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The Ninth Year: The Haunting of Swill House

A Wanker’s Literary Reaction: Fifty Shades Darker Trailer

IT’S TIME. That’s right, loyal and long-suffering readers- the Fifty Shades Darker trailer has arrived, and my oh my, have I missed having something to direct my boundless fury towards. Let’s DO THIS THING.

0:02: OH THE UNIVERSAL LOGO IS IN SHADES OF GREY DO YOU GET IT DO YOU DO YOU GE-

0:07: “I want you back”- we don’t, mate, trust me.

0:17: Ana agrees to have dinner with him, but only because she’s hungry. But…not for food? If the books have taught me anything, that’s the case. Also, the smile Jamie Dornan has on his face here is the exact face the kid in We Need to Talk About Kevin makes when he shits himself to piss off his mother. The. Exact. Face.

0:24: Ana pays the bill, and Christian laughs- are they going to show the bit where he says that her paying the bill will “unman” him, or…?

0:30: “I’ve never been happier” than in this month-long relationship that has already been through a break-up that left you unable to eat for a week. Finally, something for women to aspire to!

0:34: “Slip out”. Is that a tagline they want attached to this movie? Slip out? Because…that makes me think of that awkward moment when a guy goes in for too hearty a thrust and ends up falling out of you. Just me?

0:44: She’s taking off her underwear under the table…but there doesn’t appear to be a tablecloth to shield them from the room full of other diners? So, is everyone just politely pretending not to notice than Ana has just dumped her panties on the floor, or…?

1:00: He jams his fingers up her in an elevator because he’s classy, we know the drill. You know the director of Glengarry Glen Ross is directing this tripe? Bloody hell.

1:02: This is the pool table scene, in which he spanks her a bit in a game room because HE’S SO DARK AND DANGEROUS AND KINKY.

1:09: Ah, Jack Hyde, the man who’s really only marginally worse than Christian and the main villain of this movie. I mean, he’s not the one who literally tells her not to “overthink this” when she turns down his advances and has sex with her anyway, but Christian has…muscles, I suppose,which makes it okay?

1:18: Nah, I think the first woman who tried to save him was his mother, who adopted him when he was a traumatized young boy and coaxed him out of his shell, eventually giving him the confidence to become a successful businessman. But you know.

1:21: Ana is briefly jealous of that helicopter because Christian refers to it with female pronouns and no, I’m not joking.

1:31: Ah, Leila, my favourite character, because she tries to murder Ana and/or Christian.

1:43: Does the guy playing Jack Hyde-don’t know his name, don’t care-look like a cross between Matt Bomer and Alexander Skarsgard to anyone else? Just me?

1:47: Ooh, massage oil, that’s how you KNOW he’s filthy-minded beyond all recompense.

1:1: I am looking forward to seeing Christian’s helicopter crash. I’ll just leave the cinema then and pretend that’s the end of the trilogy.

2:00: Aye, don’t fuck her or anything, that’d be rubbish.

2:10: LOTS OF DRAMATIC LOOKING IN PRETTY DRESSES.

2:22: “If something were to happen to you, I could never forgive myself” unless I inflicted i upon you myself, of course, which I will do repeatedly over the course of this story if it’s anywhere close to it’s paperback counterpart. As ever, you can read my full takedown of Fifty Shades Darker and it’s predecessor right here on this blog– and in the meantime, we shall all wait with baited pussies over the arrival of the only thing we as women are allowed to get turned on over, apparently.

Bertolucci, Brando, and Separating the Art from the Artist

Trigger warning for graphic discussion of sexual assault and rape.

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Vikings: Season Four So Far (And What’s Yet to Come)

So, my apologies for the delay between blog posts- it was my birthday on Sunday, and, despite having very little planned, I ended up doing a lot more and seeing many more people than I had initially intended. Then I was down in London for two days, and then I had to spend quality catch-up time with the cat on my return, etc, etc.

Excuses aside, it’s time to talk about a show that I’ve been aggressively ramming down your throats for the last two years: Vikings. Yes, in case you weren’t already tired of me twatting myself silly over Travis Fimmel’s amazing lead performance as Ragnar or the show’s killer fight scenes or what have you, it’s time to talk about the second-best historical show on TV (yo, what’s up, my fellow Outlander fans?).

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Arrival Delivers Classic Sci-Fi Smarts

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends and readers! I’m not going to remotely pretend that I know anything about Thanksgiving beyond holiday episodes of the sitcoms I love, but I understand that the clue is in the name; and, therefore, I’d like to give thanks for Denis Villaneuve’s superb science-fiction movie, Arrival.

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When I review movies (as you might have noticed), it tends to be because I hate them with a passion- but just once in a while, I see a film that’s so bloody good I want to run around telling everyone about it. Arrival is one of those films.

Yeah, you’ve probably seen the trailers; it’s one of the rare intersections of genre movies and blatant Oscarbait, but that’s a crossover on the Venn diagram that I am one-hundred-percent behind. I’m a huge fan of sci-fi in all mediums and all levels of intellectualism, but I think the genre really springs from big ideas. The big writers who defined the genre-Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Maragret Atwood- used it as a method through which to look at “what-if” questions, delivering philosophy and discourse wrapped up in a cool story rich with imagination. And Arrival (based on the short story Story of Your Life by Dennis Chiang) fits into this bracket.

