a bizarre, evil-eyed conundrum that Quincy, Ironside and not even Columbo could never unravel. The man for the job is Agent Dale Cooper, a boy scout with a Dictaphone and an eye for detail. Little does he know what kind of bloody, tarry suckhole he is getting himself into. The tall, twisted redwood which grew out of this poisoned acorn was a watermark of weird which the medium never reached again. Now that the second season of Twin Peaks has finally  been liberated on DVD, it seems fitting to pay another visit. Point your compasses to the American Northwest via the Land of Oz.

It has become one of the most iconic images in television history: a dead girl’s body, wrapped in opaque plastic like a department store gift, carefully placed on lakeside shingle, her face flecked with wet hair and sea glitter. The image is at once disturbing and oddly beautiful – corpses don’t normally appear so alluring, so artfully arranged. Her face, only slightly blue-tinged, seems at peace, liberated from whichever terrible night led up to her current state. The adroitly paced sequence of scenes which follows makes for phenomenal filmmaking. The news spreads around the eponymous town slowly, painfully, lapping from one inhabitant to another in black, oily waves. Not only is this an economical way of introducing the cast and familiarising us with the location’s geography; it’s also a humdinger of a cold open. The emotional wallop is palpable: as the event is reported with the gravitas that accompanies a dead president, we see people weeping, breaking, biting their fists, dropping the receiver. Laura Palmer – daughter, friend, girl next door – is dead.Twin Peaks, population around 50,000 if you also count the demons and ghosts, is about to be torn apart.

When Twin Peaks debuted on American screens in 1990, Time magazine proudly proclaimed that television would never be the same again – big words for a medium which makes a nice accompaniment to a sit-down and a jammy biscuit. But they were right: audiences were hooked by a premise which recalled the “Who Shot JR?” from the previous decade. The answer, revealed through diary entries, dreams and incantations, was probably not what they were expecting. It was disturbing enough that Laura Palmer, a sweetheart homecoming queen with a face and figure that could make Solomon forfeit his wisdom, was tangled up with pimps, truck drivers and drug dealers. How could they have imagined that she was being abused on a nightly basis by an evil spirit called “Bob”? Or that her soul was trapped in an alternate dimension with maroon curtains, zigzag carpets and a backwards dancing dwarf?

Darkness is never too far away inTwin Peaks. From the lumber mills and roadside diners pictured in the show’s titles to the fifties throwbacks who populate them, on the surface this appears to be a place caught out of time, a genial postcard envisioned by Walt Disney. But beneath every porch, behind every Norman Rockwell painting, inside every coffee cup, evil is lurking. There’s something not quite right about the way a ceiling fan whirrs, the way the trees bend in the ghostly breeze that comes with the gloaming. Like Silent Hill or Eerie,Indiana, this town teeters on the crumbling edge of a fantasy of anAmericathat never was and never could be. Ben Horne, the department store magnate and richest man for miles around, also runs and frequents the brothel One-Eyed Jack’s. Dr. Lawrence Jacoby might seem like a bumbling psychiatrist, but his obsession with Laura Palmer drives him to break all manner of medical codes of practice. Everyone inTwin Peakshas their nasty little secrets. Everyone has a skeleton or two in the closet – except the skeletons are real.

It isn’t surprising that this cracked pot tumbled out of the bongo brain of David Lynch, the Jimmy Cagney from Mars who previously made Blue Velvet, an equally disquieting whodunit which opened with shots of white picket fence America before panning down to fill the screen with beetles scuttling in the grass. Teaming up with Mark Frost, famous for his work on the much more straightforward Hill Street Blues, Lynch indulged himself with the ABC network’s budget. Even by his most avant-garde standards, it took extraordinary chutzpah to push the narrative boat out as far as he did – into the middle of the lake, before setting it on fire. In the second season, Twin Peaks grew even odder, involving time wormholes, Laura’s doppelganger cousin Maddy (hello, Hitchcock), and the long-awaited revelation of Bob’s true identity. The twist is a doozy which not even the psychic Log Lady could foresee, one which pulled both the audience and television to a place it had never dared venture before. The episode ranks among the most upsetting and resonant spectacles ever to have been transmitted.

It’s a shame that it was around this point that Twin Peaks began haemorrhaging viewers. Most sane people don’t like ice cream cones laced with salt, so bailed out when the show started to get too freaky when good-natured Dale Cooper – in effect a carbon copy of Lynch – lost himself in the Black and White Lodges. If it was kooky, undemanding fun they were after, they could always tune in for Northern Exposure over on CBS. The show limped to its season finale, avoiding cancellation thanks to a barrage of heavy petitioning from “Peaks Freaks”. Some questions were answered in the big screen outing Fire, Walk With Me (1992), but for many the film was much too violent and unpleasant to suffer the entire way through. In comparison with Twin Peaks on television, which took bubblegum clichés and dirtied up their bobby socks, the movie was all sour and no sweet.

For the fans, it was the bold and brave cliffhanger conclusion to the telly version which acted as both a typically leftfield sign-off and a two-fingered salute to the mainstream. The good guys don’t win the day, and part of Dale Cooper gets stuck within the Black Lodge. If you make it all the way to the end of season two, part of you will be stuck there with him. We may never see the like of Twin Peaks again.

I have been watching movies for longer than I care to remember and during that time have both enjoyed and endured the various fads foisted upon the medium. I would put the recent resurgance of 3D in the latter bracket. As far as I’m concerned, the supposedly revolutionary tech is merely a gimmick to sell tickets to substandard movies and in turn for the cinemas showing said movies to hike up the prices. Further, any 3D films I have seen, and to be fair I have not seen a whole lot, tend to look poor. The tech has a tendency to either darken the screen print or make the actors and scenery look flat, like cardboard cutouts in a shooting gallery. This is often due to the cinema not having the correct lamps to run the film in question, due largely to the expense of acquiring them. This might  explain why cinemas are so keen to whack on an extra couple of pounds / dollars to “hire” glasses to see a film you have already paid through the nose to see.

I just find the whole thing pretty unscrupulous and I haven’t yet spoken of the high probability that any given film you will see with 3D tacked on will be rubbish. Last year’s Clash Of The Titans was a case in point. Like many releases boasting that they are screened in groundbreaking three dimensions the jiggery-pokery has been added in post production. This should explain the distinct lack of visual oomph one might expect from a product they have paid extra money for – oomph Clash Of The Titans most definitely did not deliver.

Avatar, in sharp contrast, was always designed to be shot in 3D and was filmed accordingly using a clatter of very, very expensive cameras. Now, I really thought that film was deadly boring but at least it looked good. The 3D there was pretty impressive but it was nothing but bells and whistles. Icing on a very dull and bland cake. And there’s the rub. Too many directors  – or rather, ad agencies – are using 3D as a particularly blunt instrument, a mountebank tactic designed to sell people a pig in a poke. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, the wonderful Toy Story 3, which was not so much a brilliant animated film as a brilliant film by any genre’s standard, but one wonders if it really needed 3D to sell it. Or if the 3D made it any better. Personally, I doubt it.

Anyway, not that long ago I wrote a piece on this very issue. It was edited heavily before it went to print so it would make the designated wordcount (I do have a tendency to overwrite) so here is the full, unabridged version…

POLARISING VIEWERS

In 1959, as the conflict in Vietnam was gaining momentum, movie mogul William Castle released The Tingler, a fairly nondescript b-picture in which Vincent Price tangles with a spinal parasite. The gag was that several seats were packed with a buzzer which “tingled” the sitter at appropriately scary moments. Castle also planted fake nurses in the foyer stooges in the audience who would feign a fainting fit to put the willies up those sitting nearby. He called the gimmick “Percepto!” and pretty soon he would become renowned for equally hokey attention-grabbers, where auditoriums were filled with inflatable skeletons, plastic axes and “Illusion-o!” ghost viewers.

