DVD's & Blu-Ray's From My Collection

THE STONE TAPE (1972)



For information on this 70's TV supernatural techno-chiller scripted by 'Quatermass' writer, Nigel Kneale, see BFI, Screenonline here

And scene clip below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV5kqdOHIoo

THE KINGDOM I & II (1994 & 1997)



For information on this wierd black comedy (TV) set in a haunted hospital, written and directed by Lars Von Trier, see Wiki entry here

GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)

For information on this mainstream comedy, where a middle aged grump (Bill Murray) get's to repeat one day in his life over and over again, see allmovie by Rovi here



SILENT RUNNING (1972)

For more information on this poignant eco-science fiction movie see allmovie by Rovi here



INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

For information on David Lynch's very weird and surreal mystery shot on digital cameras see Wiki entry here



Books: Extreme Metaphors: Interviews With J.G.Ballard, 1967-2008: Edited By Simon Sellars And Dan O'Hara

Reading this excellent collection of J.G. Ballard’s interviews I was constantly reminded how off-message he is politically from my own radical left wing albeit libertarian views and how different his class background is from my own, even though he lived very nearby in Shepperton. But oddly (or not) his vision and style resonates so strongly that not only is he my favourite fiction writer but I consider him a major thinker too.

If I approach him as someone purely concerned with the psychological world of his introverted obsessed characters and their response to collapse and catastrophe or the stultifying boredom of modern society, ignoring political solutions or movements, it helps to iron out the deep discrepancies. I believe we are entering an era of crisis, collapse and catastrophe and the bubble of consumerism and affluence we used to live in the West has finally burst. (One predication that J.G. Ballard makes constantly in these interviews, that we would be living in a society of leisure and wealth in the West has proven to be wrong.) How do we grasp psychologically the strange landscapes thrown up by a disintegrating world and what personal satisfactions can we gain from it-if only in an aesthetic sense? These are the disturbing questions JGB asks in his fiction but is it possible to combine ‘inner space’ with the collective political and social project of human emancipation and hope? I really don’t know.

A very interesting review here from the philosopher John Grey (New Statesman.)

Blu-Ray From My Collection: Oldboy (2003), Directed by Park Chan-Wook



From the allmovie by Rovi website: "A harrowing, labyrinthine revenge epic that will keep viewers guessing right up to its shocking denouement, director Park Chan-wook's masterful tale of lost time and dark secrets achieves the rare feat of eliciting sympathy from the viewer before dropping in a devastating twist that is as plausible as it is affecting. As we first meet the character of Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), the drunken husband and father is sitting in a police station awaiting the arrival of his best friend to bail him out. Despite Oh Dae-su's unruly behavior in the scene, the viewer senses an inherently flawed, but ultimately good-natured character, which makes his mysterious disappearance and subsequent imprisonment in the opening moments of the film so effectively disconcerting. It is key to the film's success that the viewer identify with him, and Choi -- appearing as something of a cross between Johnny Depp in Secret Window and a blank faced Takeshi Kitano -- is able to make both his character's mental deterioration and physical transformation compellingly watchable. Though Oh Dae-su does eventually make it back into the outside world, his increasing paranoia and unquenchable thirst for answers and revenge offer a frightening look at the depths to which the human soul can sink given the right (or wrong, as it may be) conditions. His transformation is made especially convincing thanks to the inclusion of several moments of well-placed humor that is as quirky as it is low-key, providing a fleeting glimpse of the formerly carefree family man. Aesthetically, comparisons to the works of such filmmakers as David Fincher and Christopher Nolan are inevitable; though Park and cinematographer Jeong Jeong-hun 's stylish lensing was no doubt influenced by the aforementioned filmmakers, the inventive South Korean duo (with a little help from co-screenwriters Lim Jun-hyeong and Hwang Jo-yun) eventually succeed in distinguishing themselves from their Western counterparts by constantly surprising the viewer with sharp storytelling skills and fresh visuals."



DVD's From My Collection: Synecdoche, New York, Directed by Charlie Kaufman (2009)



Billed as a comedy (the smash-hit comedy of the year!) on my DVD, Synecdoche, New York is far from hilarious. It’s a cerebral fable/farce about ageing and death with surrealist touches; the sort of film you need to watch a couple of times in order to understand the labyrinthine plot. 

From allmovie by Rovi: "Kaufman has written about this kind of pain in his previous scripts; Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation each carry a heavy dose of existential angst. But the directors he's collaborated with have always found a way to make all that pain and struggle remain meaningful for the characters -- and therefore, for the audience as well. Working as a director for the first time, Kaufman tackles his main theme so unsparingly he provides barely a single concession to the viewer aside from casting brilliant actors like Hoffman, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton, and Catherine Keener. The result is a straight shot of pure undiluted Charlie Kaufman -- he makes Caden's angst and pain and helplessness and self-loathing feel agonizingly palpable from the first moment to the last. The film never condescends to Caden's emotions, and because of this, you get the sense that Kaufman is sharing his own turmoil -- and for his sake, let's hope that darkness is just a small fraction of his inner-self. In an idea that he's hinted at in his previous scripts, Synecdoche is very much about the dangers of the artist confusing art with life, and more so here than it's ever done in the past, this theme seems to insert Kaufman himself into the story. The film doesn't conjure up any of the characters as vividly as it does the idea of Kaufman, sitting behind the camera, orchestrating everything before you as a giant, tangled expression of how he feels.