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There’s nothing wrong with a bit of fun, swashbuckling sci-fi silliness (Star Wars was my film of last year), but Arrival reminds us the genre is capable of much more than that. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a linguist who’s called up to help with deducing the meaning of the arrival of twelve enormous, mysterious shells all across Earth. That in and of itself is a cool idea- the focus on language and communication is fascinating and expansive, exploring some neat concepts about the way we construct language, and the sequences involving the shells (and the aliens within them) are just gorgeously put-together. Villeneuve has made a collection of weird and interesting films before this one (including the excellent Enemy, as well as Sicario)- not to mention the fact that he’ll be directing the Bladerunner sequel due out next year- and he revels in the bigger budget and striking symbolism of this story. There are a couple of truly breathtaking moments of cinema here, and Villeneuve gives them time to breathe- which, in the era of overstuffed blockbusters, is deeply satisfying. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty, too, about Amy Adams fantastic performance- hell, even Jeremy Renner, who I find quite loathsome, is very good in this.

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But, despite the aliens and sci-fi wrapping, this is a very human story. The actual tale at the heart of Arrival is so beautifully well put-together that I would be a proper twat to ruin it for you here, but trust me when I tell you that it will move you. It’s heartfelt without being cheesy, powerful without being overblown; it’s what good sci-fi should be. And, in a year of some of those worst films we’ve ever seen, it’s nice to fee like we’re ending 2016 in cinema on a strong note.

Why is The Walking Dead Shit Now?

Yeah, yeah, so I rag on The   Walking Dead a lot. Get over it, fangirl/boy. This is it: my Magnum Opus, the article I’ve had brewing in me (and no doubt written over the course of many drunken rants round at my friend Ellie’s house, sorry Ellie) since halfway through season four of this godforsaken show: why, and how, The Walking Dead became one of the biggest and most disappointing shows on television.

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How to Get Away with Shocking Character Deaths (Or, how The Walking Dead messed up)

Fuck. Me. Spoilers, so many fucking spoilers, to come.

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American Horror Story Recaps: Chapter Ten

American Horror Story has never been good at endings. Usually, they’ve got far too bloody much else going on to come up with a finale that actually satisfies and ties up all threads present in the season; even season two (which, fight me, is the best one) struggles to stick the landing after a marginally cohesive series. I guess, then, that’s where My Roanoke Nightmare differs from it’s predecessors- this week’s episode, the last of the season, is actually pretty good.

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Well, of course it helps that they’re not trying to tie up too many threads and characters in the finale- most of the cast are long dead at this point, leaving only Adina Porter’s tale to bring to a close. One of the great strengths of this season has been Adina Porter’s Lee- she took a season that started out the story of Shelby and Matt, and turned it into a twisted, moving tale of one woman’s fight to keep her daughter alive-and beyond that, in her life.

After the end of Three Days in Hell, Lee is tried twice and found not guilty of he murder of the rest of the cast of the show as well as that of her husband- and, of course, this attracts the attention of AHS’s foremost journalist, Lana Winters. Sarah Paulson picks up her finest role (again, fight me) to interview Lee, and, for once, bringing back a character from a previous season doesn’t feel like blatant, boring pandering- Lee and Lana’s stories run parallel to each other, Lana having murdered her son to protect herself while Lee offers herself for death to let her daughter live. They’re both great characters, played by superb actresses, and slot neatly into this messy last episode.

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Is it perfect? No, far from it, obviously- we jolt between the courtroom, a live TV interview, another found footage ghosthunting sequence, and finally a tense set of scenes as Lee tries to convince her daughter to leave the Roanoke house for good. It’s messy, but, like AHS at it’s peak, it’s held together by a scintillating lead performance from Adina Porter- there aren’t enough good things to say about her, honestly, and I will be genuinely shocked, considering Kathy Bates got an Emmy for playing a sentient head, if Adina Porter doesn’t scoop an armful of awards for this. AHS is at it’s most moving and strident when it writes stories about motherhood (I have an essay in the works about this that I’ll have out next week, if you’re interested), and Roanoke made a wise choice to close out on this historically strong aspect of the show.

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So, what of the season of a whole? Well, I’ll give it this: it proved that AHS isn’t afraid of trying something a bit new. This is the first season not to revolve around a haughty femme fatale, for instance, and the messing around with the stories within stories within stories was interesting even when it really, really didn’t fucking work. It’s also the most cohesive the show’s been in- well, perhaps ever, now I think about it, with each story wrapping up relatively nicely and staying well-focused in their five-episode blocks. They ended much stronger than they started, and make no mistake that I’m not forgetting how shitty the first half of the season really was. But by relying on new and/or underused actors (Andre Holland, Lily Rabe, Adina Porter), and forcing themselves out of their usual sexy-bloody-sexy horror mould, they came up with something…different. And for a show that deals with a genre as sprawling and brilliant as horror, that’s the least I can ask for.

Thanks for following me along on this adventure- I think I picked the best season I could have to recap, and I had loads of fun doing it. I hope you enjoyed it too! You can read all the recaps under the AHS recaps tag, and find more of my TV reviews in the blog directory if you just can’t get enough.

American Horror Story Recaps: Chapter Nine

So, uh, I missed last week’s recap-sorry about that. But, in my defence, I had nothing to say about the episode that I didn’t already say about the week before’s outing- Sarah Paulson was awful and hilarious, unexpected characters died, the found footage thing is way better than the first half of the season, etc. Not to mention the actual, real, much more disturbing American Horror Story happening at the moment (bet I’m the first one to make that comparison, eh?).

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Nocturnal Animals is Tom Ford’s Sophomore Slump

“Do you ever feel like your life turned into something you never intended?” sighs Amy Adams in Tom Ford’s sophomore feature, Nocturnal Animals. I can’t speak for her, but one can only hope that the dreck I saw last night wasn’t how the former fashion designer planned his movie to turn out.

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A Wanker’s Literary Reaction: Wonder Woman Trailer

What’s this? Thursday and no American Horror Story recap? Nope, we’ll all have to wait, because there’s another Wonder Woman trailer that needs my attention!

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