If you find yourself scoffing at such a concept, consider for a moment the recent trend of paying a premium price to don plastic glasses before you slouch into your reclining seat. Of course it is not recent at all. By the time William Castle had given ticket buyers magic coins and “punishment polls”, 3D film had already been in existence for several decades, though the technology was largely restricted to car adverts and experimental shorts. The 1950s witnessed a brief rise in popularity of Spectroscopic Photography, to use the correct term, most notably House Of Wax (1953, later to be remade with Paris Hilton doing her best impersonation of a teak sideboard), The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) and Bwana Devil (1952), an oddity about big game hunters which received a more savage mauling from the critics than from the titular lion.

The 3D phenomenon initially failed to catch on, largely due to the financial and practical specifics of screening the films, a process which required two prints and, occasionally, two projectionists. There was another flurry of interest in the 1980s, resulting in bargain basement fodder Jaws 3-D (tagline: “The third dimension is terror”), Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone, a fun if bonkers Sci-Fi romp, and Friday The 13^th Part 3. The latter epitomised the very thing that was bad about 3D movies at this stage: cue a series of convoluted scenarios which ended with objects such as an evacuated eyeball, a machete or – oh, scary – a yo-yo to be poked towards the camera. It reduced a script to a series of visual jokes, and the actors to the level of the carnies who dress up as monsters in ghost trains. It’s important to note that funfairs and amusement parks were at this point using the same screens for their roller-coasters and simulators. In 1896, the Lumiére Brothers achieved a similar effect without the use of red and cyan glasses: when the audience saw footage of an approaching train, they thought it was going to break the fourth wall and steam into the theatre.

Imagine then, the smattering of embarrassed coughs, when James Cameron declared that 3D would change the language of cinema. Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana were currently strutting and honking on 3D IMAX screens the size of space shuttles, so you can understand why people were dubious. Cameron had already proclaimed his love for stereoscopic imaging with underwater documentary Ghosts Of The Abyss (2003), but lost his shizzle altogether when it came to filming Avatar (2009). “When you see a scene in 3D, that sense of reality is supercharged,” he told Variety. “A 3D film immerses you in the scene, with a greatly enhanced sense of physical presence and participation.” Fair dos to Cameron, upon its release Avatar lived up to his promises. The plot, an amalgam of everything from Ferngully (1992) to Dances With Wolves (1990), may have been derided, but the effects were truly revolutionary and did indeed change the language of cinema. Many critics sniffed at Cameron’s hyperbolic self-aggrandising and leaden direction, but as Avatar has since bankrolled around a gazillion dollars worldwide one doubts that he is worried.

However, other academics expressed concerns about the dangerous precedent the resurgence of interest in 3D would have on the medium. Roger Ebert, a man who clearly knows his film onions, didn’t mince his words: “It’s a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience.” This might sound like sour grapes, but other accusations levelled against 3D movies are harder to refute. They have a tendency to make some viewers nauseous – a condition called “vergence accommodation conflict”. Boking, unless induced by beer and a dodgy kebab, isn’t something most folks want from a night out. Another problem relates to design and pre-production. When Cameron dreamt up the planet of Pandora in his Cerebro chamber, he always intended it to be shot in 3D and invested a huge amount of time tracking down the right cameras for the job. When studio bigwigs got wind of the runaway success of Avatar, they immediately asked for regular movies to be converted to 3D retroactively. Earlier this year, both Alice In Wonderland and Clash Of The Titans fell foul of this process, and both looked desperately flat. Compare, for example, the warmth of the physical effects, stunts and wirework used in Inception with the cold CGI you will see in most 3D movies, and you may be convinced that this supposedly revolutionary tech is not in fact the way of the future.

Further, it’s prohibitively expensive to retrofit a cinema with the right equipment, which doesn’t take into account the process of cleaning the customers’ glasses after use. Many emporiums will simply choose not to buy a sufficiently powerful lamp, which might explain why viewers find the print dark and sapped of colour. Others will slap a surcharge onto the regular price of a ticket, as Mark Kermode observed in The Guardian: “3D exists not to enhance the cinematic experience, but as a pitiful attempt to head off piracy and force audiences to watch films in overpriced multiplexes. It’s a con designed entirely to protect the bloated bank balances of buck-hungry Hollywood producers.” Thankfully, this unscrupulous practice has not been adopted by all venues. Moviehouse have chosen to absorb the cost rather than foisting it upon their client base. According to General Manager Hugh Brown, “We made a deliberate decision not to charge our customers more for tickets to a 3D film. We didn’t charge extra when we brought in surround sound, so why should we do so for 3D?” Sadly, Moviehouse seem to be in the minority. The language of cinema is now the language of cold, dirty cash. It always was, but at least people used to be subtle about it. With 3D you can really see the hand grasping towards your wallet.

In spite of what you, me or Mark Kermode says, the 3D juggernaut will carry on thundering through the multiplexes, scooping up cash as it goes. The next instalments of Saw, Harry Potter, Final Destination, Tron, Resident Evil and Jackass – skater genitalia and poop in your face – will all be marketed as 3D productions, regardless of how genuine that claim might be. It’s worth remembering that Alfred Hitchcock dabbled in 3D with Dial M For Murder (1954) but was so unimpressed by the results that he dropped it like a bag of burps. And he knew a thing or two about making movies. Innovation is not always progress.

I’m a big fan of CSI. I’ve watched it, or rather the original show set in Las Vegas and it’s two spin-offs, for around a decade. I realise that it’s silly and throwaway and immediately forgettable but that is equivalent to complaining that a pizza has no nutritional value. That’s not the reason you eat it. Sometimes you are in the mood for a steak dinner and sometimes you’re in the mood for a dirty burger, no matter what Paul Newman says. The same can be said for television: sometimes you want an intellectual workout from a rigorous, dramatic show like The Wire and sometimes you want to loaf and let a programme dripfeed your brain with visual E numbers.

CSI lands square in the latter camp. Or at least it appears to. But the more of it you watch the more you realise what a clever, skilfully crafted little show it is. Cast members may have came and went and new stars may have arrived (hello, Laurence Fishburne) but the show retains its beguiling formula of gore and whimsy. It’s one of few shows that I could happily watch all day. A couple of years ago I was asked to write a feature on the programme’s appeal. Here it is…

MURDER MOST FLORID: TEN YEARS OF CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION

Since it first launched in 2000, the Crime Scene Investigation behemoth has given birth to three separate series, been broadcast to nearly a third of the planet, and translated into most known languages. If internet speculation is to be trusted (and if it is, I sent you my credit card details six months ago, Mohammed Al-Jazarr, so your father must be out of prison by now), then the show’s popularity has exponentially multiplied the applications for university courses on forensic science. The greatest trick CSI ever pulled was convincing viewers to care less about the cool cops and manly firemen working the scene, and more about the smart but socially backwards eggheads spraying Luminol to determine blood spatter and poking a thermometer in a body’s liver. To be fair, this makes it seem that working with corpses is, well, dead boring, but every episode of CSI is rendered with the kind of crash bang wallop you would expect from loud and proud Hollywood movies about hijacked submarines and giant Komodo dragons terrorising Los Angeles. You wouldn’t get the same results with refrigerator salesmen or zoologists.

The catalyst for the amped-up dynamism of CSI is Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer mogul behind dumb-as-a-box-of-hair films like The Rock, Con Air, Pearl Harbour and, of course, that paean to male bonding, Top Gun. Each of these money-guzzling releases was based upon a basic equation: knowingly ludicrous plot + one-dimensional characters x big explosions = happy audience. It was only a matter of time before Bruckheimer turned his Rolex hand to television. The original incarnation of CSI was set in Las Vegas, a place as famous for its glitz, glamour and unending Barry Manilow residencies as it is for the desert which surrounds it: a vast, desolate landscape which is said to be filled with scores of victims, unseen reminders of an era when the city was run by the mob. The show immediately took advantage of Las Vegas’s dual nature – the self-billed “Entertainment Capital of the World” could equally be called “Murder Central”. The back alleys, parking lots, hotel suites and dressing rooms of this superficial fantasy world are rarely dry of blood and chalk outlines. The city never runs out of questionable characters soon to meet a sticky end: showgirls with skirts cut down to there and shady businessmen with bankrolls to stick into elasticated garters.

