Subservient to no one

There are many ways to tell a story, and stories can be allegorical, sure; but with the allegorical you can end up with a story that lacks internal logic. Characters might not follow any meaningful rules, instead being guided by a narrative outside of the story being told. Often they act completely out of character, and the only explanation we are given is that it is 'allegory'. This is the case with Aronofsky's mother! Allegory isn't necessarily a problem in storytelling, but if the viewer/reader is not aware of what being referenced the story can be perceived as confusing or unrealistic. If you were to watch mother! and not understand the (frankly glaringly obvious) references to Judaeo-Christian lore, the film would not make sense. You would end up with a story that is more surreal than anything else, something nonsensical in which the characters don't react to the events that have come before, who don't learn, who don't develop. Jennifer Lawrence plays

According to Stephen King, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers”, but The Running Man is a book that would have vastly benefited from some careful planning. This novel feels too much like an opportunity missed, in a number of ways. As the title alone suggests, what you’d expect to be a fast-paced, action-packed thriller is instead a wee bit plodding and pedestrian (more of a walking man). I wanted a tale in which the protagonist is attacked relentlessly from all sides, at all times: something fast and trilling and terrifying. The book is structured into one hundred sections, counting down form one hundred to zero (in fact that may be one-hundred-and-one sections in total). It’s the sort of literary device that might seem like a good idea in your head but in reality turns out to be tedious and cumbersome, and more of a hindrance than anything else. I couldn’t help thinking that much of what I was reading was mere filler to make up the numbers rather than important pl

I watched Blade Runner 2049 last night but decided to go to sleep before the end. I cannot see what there is about this film's story structure that could keep a viewer interested enough to watch the entire film. The key plot points of the film were predictable. I knew K was a replicant from the start and I knew there would be a fight between him and the other replicant, despite K averting his eyes from the other replicant. In fact, since he was there to kill the other replicant, the other replicant's only option was to try to kill K first. So K putting his gun on the table and averting his eyes makes no sense and it seems its inclusion is merely a lazy cinematic trick to create tension, nothing more. I also guessed K was the replicant who was born – or at least the film implies this up to the point I switched it off – and I was profoundly underwhelmed by this reveal. Another underwhelming feature is how drearily slow the pace of the film is, and how difficult to

Some of my worst experiences as a reader come from reading the work of best-selling authors; a banal subsistance of writers whose qualifying attributes arise from their ability to blandly appeal to a wide variety of consumers. Being mostly into the Avant-Garde, it is not surprising I find acute tedium in the realms of the best-sellers, but I do occasionally subject myself to their creative renderings out of intrigue and perhaps from a kind of self torture. Four chapters in on The Business by Iain Banks I am struck by how trite the characters are, how banal and wooden they are, how they are basically cliches ranging from posh toffs who like cars to Americans who like guns. They are like rejects from a BBC drama characters from a BBC drama; characters one has seen before, not new, original, interesting characters, just recycled archetypes: mediocre characters; the type you'd expect to find in a best-selling novel who are just bland enough (and I am assuming supposedly likea

Um, spoiler alert, I guess. Perhaps I am reading Dickens wrong. I have not (not yet) visited the Victorian era, and reading his work from the comfort of my 21 st Century poverty, I have but the faintest inkling of true Victorian poverty. Around 1/3 of the urban population lived in poverty, as told here by Angie Speaks in this excellent work house video, and there were plenty of ways the poor were subjugated and systematically punished. So when one reads Dickens, I think one must remind oneself that Dickens lived in a world where poverty, death and sickness were commonplace, and not merely things transmitted to people's homes via the safe distance of mass medium communications. The prose at the beginning of A Christmas Carol describes Scrooge much like a pantomime villain, and despite this, I think one should acknowledge the severity of Scrooge's selfishness. Those opening words are not dissimilar to that of a fairytale, but like a fairytale, the story comes from a w

If I was a twelve-year-old boy I think I'd probably rank Deadpool as one of my top ten favourite films ever. It is a film clearly written by a teenage boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen: how else can one explain the plethora of nob-gags and wank jokes?   This fixation on the penis is hardly homo-eroticism however, despite the constant jokes on ejaculation and anal penetration, although Deadpool himself in his pre-super-power days is decidedly camp and it appears to me this story is really a tale of him concealing his true gay self by fooling himself of his straightness by fixating on a woman. The film is certainly watchable. The characters are reasonably likeable and the film moves at a swift pace so that the easily-duped cannot reflect for a moment to realise the story is meagre and simplistic. The story basically goes: Deadpool gets super powers, he wants revenge on the guy who gave him super powers, he nearly succeeds but doesn't, then the bad guy kidnaps his love in