Alien Resurrection - Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The guy who gave us Amélie also brought us aliens with feelings and sexual desire. After a while, all movie franchises die, and when they do, it’s usally in a very bad way: Rambo was this close to fight with the Taliban for the freedom of Afghanistan….

The biggest virtue of the first three Alien movies was the idea that nature has no morals, even if it comes from the outer space: after the optimism of Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien explored the idea that aliens could be ruthless predators looking for living-nests for their offspring: pure survival instinct, nothing else. Jeunet killed that central tenet of the saga.

One big problem of Alien Resurrection is its abuse of gore. Gore is usually used a substitute for plots: if you don't know how to close a sequence, just show the brains of a random guy. There should be a metric regarding how many guts and brains can be shown before a movie is considered bad. Whatever the metric is, I’m sure Alien Resurrection surely surpassed it. The directors of the previous three movies were smart and creative enough to keep a right balance between horror, action, suspense, and the right amount of blood on screen.

The other problem with this movie is that it opens too many fronts that are left unexplored throughout the picture: corporate fascism; the moral dilemmas of cloning; Ripley’s ideas as a half-alien half-human; the aliens’ seemingly newly acquired rationality; outer-space piracy, among others.

In defense of Alien Resurrection, it must be said that it was one of the first movies to talk about the moral dilemmas of cloning (one more topic that is left unaddressed). The movie was released right after the announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly.

I recommend the alternate version of Alien Resurrection, which actually closes the saga (the original version has an open ending). But even then, XXX couldn’t avoid the temptation of showing his French credentials, which was totally unnecessary.

Marabou Stork Nightmares - Irvine Welsh

"A very big thanks to my family for not being the one in this book."

-Irvine Welsh, in the foreword

In its review about Marabou Stork Nightmares, The Guardian says that Irvine Welsh displays an "incendiary talent" but "doesn't yet know what to do with his terrifying fatalism." I disagree. Marabou Stork Nightmares is a book where Welshian violence actually serves a purpose. This is a book about the sexual violence cycle: the main character, Roy Strang, was abused by his uncle while he was a child, turns into a hooligan, and participates in a gang rape. At the end of the book, the reader discover herself with  mixed emotions for Strang: pity, disgust, and sometimes empathy. This book also promoted the work of Zero Tolerance, a Scottish NGO aimed to fight violence against women. Marabou Stork Nightmares is not, as The Guardian implies, senseless gore and violence: it is a howl against sexual abuse.

The fact that this book talks about sexual violence so crudely and the way British justice used to deal with it 20 years ago was also a landmark. Back in 1995, when this book was published, mainstream books didn't talk about raping. Welsh broke that taboo. And Just to give you an idea of how the so-called modern and liberal Britain thought about sexual violence against women one generation ago, I quote the following excerpt of an interrogation manual published by the British Police in 1975, also quoted in Marabou Stork Nightmares:

It should be borne in mind except in cases of a very small child, the offence of rape is extremely unlikely to have been committed against a woman who does not show signs of extreme violence. If a woman walks into a police station and complains of rape with no signs of violence she must be closely interrogated. Allow her to make a statement to a policewoman and then drive a horse and a cart through it. It is always advisable if there is any doubt of the truthfulness of her allegations to call her an outright liar... watch out for the girl who is pregnant or late getting home at night; such persons are notorious for alleging rape or indecent assault. Do not give here sympathy. If she is not lying, after the interrogator has upset her by accusing her of it, then at least the truth is verified... the good interrogator is very rarely loved by his subject." (the quotation can also be found in this e-book about rape and women credibility)

In his official website, Welsh mentions that Marabou Stork Nightmares is the book he is the most pleased with, even if it will never make it to Hollywood -a movie about this book would have to be rated XXX. From a technical perspective, this book is a monologue in three states of consciousness. Making this formula work and seem credible to the reader is very complicated. The result achieved by Welsh is superb, and it has extra points for being written in a more intelligible English than Trainspotting.

One last comment: after reading this book and Trainspotting, it is clear that Edinburgh is a shithole. Scots hope it will improve when and if the referendum on Scottish independence has more yeas than nays, but I doubt it. 

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

I've never watched the movie Trainspotting, even though most people of my generation did. I'm not in a position to make a comparison between the book and the movie, but Wikipedia does. I have heard the soundtrack (the two volumes) which I think is awesome, even if its music is not the same the book mentions. This makes complete commercial sense: the movie is oriented towards the generation that came of age in the second half of the 1990's, so people like Blur and Underworld had to be there instead of bands like Status Quo, T'Pau, or Pogues, which are constantly mentioned in the book, set in the late years of Margaret Thatcher's government (there's a mention of the poll tax). I think Iggy Pop is the only guy who is mentioned in the book and appears in the soundtrack too.

I did read, however, Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares in Spanish (I'll be reading it again in English and posting about it soon) and I thought it was one of the best of my teenage years. I wanted to read Trainspotting for a long time, but I had never found the time to do it until recently.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Two things weigh against it: first, it is written phonetically in order to make it sound "Scottish" enough. This makes the first 50 pages (out of 345) almost impossible to read, at least for a non-native English speaker. The fact that different parts of the book are narrated by different characters with different "accents" compounds this problem. For 50 pages, I thought that the main character had contracted HIV, only to realize that he had been safe and alive in London, thank goodness. Second, most of the book is written using stream-of-consciousness, the technique created (according to the Irish) or popularized (according to the rest of the World) by James Joyce. Stream-of-consciousness, no matter who created it, destroyed literature, which takes some elements of reality and simplifies it to make it digestible. By trying to replicate thoughts verbatim, stream-of-consciousness defeats that purpose.

On the other hand, the parts of this book that I was able to understand are really good: it made me cry at one point, which had not happened since I read Vargas Llosa's Aventuras de la niña mala, and it made me promise to never live in the UK, particularly Scotland. I think, though, that the book works better as a collection of short stories than as a novel given the multiplicity of narrating voices and the fact that the book is not supposed to follow a chronological order.

I guess that my recommendation is to read this book in one's native language, or spend a couple of months in Leith to realize that "ah" actually means "I" since the beginning of the book. But then, on the other hand, a translated version of Trainspotting would be like a new book. You can't really replicate a cockney accent in other language than English.

I would say that the optimal solution would be to watch the movie with subtitles, but then you would miss scenes like this one, apparently absent of the film, where a character gets a shot of heroin through his penis:

Probably the comprehension of the book is no problem at all. The book was very successful across the English-speaking countries and so was the movie across the World. From a statistic and demographic point of view, the people who are reading this blog (or any blog) have either read the book or seen the movie.

Black Mask - Daniel Lee

Originally recorded in Cantonese, Black Mask was one of Jet Li's last movies before becoming a famous Hollywood actor.  Being a Jet Li movie, one should make the usual concessions to enjoy the film: gravitation does not apply, and the hero cannot die. In addition, the viewer of Black Mask should also be ready for some discontinuities in the plot and in some odd situations, even for an action movie. For instance, characters jump to the right when they should have done it to the left after and explosion, etc.).

Black Mask is not a good movie in itself, but it has so many clichés of the American action movies that it is interesting to see the extent to which the United States' mass culture (one good cop trying to change everything on its own, for instance) is influencing China, and how some Chinese clichés (the hero leaves everything at the end of the movie to never come back) are preserved in the story.

Watch under your own risk...