For a fledgling television programme, CSI leaped straight out the traps snarling and baring its teeth. Adhering to Bruckheimer’s applied his usual ramstam approach, the rollicking theme tune (‘Who Are You?’ by The Who) and glossy production values made this a scalpel cut above the rest of wordy but dull police procedural dramas. Three things made CSI a must watch. Firstly, it had a varied and likeable array of main and supporting characters working in the crime lab: stripper turned scientist Catherine Willows; gambling addict Warrick Brown; square-jawed Nick Stokes; damaged but tough Sara Sidle; and supervisor Gil Grissom, named for the astronaut Gus Grissom and described by actor William Petersen as “a guy who finds the world in little things”. “Gruesome” Grissom, an entomology nut for whom no situation is unworthy of a quizzical squint, is an odd kind of hero – reserved, saturnine, inclined to speak in literary quotations – but he is a hero nonetheless. The more CSI progressed, the more of Grissom’s back story was revealed, and the more likeable he became. The fact that he lacked the brawn and cocksure swagger of your average leading man made him all the more appealing.

Secondly, CSI was, believe it or not, educational. Yes, it’s mental chewing gum, but that does not mean that you can’t learn stuff at the same time. Every episode of CSI is like a barmy, hi-tech version of Cluedo – there’s a corpse or two, but the victims haven’t fallen off ladders or been beaned with a candlestick. No, nothing is ever that straightforward in Las Vegas. These poor souls have been mummified in an oil drum, turned to soup into a scalding hot shower, impaled on a hunting implement or torn apart by wolves. When the intrepid team stumble upon a body, or poke its guts about in the autopsy room, the viewer is treated to some Basil Exposition dialogue of exactly how it ended up in its current state: what exactly happens when a pea hammer impacts a cranium, or a dog’s teeth bite a shinbone, how a bullet’s path is affected by wind direction etc. This semi-scientific verbiage is complemented by fancy graphics illustrating Grissom’s explanation. It’s an arresting and economic way of explaining a lot of cumbersome detail without descending into blurbling techie jargon – and it gives you amazing facts to casually drop into conversation at parties.

Thirdly, CSI, while hokey and contrived, is fabulously gripping. Each episode crams a lot of plot into forty-five minutes – with two or three murders, you can play at guessing the killer’s identity, but most solutions are so wacky that you have more chance of netting the moon’s reflection in a puddle. As the show has accumulated higher ratings with each season, the writers have grown more daring. For evidence, check out the episode ‘Fur And Loathing’, in which a “Furries” convention is curtailed by the death of a man in a racoon suit; or ‘Who Shot Sherlock?’, structured like a classic Conan Doyle mystery; or ‘Toe Tags’, in which dead bodies try to figure out the circumstances of their own deaths.

With multiple in-jokes and references to Kurosawa, Lumet, Bowie, Hitchcock, it’s witty, self-effacing and smarter than the winner at a Mensa spelling bee. The highpoint of the ambitious “Miniature Killer” story arc from Season Seven remains a masterpiece in sustained plotting.

That said, CSI is not without its detractors. It may have come under attack for not providing a wholly accurate representation of actual forensic science work, but this is the same as complaining that Dan Brown is a fairly unreliable historian, or that Heroes gives the impression that people start spontaneous fires by frowning and wriggling their fingers mysteriously. Of greater concern for many is the show’s dependence on violent themes, which are blacker than an asphalt freeway and touch upon issues rarely mentioned in the polite company of mainstream television. There are cases involving child abuse, date rape, cannibalism, Grissom’s fascination with sadomasochism (hello, Lady Heather), snuff films, vampirism, mental disability… namely, more hot potatoes than a high street chip shop. But this accusation, when you think about it, is pretty silly. Murder is a horrible and messy business, and CSI never allows the viewer to forget that. Every victim, no matter how fanciful their death, is treated with the reverence and diligent fieldwork it deserves. And when the crime is solved and the body is tagged and bagged, it leaves you feeling with equal amounts satisfaction and sadness for the lonely cadaver sliding into the morgue.

CSI: Las Vegas was so successful that a spin-off was inevitable – and for once welcome. It’s sibling, CSI: Miami, introduced in a crossover episode with Team Grissom at the end of Season Two, initially appeared to be a lighter affair. Taking full advantage of the sky-burnt sunshine of South Florida and Bruckheimer’s trademark screen filters, the new show had a visual style which was as bright and artificial as candyfloss. If Las Vegas was whiskey and downers, Miami was amphetamines and rum. There could well be hyperbolic stories about snipers, lynching, tidal waves and shark attacks, but there could equally be sombre affairs about illegal immigration and paedophilia. Miami was daft and it knew it. Horatio Caine (David Caruso, returning to television with his tail between his legs), a forensics expert and former bomb squad officer didn’t do Grissom’s squint – he had a tic all of his own: remove sunglasses, say the feed line, put on sunglasses, say the punchline. This normally happens pre-credits, followed by another song by The Who, the yowling ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.

However, Miami soon settled down and stopped jumping about like a child after a birthday party buffet. Horatio, at first portrayed as part saint-like White Knight in an Armani suit, part Doctor Barnardo to traumatised children, was given meatier storylines which required him to do more than intoning wisdom in a hushed voice. Hispanic gangsters, drug runners and the Russian mob figure heavily, and more is disclosed about Horatio’s own chequered past – thankfully, he may not be the goody-Gucci-shoes he appears.

The torch – standard issue for all forensic scientists – was handed on to CSI: New York in another crossover episode, this time at the end of Season Two of Miami. Bleaker and more serious than its predecessor, the first instalment of New York addressed the looming issue of the Twin Tower attacks, and then grew progressively darker. The Big Apple is rotten to the core with bent cops, serial killers, suicide jumpers, sex offenders… it’s not a glowing endorsement for the city, and the good guys don’t always win, but it is entertaining.

The CSI franchise has now been running for a whisker short of a decade. In its run it has arguably become the most lucrative programme on television, though I wouldn’t like to see its budget for prosthetic corpses and syrup blood. Its reputation is such that it is able to draw renowned actors like Gary Sinise, who plays lead character Detective Mac Taylor in New York, and Laurence Fishburne, who has recently joined the cast of Las Vegas. Unusual for a business where scriptwriters desperately shoehorn in ridiculous concepts about time travel, collective amnesia and the end of the world, the thinking behind CSI remains refreshingly simple: find the evidence, convict the killer, give the family – and the audience – closure. Job done. Until next week.

Cast your eyes to the top of this blog and you should see a banner with a little red plumber bounding through a  colourful world decorated with smiling turtles, pipes and big, pastel shaded blocks. It is, as any geek will know, a cross section of screens from Super Mario Bros. 3 (the  SNES remake from the All-Stars collection of ports), widely agreed to be one of the best videogames of all time. In fact, do a random google search for a list of the greatest games (there are a lot of them out there – we are a world of compulsive listers) and you will see little Super Mario appear more than once.The praise is entirely deserved. Nintendo know a thing or two about making good games, not in a join the dots style which is applied to many modern releases, but by injecting them with an indescribable, highly addictive quality which not many other designers are able to conjure. I wouldn’t like to think about how many hours I have spent on releases from the Big N during my years of gaming, particularly anything with the words Zelda or Mario in the title.