The thought that Kaufman himself might be this conflicted about his own artistic gifts is disheartening -- especially because it seems like no other topic interests him as much. But by that same token, there will probably be a cult for this movie no matter what Kaufman does for the rest of his career. The emotional commitment from the director, and the film's weird, offbeat rhythms, guarantee that there will be a niche of fans who will respond strongly to it. But, looking forward for Kaufman, it doesn't seem possible he could have much more to say on the dangers of living in your own head. Synecdoche, New York is the kind of movie that only exceedingly talented filmmakers can get away with, and usually only once in a career. Charlie Kaufman is that talented, but he picked a dangerously early point to cash in his free pass."

DVD' s From My Collection: Santa Sangre, Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky (1989)



A weirdo horror pic from Mexican cinematic surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky, saturated with garish and colourful imagery. If you like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel you'll love this.

From allmovie by Rovi: "A candy-colored, blood-soaked journey into the disturbed mind of a damaged soul, Alejandro Jodorowsky's dark and surreal comeback offers a potent tale of psychological despair with striking, haunting imagery that will linger in the mind long after the viewing. It had been quite a long time since El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) thrust '60s underground cinema into collective mainstream consciousness, and Jodorowsky proves without a doubt that he still has the power to shock and move audiences as few other filmmakers can. Time has certainly not diluted Jodorowsky's ability to craft the sort of bold and fearless film made virtually extinct with the ever increasing commercialization of the film industry, and his years spent penning fantasy comics has only served to strengthen his ability to portray the kind of complex characters that make his films so compelling. As deeply troubled Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) is enslaved by his armless mother and forced into a murderous existence following his release from a sanitarium, Jodorowsky instills his protagonist with a desperate sense of fear and helplessness from which there seems little chance of escape. An alternately brutal, hallucinatory, and beautiful film, Santa Sangre is without question a polarizing effort by its very nature, though viewers willing to be seduced by Jodorowsky's alluring cinematic nightmare will find themselves surprised, enthralled, and richly rewarded with an uniquely unapologetic film that's not easily shaken off."



Blu-ray From My Collection: That Obscure Object Of Desire (1977), Directed By Luis Bunuel



DVD's From My Collection: The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), Directed By Wojciech Has



Blu-Ray From My Collection: The Trial (1962), Directed By Orson Welles



Book Review: The Drought by J.G. Ballard

In tribute to the great J.G. Ballard who died in April, I'm re-reading four of his novels: The Drought, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash and High Rise.


J.G. Ballard's eco-catastrophe novels from the 1960's are not like your average disaster novel. He's not interested in didactic warnings or setting up an apocalyptic scenario merely as backdrop to the characters lives. These novels are about drastically altered landscapes, surreal vistas, intrinsically connected to the central protagonists' inner or mental space. The Drought is composed of intensely visual, descriptive prose, used as a paintbrush to conjure beautiful but desolate geography in the readers' mind: drained lakes and dry river beds littered with rusting ships and wrecked technology and cities succumbing to encroaching dunes.

At this point the river had been dredged and widened. They passed more launches and river-craft, half-submerged under the sand-hills. Ransom stopped and let the others move on ahead. He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universes where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The unvarying light and absence of all movement made Ransom feel that he was advancing across an inner landscape where the elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without association.

The book's plot is simple. Dr Charles Ransom remains behind in a lakeside town, Hamilton, in an unspecified country as most people flee to the coast. The town succumbs to ever increasing levels of dust and sand, as the lake and the river dry up when the world-wide drought hits; the town eventually burning as religious factions fight it out. In the second part ten years have gone by and Ransom is now living a precarious life on the endless salt flats of the coast where scattered settlements cling to a barely sustained existence. The third part describes the journey back along the dried up river bed through the dune infested towns and sand inundated wreckage of civilization, in search of a possible oasis. The characters of the novel are vivid insane archetypes seemingly springing from Ransom's unconscious rather then any external reality. A minor character worth mentioning is Jonas, the leader of a strange cult formed by the fishermen of Hamilton, and his obsession with finding a 'new' river in the desolate wilderness of the lake, obviously a seed of a much later novel, The Day of Creation (1988)

The over riding symbol of The Drought is the desert, leeching away time, eroding the past and sense of the future into an endless fossilized present. Ballard draws from the surrealist painting 'Jours de Lenteur' by Yves Tanguy, hanging in Ransom's houseboat, and the painting's name is also the title of the last chapter of the novel, making explicit its connection with surrealism.
As he pondered on the real reasons for their journey, he had begun to sense its true inner compass. At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life, but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking. None the less they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the drained bed.

Postscript: Without any knowledge of J.G. Ballard or my interest in him, relatives of mine from Australia sent my brother these pictures of Lake Ballard in Western Australia and Antony Gormley's sculptures situated on this waterless salt lake. These artworks are not inspired by The Drought or Ballard and any connection is purely coincidental but I believe the unconscious resonances with the novel are uncanny.