Therefore, I was delighted to have the opportunity to write a retrospective on the Super Mario franchise when Nintendo were celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the portly plumber – though, if I am to be pernickety, it is more than that since he starred as “Jumpman” in the first Donkey Kong. I love the notion of writing about videogames, a pursuit which many will view as trivial at best, in a serious academic manner and the interesting paradoxes this approach can produce. Further, the article was illustrated by the brilliant Mark Reihill, a local artist whose work grows more and more impressive with each piece he produces. He has drawn stunning images of Thom Yorke, Nick Cave, Brad Pitt, Christopher Reeves and countless others. They are eerily lifelike but are also imbued with a strange, otherworldly quality which, as with the appeal of the Super Mario games, is hard to pin down. Mark was kind enough to give me a print of Mario and an iconic coin block, which now hangs on my dining room wall alongside a selection of art prints relating to my favourite musicians. This room has now been affectionately called “The Suicide Shrine” due to the tendency of said artists to do what that title might suggest. When I told Mark that his work is amongst such esteemed but doomed company and how this might bode for Mario he pithily responded, “It’s okay. Mario always has extra lives.” I can’t recommend Mark’s work, which you can view over here, more highly. He was just commissioned to do a picture of Jesus, something which for obvious reasons I would normally find unsettling, but on this occasion it is actually very beautiful.

Anyway, you can read the full and unabridged article on Mario, below…

 TRUE ONE-UP-MANSHIP: THE HISTORY OF SUPER MARIO 

He is one of popular culture’s most recognisable icons. His upturned moustache, Mickey Mouse gloves and sky-blue dungarees might not be up there with Lady Gaga’s get-up as far as fashion statements go, yet it can still be seen on billboards, magazine covers and screens small and large across the globe. Yet Mario does not exist: he is little more than a cluster of coloured pixels cleverly animated to wobble, twitch and caper from one platform to another. Switch off the console, set down the joypad and he ceases to be. Not that it matters: Mario might not be flesh and blood, but in the imaginations of several generations of kids and big kids he is very real indeed…

For close to thirty years Mario, with or without the “Super” prefix, has leaped, bounded and yippee-ed his way through chocolate islands and star roads right into the hearts of anyone who has put on his jumping shoes for a few minutes. The times might change, but the tubby wee plumber stays the same, still chasing after a princess who is perpetually peach-napped by an oversized turtle – we’ve all been there. One of the keys to the Super Mario Bros. franchise’s longevity is its simplicity. Whether it’s playing tennis, racing karts or racking up stats in an RPG, every gamer knows that they can pick up a Mario title and immediately know what to do and how to control the character. Gameplay is so intuitive that it feels like it has been coded into your genes. Your fingers and thumbs instinctively find the jump button and your ears prick up at the doink sound of a penny jumping out of a coin block. It’s a beautiful thing.

This simplicity helps infuse it with an appeal which cuts across age and gender boundaries. The fluffy violence of jumping on a koopa’s back to make it pop out of its shell is a far cry from the gung-ho bullishness of Gears Of War and Splinter Cell, thereby making it attractive to girl gamers turned off by the brutality of fragging random strangers. However, the urge to reach the finish flag or collect every power star on the map appeals to the pack rat in all of us, regardless of gender. I personally would not care to tally up how many hours I have been spent exploring every nook, cranny and pipe of the Mushroom Kingdom during my videogame career. Call it a compulsion, if you will. I call it fun.

Mario has become the most lucrative videogame series of all time, an impressive achievement for a character who was dreamt into existence almost by accident. In 1981 Shigeru Miyamoto, the genius designer who would later magic up Zelda and Star Fox along with revolutionary technology such as the motion-controlled Wii, was contracted to create a game to target Western audiences. The result was Donkey Kong, whose deceptively simple premise was to rescue a damsel in distress from the top of a construction site by avoiding flaming barrels and the angry stomps of a chest-beating gorilla – again, we’ve all been there. The hero, then known as “Jumpman”, soon became Mario, named after the surly landlord who rented out Nintendo of America’s warehouse, and history was made. Mario Bros. hit arcades two years later, a simple one-screen affair which appeared to take place in a New York sewer. There were no alligators though, just crabs and the trademark turtles. Oddly reminiscent of Pac-Man (1980), the game’s most notable feature was the first appearance of skinnier, dozier brother Luigi. Clad in green, he became Laurel to Mario’s Hardy, a pratfalling, wibbling numpty but none the less loveable for it.

However, Super Mario Bros. (1985) caused a paradigm shift in the gaming universe. This side-scrolling masterpiece remains the acme of taking a simple concept and rendering it expertly. Those wishing to plumb the fathoms of a dense mythology might have been disappointed, because in terms of narrative it didn’t make a puppy lick of sense. How can you explain the idea of a plumber who eats mushrooms to gain special powers to defeat his arch nemesis, the fire-breathing ectotherm Bowser? You can’t, you just have to enjoy it. Let your thumbs do the talking. Super Mario Bros., in both its arcade and home port versions, was almost infinitely replayable, littered with warp pipes, invisible bricks and other secrets. A bona fide successor to Space Invaders, it became a phenomenon in the truest sense of the word: those playing it would quickly adopt the kind of look which suggests catatonia but actually hides deep concentration.

As the sequels followed, Nintendo became increasingly adventurous, re-colouring and tweaking the template Mario fans had come to love. “All I wanted was to simply create something that may surprise the world,” said Miyamoto-san recently, and he did just that with each new iteration of the Mario brand. There are too many great games to list here, but most notable are the umpteen-selling Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), which introduced animal suits to allow the portly Italian to fly, hop and swim, or the equally well received Super Mario World (1992), which added the fruit-guzzling ultra-cute dinosaur Yoshi to the mix.

Never content to rest on his laurels – or do any actual plumbing – Mario leapt into a new dimension, quite literally, with Super Mario 64 (1996), a deeply imaginative 3D platformer where the hub-world of a fairy-tale castle branched off to multiple self-contained levels. Each of these was a richly detailed play-park of wonderment: you could jump through paintings, race penguins, swim underwater… by doing away with the flat background previously employed to conceal the limits of the map, the team created the sense that anything was possible. If you could see a platform, you could get to it. In all likelihood a star was secreted up there too. Super Mario 64 was truly revolutionary – sure, its graphics might look blocky and hazy now, but in terms of level design it’s astounding.

Since then, Mario releases have arrived as regularly as Bullet Bill missiles (we’ll ignore the aberration of the justly maligned Super Mario Bros. film, given that the Big N had nothing to do with it), each one buffed to glimmer with the Nintendo magic duster. The latest of these is the spanking new Super Mario Galaxy 2. It is predictably terrific, but that doesn’t mean that it is predictable. From the opening scene where you romp through the pages of a storybook it’s joyously apparent that Miyamoto-san and his fellow developers are far from running out of ideas. The game is constantly inventive and, to use Miyamoto-san’s word, surprising. Our little friend ping-pongs from planet to colourful planet, the screen flips between 2D and 3D, from upside down to back to front, all the while propelled by ragtime, country and swing band versions of familiar Mario tunes. The challenges are varied and there is a gallon of minigames sluiced throughout each level. These range from the casually difficult to the nightmarishly hard, but nobody understands the relationship between challenge and reward quite like Nintendo. The satisfaction of completing a run based on constantly flipping tiles is well worth the controllers you will have broken to do so. 

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the kind of game for which grown men will happily sacrifice their girlfriends and jobs, but it is just one glorious arc in an ocean of quality. No other videogame series is as consistent as Mario’s odyssey. Even the various outings for the Mario Kart label are made with real care and an attuned sense of how games work – or should work in an ideal world. We could talk about their great physics engines, but we could equally big up their innate philosophy that, regardless of how good they look or how little they lag, games should be enjoyable. Thirty years young, Mario is still as loveable as he ever was. Long may he run, jump and spin.

I recently wrote a feature on Danny Boyle’s movies to tie in with the cinematic release of 127 Hours. The article was, for reasons too convoluted and tedious to go into here, was never used. I thought that I would post it here instead. It has its faults, I know: it’s lopsided and does not have enough information on the film where the dude cuts off his arm, as it shall hereafter be known, but I was working to a tight wordcount and had quite a few films to fit in and lots of things I wanted to say. Sometimes you have to cut out material you don’t want to cut out. It’s just the way it goes. Often, it makes for a much better article.

I’ve since seen 127 Hours twice. I’m glad I saw it in the cinema first. Rarely have I been at a screening where there is such a unanimous reaction from the audience. The moment when James Franco finally does the needful was, after such an intensely paced build-up, a wave of sympathetic pain shot through the theatre. There was an audible gasp, a mass clenching of teeth and the whoosh of multiple pairs of feet being lifted off the floor. It was a special moment, one which rarely happens at the cinema, and I’m glad that I was there to experience it.

Boyle’s latest work remains a very special film. One of things which fascinates me about it is that for all its visceral power that scene is incredibly cathartic. It’s liberating. You want Ralston to escape the canyon and get back to living something resembling a regular life. Whilst on the press junket to promote the film Boyle and Franco often spoke in pseudo-spiritual terms about the film, coming close to using the phrase “born again” on several occasions. In fact, shortly after I got to speak to a group of around 150 young people about my love of cinema and my Christian faith and I cited 127 Hours as a profound example of how movies, for all their shortcomings, can contain profound messages. Maybe that is one of the best things about Boyle. His films have real heart and soul. No matter if they are set in space or on a tropical island or in a Zombie infested London they are always concerned with human experience.

So, here’s the Boyle feature, aired at last…

With eight movies and several more television dramas to his name, Danny Boyle has become one of the leading lights of the British film industry. Always coming in on budget and on time, he is widely respected as a bold, innovative director who is at home in any conceivable genre. With Boyle’s latest picture 127 Hours on general release it seemed fitting to take a look back at his career to date.

Here’s a quick challenge: how many still living, world-renowned British directors can you name? Contemporary cinema is dominated by cash-raking codswallop from American swill-merchants, yet ruddy-faced, bespectacled British filmmakers seem thinner than Ted Danson’s hair. Stephen Frears and Paul Greengrass might spring to mind. There’s also ever genial Mike Leigh, who has been honing his improvisational style for forty years. Or Ken Loach, who continues to make politically charged, socially aware dramas in his eighth decade. Buffs will pick out Scott brothers Ridley and Tony, but these days they seem content to churn out big budget, small intellect tripe in the American mould rather than plummy pictures with a distinctly British flavour. However, after you have ticked off those names you would be forgiven for running out of steam but at least you will still have a few fingers to scratch your head.

It might be take the average filmgoer a while before they think of Danny Boyle. Not because his films are bad – far, far from it – but because it’s difficult to pin down exactly what kind of director Boyle is. He may be British but his work is a long way from the jolly hockey sticks comedies and the interminable gangster subgenre which dominated multiplexes from the late 1990s onwards. Further, like the prolific Michael Winterbottom, who most recently made the joyous comedy series The Trip, Boyle has built up a body of work which disco dances between drama, social commentary, sci-fi and screwball comedy. The difference is that whereas the edgy, contentious nature of Winterbottom’s work has so far prevented him from reaching a wider audience, Boyle is able to make pictures that slot neatly into the mainstream without sacrificing their independent verve.

After earning his stripes by working on telly like Inspector Morse Boyle shot to prominence by helming Shallow Grave (1994), a savage comic thriller which fused the devious spirit of the Coens’ Blood Simple (1984) with the central plot of Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale: greed is the root of all evil. Flatmates normally fall out over crumbs in the butter tub but they rarely have to contend with a dead body and a suitcase full of equally cold cash. That might not sound like a golden barrel of laughs but Boyle and writer John Hodge took this simple set-up and built layer upon layer of paranoia and twitchy energy to make a riveting minimalist horror. Shallow Grave only seems clichéd because its dark mood and brutal Itchy and Scratchy style violence have been copied so many times since.

Any accusations of Boyle being a one trick pony were smashed out of the park with Trainspotting (1996), which pared down Irvine Welsh’s messy portmanteau narrative of drug addicts slumming around Edinburgh to reveal the grinning, gap-toothed skeleton underneath. Returning writer Hodge cut (most of) the more outré scatological moments, focusing instead on the emotional and physical trauma heroin wreaked upon Scotland during the preceding decades. Trainspotting was an unprecedented success, particularly when one considers how poorly similarly themed films such as Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had fared. Further, though Boyle dared to show both the highs and lows of addiction, the film’s message, summed up in the shots of dead babies and the doomed, tragic Tommy, was pretty clear: drugs are not a good thing.

Understandably, much of the buzz surrounding Trainspotting focused on Ewan McGregor, then a star in waiting, whose cocksure attitude and soft Scottish burr set eyelids fluttering the world over. Sadly, Boyle’s next film, A Life Less Ordinary (1997) failed to capitalise on this momentum. This pastiche of Raising Arizona (1987) and golden era road movies was, frankly, a big old mess. Pairing McGregor with the equally hot Cameron Diaz no doubt seemed like a great idea at the time, but a gonzo script involving angels, shootouts and a mobster dentist meant that this was a less than perfect romance. This might have been a contributing factor in McGregor quitting work on The Beach (2000), and his role as backpacker losing his mind in far flung Asia was passed to the more bankable Leonardo DiCaprio. Adapted from Alex Garland’s novel, this psychedelic mishmash of tree-hugging eco-love and philosophical psychobabble remains a required taste, even for Boyle’s most fervent fans.

However, The Beach had one thing working in its favour: a cracking soundtrack. Boyle has always understood the power of musical cues to affect the audience emotionally. Think, for example, of the junkies in Trainspotting pegging it full tilt down Princes Street synched to ‘Lust For Life’ or Shallow Grave’s ram-cam credits pulsing in time with Leftfield. This understanding of the evocative power of sound is exemplified by 28 Days Later (2002), Boyle’s venture into straight horror territory. Famous for giving the world fast Zombies, some two years before the Dawn Of The Dead remake tried the same trick, and for its eerie vision of an empty, post-apocalyptic London, the film is most notable for its use of sound. The rabid growls of the infected (strictly speaking, they are not Zombies at all) were bolstered by a bed of barked words like “hate” and “kill”) and the strains of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It’s the ideal metaphor for a society where one can’t escape the white noise of horns, pneumatic drills, sirens, jet engines and tannoy speakers. Curiously, 28 Days Later isn’t half as frightening with the sound turned off.

After knocking out the underrated children’s film Millions (2004), Boyle reunited with Garland for Sunshine (2007), a slice of twisted sci-fi which somehow found the middle ground between Solaris (1972) and Alien (1979). The film doesn’t disguise its ecological theme – a crew of astronauts and scientists jet into space to “reignite” the dying Sun – but this is not political tub-thumping. The result is an intense, claustrophobic yet unconventional horror which zips off on a wig-out tangent about two thirds through. The final coda, in which Cillian Murphy’s physicist disappears up his own mental vortex, is bold, baffling and brilliant.

If there is a single trope or leitmotif which connects the disparate elements of Boyle’s canon, then it is the plight of one character – the “hero” – in an unjust, uncaring world. The Oscar-snaffling Slumdog Millionaire (2008), erroneously tagged as “the feel-good film of the decade”, for example, centres on the orphaned Jamal desperately clawing his way out of the Juhu shanty towns. In 28 Days Later, Murphy’s everyman protects his surrogate family from a universe spiralling into chaos and brutality. The accompanying question is: what is this character prepared to lose? What will they sacrifice to escape from their predicament? No film asks this more pointedly than 127 Hours, the true life tale of danger-loving, self-admitted jackass Aron Ralston (James Franco). We should all know the plot, such as it is, by now: a freak hiking accident left Ralson stuck down a Utah canyon with a boulder crushing his right arm, equipped with a blunt penknife and a depleting supply of water. From this slight set-up Boyle turns what might have been an exercise in boredom into a rousing exploration of human resilience in the same vein as Into The Wild (2007) and Buried (2010). Knowing that the audience knows what’s coming, Boyle cleverly toys with audience expectations: we hear that Ralston has made a tourniquet a days before he uses it and a first attempt to sever his limb reveals that he needs to break the bones first.

However, when that scene finally arrives we have invested so much emotion in Franco’s brave, subtle performance that the reaction is one of liberation, not shock or disgust. We want Ralston to escape in the same way that we wanted Renton to kick the habit or Jamal to win the game show. These moments of joyful relief are at the heart of each of Boyle’s films. His characters might lose an arm, their mind or a loved one, but they gain so much more in return. And so do the audience.

It’s been a year since Mark Linkous, one of my favourite musicians, took his own life. At times such as those people always write what an immense talent the world has lost and how their music will always live in their hearts. These eulogies are sincere and empathetic but they often miss the fact that the deceased has left behind friends, family and loved ones who must carry on whilst shouldering the weight of questioning why such a thing had to happen. I found myself questioning this thorny issue, the same issue I had contemplated when Elliott Smith killed himself way back in 2003 and when Kurt Cobain did the same in 1994. Musicians whose work did indeed live in my heart and brought me many moments of joy and soul-searching through my school and university years.

Suicide has always been a taboo subject, particularly amongst Christians, as many believe it is an affront to God and the destruction of the gift of life he has freely given. Whilst I do not doubt that I have sympathy for those who find themselves perched on an emotional precipice staring down into the receding depths of the void. Normal, everyday people who for whatever reason have been pushed to the very end of their tether and can see no way back, out or forward. Of course I have had my own moments of doubt and melancholy but I am a long, long way from knowing how insidious such poisonous thoughts can be.

Therefore, it was with great regret that I read of the passing of Mark Linkous one year ago. As is often the case in our modern age I found out via a friend’s post on Facebook and then by trawling the music blogs I occasionally peruse. I immediately thought of the occasion I interviewed Mark over the phone. It was during the intermission at a Glen Hansard gig in Lisburn. Mark was genial throughout, even when talking openly about the darkness which continued to regularly cloud his thoughts. I have always found that the best material for interviews arise from a casual chat and that was certainly the case here. I’m not foolish enough to believe that I made a new friend that night but I was touched that a complete stranger would open his door to me, metaphorically speaking, and ask me to sit down in his favourite easy chair. Not that long after that Sparklehorse, the band that was effectively a stage and studio name for Linkous himself, played a fantastic gig in Belfast. The room, downstairs at the Empire Music Hall, was packed and the mood was buoyant. If I knew then that it would be the last time I would see the band play live I would have held onto the memory more tightly. After they finished I wanted to go and introduce myself to Mark, tell him I was the guy he had spoken to on the phone and hand over the piece I had subsequrently written about the new album, Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain. I didn’t. There’s truth in the maxim that you should never meet your heroes. You’ll always be disappointed. Maybe I should have done, if only so I would now know that I shook his hand.

Last March I was asked to write a piece on Linkous’s death and the history of the band. It was one of the toughest articles I have ever done, not only because of its emotive content but also because I wanted to strike the right balance between critical distance and personal engagement. I don’t know if I pulled it off. Anyway, here it is… 

Earlier this month, independent music suffered yet another blow with the tragic passing of Mark Linkous, the reclusive genius behind Sparklehorse. For many, the band’s name will trigger nothing but a vague rattle in the back of the mind, a twinge that you probably have heard their music but can’t recall exactly where or what it sounded like. The limited inches of copy devoted to the singer’s death signify just how well kept a secret the Virginia-born writer truly was. The understated and deeply pitiful nature of his exit stage right is at odds with the immense beauty and bountiful vitality of the work he left behind him. It’s a sad end to a life which, by all accounts, was a long slog out of the mire up towards the light. Linkous might never quite have reached it, but every sour bubble in his back catalogue is burst by a spark of pure joy.

For some, making music is as easy as breathing. Or at its most difficult, walking in a straight line without pulling a stitch. Those who are blessed with spontaneous inspiration can pluck songs or albums entire out of thin air like fruit. They arrive fully formed, chorus, middle eight and all, and the musician simply receives the music as effortlessly if they are tuning a radio to the right channel. They hear the song waltzing through the frequencies, write it down, and then take the rest of the day off. For the less fortunate, making music is a painful, messy business where every note is an uphill struggle, every bar a marathon, every verse a session of stretched limbs and splintered shins on the torture rack. For those for whom composing is an addictive blend of catharsis and masochism, writing a song is akin to pulling a wire strung with razor blades out of their throat – and not the rubber props which ersatz magicians use, but the stainless steel kind which rip your heart and lungs apart on the way out.

Mark Linkous very much fell into the latter camp. Releasing just four proper albums during his fifteen year run in the guise of Sparklehorse, he was hardly what one might call prolific, but that’s because the yawns of time between each release were blotted by darkness and crippling self-doubt. One wouldn’t like to imagine what inky-eyed, rusty-toothed demons haunted Linkous, but you can’t listen to his work without knowing that they’re there, scratching around between the notes like a tarantula in a margarine tub. Equally influenced by Tom Waits, William Blake and Daniel Johnston, the songs sound as if they are forged in Freddy Krueger’s workshop, glued together from bits of other songs, and wound onto a waterlogged reel to reel tape recorder. By turns melodic, hypnotic and frequently teetering on the cusp of chaos, they are little symphonies of broken biscuits, where one bite is so sweet it will sting your teeth, and another lemon squirt sour.

Sparklehorse first came to prominence supporting Radiohead way back in 1995, around the time the latter released The Bends and were perched on the brink of universal acclaim. To shirk critical distance for a moment and sidestep into my own history lesson, I caught the tour when it hit a tiny venue in Glasgow. Skinny, dressed entirely in black and standing like a crooked shotgun barrel, Linkous cowered at the front of the stage and sang about spirit ditches, gasoline horseys and rainmakers. The songs – pretty, fractured things – alternated between cat sneeze quiet and gamma bomb loud. Looking back, it probably wasn’t the ideal performance for a roomful of Scotsmen tweaking on Buckfast who just wanted to hear ‘Creep’. Linkous, as would soon become the norm, seemed embarrassed to be there. As awkward as a teenage boy holding a chess set at a bus stop, his vocals, brittle and reedy, were largely cloaked by a distorted microphone.

The effect, however, was mesmerising. Sparklehorse were promoting their debut Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (1995). You can imagine how much of a pain in the posterior it was writing that on the spine of a cassette tape. Some critics labelled the music therein psychedelic trip hop, others Appalachian folk slop – not that a pigeonhole really matters. The record inhabited a dark papier-mâché fairytale world where few artists have trod. Dense and mystical, the lyrics, which could well have been written in gasoline on tree bark, were filled with references to snakes, rooks, blooded hands, rusted motorcycles, acetylene torches and great keyboards made from horse’s teeth. The resultant clatter was like nothing else around at the time. In fact, Radiohead’s Phil Selway has often said that without the Sparklehorse ‘Saturday’, a lament so fragile it disappears in the mouth like rice paper, there would have been ‘No Surprises’. Such is the regard with which Linkous was viewed.

As it turned out, that tour was to be fairly disastrous. The incident has been well documented: in a London hotel room, Linkous overdosed on Valium and anti-depressants, the singer keeled backwards, trapping his legs beneath his crumpled body for fourteen hours. When he was finally discovered, and the paramedics started to work their magic, the shock to his system was so great that his heart stopped beating. Linkous was technically dead, until he was sucked back out of the plughole again, but he emerged a battered man. The incident ravaged his body, particularly his legs, which were thereafter supported with callipers. One can understand why Linkous grew bored of continually being asked about it – who wants to be perpetually reminded of their most colossal screw-ups? But it was clear to see just how great the crater it made on his heart.

Whatever black dog which was hunting Linkous grew closer with Good Morning Spider (1999), named for an actual arachnid which terrorised the smoke-shack in which he had set up his home studio. The album opens with ‘Pig’, surely the most low down dirty thing Linkous ever recorded, but the aggression was counterbalanced by gentler tracks like ‘Sunshine’ and ‘Junebug’. On ‘Saint Mary’, he gave thanks to the nurses who coaxed him back to health in the hospital of the same name, and in ‘Painbirds’ he spoke of the depression which continually pecked at his nerve endings. The one thing that tied the songs together with old, withered twine was a yearning for something that this physical world can not offer. It would be too tempting to scrutinise the back catalogue for signs that Linkous’s internal compass was pointed towards the grave, or to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the horse’s head was aimed towards eternity. There is no doubt that his words, as with those penned by Elliott Smith, Johnny Cash or whichever troubled artist you might choose, swelled with a profound and tangible sadness, the quivering and chill of this temporary life. However, to do this is to miss the other side of Linkous’s work: just because the visible side of a planet is blanketed in night does not mean that the other side is too. Many critics observed erroneously that the title of It’s A Wonderful Life (2001) was meant to be ironic. If anything, Linkous was at his most content and creative. By collaborating with Dave Fridmann, Polly Harvey, Nina Persson and Tom Waits, he unlocked parts of himself which previously remained untapped. The dissonant chime of guitars was largely usurped by the flickering thrum of a selection of keyboards, mellotrons and optigans. The jumbling, tumbling metaphors to fat babies, ocean-bound bees and, yes, horses were still present, but the prevailing mood was fitter, happier, more productive.

Sadly, the following years were not kind. After a glacial wait, during which Linkous paid the rent by producing albums for Daniel Johnston and A Camp, Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain was finally released in 2006, and co-produced by – of all people – Danger Mouse. Perhaps it was the weight of expectation, and perhaps it was the fact that several of the tracks had been released in one form or another before, but there was no denying that this reel around the fountain was disappointing and less coherent than anything Linkous had done before. It seemed that the static in his head was taking over, that the fire in his belly was dying out.

Linkous’s real swansong, however, is Dark Night Of The Soul (2009), a further joint effort with Burton and anyone who is anyone from the indie rock community. It’s a startling, richly textured piece of work, which makes it all the more tragic that Linkous never saw it released. Originally caught up in a treacly web of legal wrangling, it is due for a proper outing this summer, and serves as a testament to the man’s talent and overflowing heart.

Linkous once sang plaintively, “All I want is to be a happy man”. One can only hope that he has found his peace.

I was more than a little apprehensive about going to see Sucker Punch, the latest movie from Zack Snyder, who is white of teeth and lantern of jaw and looks every inch the American quarterback. I both enjoyed and admired his previous jawn Watchmen, not only because I read the graphic novel in my impressionable teens (and again in my jaded twenties) and loved it but also because the adaptation was so faithful. Impressively, Snyder chose not to pander to the audience, choosing instead to weave a visually stunning, narratologically complex story which played out on multiple layers. Whereas other movies, particularly those leaping from the Superhero canon, spoonfeed the audience with exposition and clunky monologues explaining backstory, motivation and so on, Watchmen was much more obtuse. It demanded that the audience keep pace with its slow and at times unwieldy plot. I respect that greatly. Here was a film which did not pander to the viewer and credited us with more than a modicum of intelligence. Not that it was short on spectacle. Some of the action, particularly the pow-wow in a high security prison, was fantastically choreographed and brutally violent.

This should explain in part why I was on edge when sitting down for the Belfast press show of Sucker Punch. I try not to take notice of advance reviews of films, mostly because they are packed full of spoilers, but in this instance I had heard nothing but bad things. Snyder’s film – and, such is the way of the press, Snyder himself – has already received a critical drubbing, the kind of venom normally reserved by movies made by at best Uwe Boll or at worst Michael Bay. This did not bode well. The sticking point for many was not, as one might expect, the throwaway, videogame inspired action scenes in Sucker Punch, which place more importance on CGI, wirework and gunplay than anything resembling a coherent story arc. Rather, it was the fact that all of the main roles (such as they are: we’ll get to that in a second) are played by women. Specifically, attractive women in their early twenties. This, predictably, has brought a wave of harsh criticism uncannily reminiscient of the reception which greeted Kick-Ass around a year ago. As in that movie, it is not a concern about the level of violence depicted but a dangerous tightrope walk between titilating and sexually immoral. We’ll get to that in good time. Before that, a brief summary of the plot.

It’s 1955. Our twenty-year-old heroine “Baby Doll” (Emily Browning, as previously seen in Lemony Snickett) is imprisoned in the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane, a less hospitable Arkham Asylum where the chief staff and their underlings do not care for bedside manner. Here, conditions are cured by lobotomies and misbehaviour is amended by a quick trip to “the closet”. So far so Girl, Interrupted but that is where the comparison ends. For reasons which we will not go into, largely because the scriptwriters don’t really go into them either, Baby Doll disappears into a parallel universe / fantasy realm / alternate reality, taking some of her inmates with her: Rocket, Sweet Pea, Amber and Blondier. The latter is played by, of all people, Vanessa Hudgens. Yes, the girl from High School Musical.

Said fantasy realm is a seedy, sub Moulin Rouge brothel run by the mob, headed up by a jumped-up kingpin whose style is half indebted to Al Pacino, half to Kid Creole. This character is an avatar for one of the orderlies from the asylum. In fact, all of the people from the asylum have other identities in the feathery, red velvet lined dancing club.

Admittedly, none of this sounds like something a grown man should be writing about. Or watching, for that matter. But then all plots sound ridiculous when you write them down. For example: a geeky high school student who becomes a maverick crime fighter after being bitten by a radioactive spider? Two little hairy people who carry a magical ring up the side of a volcano? Anything with Nicolas Cage’s name attached to it.

It only gets weirder. Baby Doll then creates further fantasy worlds inside the first one, which will no doubt lead lazy critics to say that it has a structure just like Inception. The hacks. These flights of fancy seem to come about when she dances, most often to anachronistic versions of The Smiths and The Pixies. The first world – or level, to keep the videogame analogy – features the girls fighting steampowered, clockwork German Zombies in World War 1 trenches whilst inside a giant Mecha-Robot.

If that sounds madder than a box full of wags then that’s because it is. At this point at least three people in the press screening left the cinema, shaking their heads in disbelief and mutter mutter muttering about the kind of tosh and nonsense which gets churned out these days. The action is ridiculous, the explosions, shouting and swashbuckling pushed along by the Frat Metal soundtrack booming out of the surround speakers. But then it is supposed to be ridiculous. This is all of Zack Snyder’s teenage daydreams writ large on the big screen. Later, we will see the girls gunning Halo like robots on a speeding train whilst trying to defuse a Nuke, or dogfighting a dragon in a World War II plane.

It is, as we have already established, tosh and nonsense. But it is enjoyable tosh and nonsense. Call it a guilty pleasure if you will but I couldn’t help revelling in the tosh-nonsensical nature of it all. Snyder, clearly, is having a ball, along with his cast, none of whom appear to be fighting clockwork Zombies against their will.

There is, however, a problem, namely the costumes Baby Doll and her cohorts wear for the film’s entirety. Being so in thrall to all things Manga and old school games like Final Fantasy, Sailor Moon and Dead Or Alive, Snyder has decided to dress all of the female characters in ill-fitting outfits. This might work in the world of Anime but when you put them on real people it does have a tendency to look salacious. Snyder, along with his producer missus, might carp that this is a comment on the objectification of actresses onscreen, but in reality it is simple exploitation. There is no way to defend that and I am not going to attempt to do so. The film certainly makes no apology for it.

More worrying is the amount of misogyny and sexual violence which runs through Sucker Punch. It’s not so much subtext as text: Baby Doll is locked up because she kills an innocent person whilst defending herself against her abusive father; the girls in the asylum are subjected to all kinds of degrading, leering talk and treatment where, in an odd kind of reverse sexism, all the men are portrayed to be lecherous sleazeballs who clearly were not brought up right by their mothers. Some might argue that this is reading too much into Sucker Punch but it is worth noting that this is Snyder’s third film in a row to incorporate imagery of rape. That’s more than a coincidence.

There is no arguing against the fact that these scenes leave a sour taste in the mouth, one which does not sit so well with the popcorn-flavoured fluff of the rest of the film. Even more unusual is the fact that Sucker Punch has been granted a 12A certificate. Even though the film is entirely bloodless and devoid of swearing the constant presence of implied violence makes this seem like an oversight. I am personally all for censorship and age ratings when they are handled correctly but I couldn’t help feeling that the BBFC dropped the ball in this case.

There is also the persistent feeling that a LOT has been cut out in order to receive such a lenient stamp. A little googling will tell you that this is indeed true, most notably a series of gonzo dance sequences. These will be reinstated on the Director’s Cut DVD but it will be interesting to see how Snyder and his team will handle the same material when allowed another pass at it. I sincerely hope that they remove a lot of the unnecessary leering and drooling from the Asylum’s greasy cooks and orderlies as you only really need to see that sort of thing once to get the point.

In short then, Sucker Punch is by no means another Scott Pilgrim, whose non-stop geeky references frustrated me no end and I am the biggest geek around, but it’s certainly no Watchmen or Dark Knight. I know that I enjoyed it more than I should have done but after thinking about it I don’t know if I’ll be in too much of a rush to watch it again.

Howdy!

If you’ve stumbled across this flimsy excuse for a blog , which in reality is my flimsy excuse to write about myself and my geeky interests, you have either 1. come here because I told you to do so 2. been googling for reviews of the new Dead Space game, which I will no doubt rave about in the frothiest terms imaginable 3. been looking for information on the new David Fincher movie, which I will rave about in even frothier terms and no doubt lose my dignity in the process.

Whatever your reasoning, it’s more than likely that you’ll be disappointed. This is, after all, a thinly shaded outlet for my dork-estrian activities. An outlet for my thoughts on the various media with which I find myself - as a grown adult with a responsible job, married with a little growing family – obsessed. Not dangerously obsessed, but close enough. That list would include videogames, movies, music and quality American television shows. I stipulate American because, let’s face it, British television is by and large about as enjoyable as playing KerPlunk with a dead ferret. We’ve all been there.

The other driving force in my life is my Christian faith. I’ve been a believer for the past twenty years though if I am completely honest I would have to say that my enthusiasm has burnt more brightly at some times than at others. I have never lost my belief in God nor any of the Bible’s central tenets though there have, of course, been times of great doubt and uncertainty. This affects my life and my choices in many ways but one of the issues in which I am most interested is how I should approach the media which comprises such a large part of my life. I am fascinated by the intersection of Art and Faith in so many forms and how I can interpret and analyse cinema, music and literature from this perspective. Certainly, all of the material I will blog here will not always refer to my faith but I do think it’s important to mention it upfront.

Feel free to bale out at this point but do at least hear me out or skip forward a few paragraphs when I begin wittering about Nintendo.

There is a recurring argument that Christians or people of any faith should not involve themselves with, to use a well-worn phrase, “the things of this world.” Some particularly devout believers will abstain entirely from cinema, television and so on due to the negative and corrosive images that are presented therein. I respect that wholly and over the past few years I have certainly noticed a refining of the material which I will now absorb. Perhaps it is a sign of growing older or perhaps becoming more selective or prudish but I have become more discerning of the imagery which I will permit inside my head.

However, I am also firmly of the opinion that we also have to approach the media from an academic, thoughtful stance. Too often Christians or members of other faiths are too dismissive of the media without taking the time to investigate or analyse it. The films, novels and, yes, videogames that are currently being released have many striking things to say about our contemporary world that to ignore them entirely would seem to be folly.

I’ll come back to that.

So, videogames. Yes, I play them. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not embarrassed, even when I do make the observation that, to use the perjorative, “computer games”, can be art. Yes, art. I’ll come back to that too.  

There’s not much to say here other than I’ve been wasting my time playing videogames for as long as I can remember. I’ve either bought or been gifted subsequent generations of various consoles. I was once a devout advocate of Nintendo but then I defected to the Xbox 360 and, most recently, the Playstation 3.

Further back, however, I was fairly addicted to gaming on the Spectrum. I use the oxymoron “fairly addicted” to make myself feel better about how much time I wasted watching poorly rendered pixels blip and blop around a black and white television screen. Leagues ahead of its time, Sir Clive’s home computer had a whopping 128k memory and came with an in-built tape player. This meant that pirating games was fairly easy. Sales of blank cassettes rose significantly during those years.

After that, I loved each of Nintendo platforms since the release of the lowly NES. Though, as memory serves, it did cause one of my few brushes with the law. Whilst a friend Charlie and I were visiting another friend, Lee, the latter insisted on playing Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (they were forbidden from using the word “Ninja” on this side of the pond, lest impressionable youngsters risk their lives by donning hoods and fashioning nunchucks and gyping about in sewers) for approximately four hours. He refused to let us play, saying, “Wait until the end of this level” and “In a minute” and “I’m just about fight Shredder” etc. On the way home, deeply frustrated that we were unable to mess with the heroes in their half shells, Charlie and I thought that it would be wise to terrorise one of our teachers who we knew lived nearby.

We knew this because we could see his tin box of a Lada which was parked outside his house. It was cherry red apart from a sticker which he had carefully placed over a scratch on the back wheel arch. Said sticker was three or four shades lighter than the rest of the car.

We started off by playing thunder and lightning – this, as any young japester will know – involves ringing the victim’s doorbell then running off, laughing and shouting the person’s name in all pitches and timbres of silly voices. The latter is optional but we thought we might as well go for broke.

This we did with glee and kept on doing until said teacher came out of his house and began to chase us up the road. We were on bicycles, you understand, but still he swore blind – in both senses, one involving the nature of our respective parentages, and the other outlining the interface between his walking stick and our rear ends should he catch us.

The following Monday, I had double Physics first thing in the morning. The teacher, why by now had still failed to see the funny side of two young rips throwing pebbles at his house at 11pm of an evening, gave me two sets of school rules to copy out for the next day. This I duly did but the next day he ripped them up and put them in the bin, gave me another two sets to do, a Saturday detention and a verbal promise that he was going to call my parents, the police, the headmaster and, presumably, Margaret Thatcher, to report my insolence.

I think I wrote out about 8 sets of school rules. Well, I say “wrote out” when what I mean is that I wrote out one onto a sheet of carbon paper from a book of receipts. Ha!

None of this deterred me from the evil lures of gaming. I have never again rung a teacher’s doorbell (though, ironically, I’ve now become an English teacher and am waiting for the night some rapscallions come to my door – the shotgun is loaded), but I did eventually get to play TMHT for myself.

It was woeful. An anthropromorphic turtle Samurai does not look quite as impressive when badly animated in three primary colours.

But there have been dozens and dozens of brilliant titles since then. When I’m not attempting to teach youngsters the difference between Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets or the subtle nuances of Pentameter and Tetrameter, I write for various publications extolling the delights of Fallout 3 or Bioshock or Dead Space or… well, you get the idea.

This means that I get sent games for free – yes, approximately nuppence, something which still makes my heart do a little pirouette when I rip open the jiffy bag after it plonks on my welcome mat.

I’ll be posting some of these articles here, and sharing with you – if you have not bailed out by now – my opinions on which games, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, you would like to shoot ‘em  up and which you would like to shoot ‘em down.

I’ll also be blogging about cinema, music and literature and the different ways we can approach them: the academic, the geeky and, yes, the Christian.

See you around,

Ross.