If your name’s on the list…

Kill List is the best horror film I’ve seen in ages. For plain old nastiness it was up there with The Descent, the film that reiterated why I’m not interested in caving. But more than that I cannot say, because this really is a film that is worth seeing without knowing anything very much about it.

The set-up is simple to the point of being mundane; like Mike Leigh but with more shouting. From the opening moments we’re plunged headlong into a domestic scenario. Jay is married to Shel. He’s an ex-serviceman, she’s feisty in her own way and they have a young son, Sam. Jay hasn’t worked for months, and despite having a nice home, they certainly seem to have money worries. Jay’s best friend and comrade (Gal) comes round for dinner with his new girlfriend Fiona. Dinner doesn’t go well. So far, so nothing like what follows.

Suffice also to say that Nigel Floyd, Mark Kermode and the Sound on Sight radio/podcast team (who all know a thing or two about horror/genre films) have all raved about Kill List. Be warned: it is nasty, it is filled with a creeping sense of dread and threat, it has more than a couple of moments of gruesome violence. This is not for everyone, but it blew me away. The trailer is here, but if you think you might watch the film, I’d genuinely avoid both reviews and the trailer.

From here on, there be many, many spoilers…

Eeven the bl**dy poster has a spoiler in it...

The opening sequence really does feel like a shouty TV sitcom. Jay is evidently traumatised from some previous job (in Kiev?!) and his lack of work is causing money worries, although they don’t seem like they’re on the breadline. Gal comes for dinner, and has a job offer for Jay. It seems Shel is already aware of this, and more arguments escalate. All this feels tremendously naturalistic and real, the relationships are very ‘lived-in’: the tensions in Jay & Shel’s marriage feel real, the banter between Jay and Gal is genuine, the chemistry between all three characters is terrific.

Gal & Jay (BFF?!)

Then we realise Jay and Gal have progressed from the military to private security work to contract killers. Behind the barbeque and piles of recycling in the garage, Jay has a stash of weapons. The job offer is a lucrative one, more killing. But of course, they’re good at that.

From here we leave Mike Leigh and progress into more familiar hit-man territory. Still the style is handheld, naturalistic. The relationships are well-drawn. Jay and Gal seem like professionals. It’s hard not to think of Pulp Fiction’s Jules and Vincent, but mainly in an ‘opposite’ way: the dialogue here is totally real, not mannered or stylised at all. These guys drive a family estate car, they stay in anonymous hotels. They have their list, and the first killing seems to go exactly to plan.

Except that the victim (The Priest) seems to smile at Jay just before he dies, and says “thankyou”. And suddenly we’re questioning everything that occurs. All the hints up to this point start to weigh even more heavily; Jay’s temper, his unexplained trauma in Kiev, what did Gal’s girlfriend do in the bathroom, what was that knife cut when they took the contract…?

You'll get a very different feeling about this after the end...

And then it goes downhill rather quickly. The Librarian sequence is as intense and unpleasant as anything I’ve seen on screen. Jay starts going properly off the rails. He sees a film which the audience does not, and this seems to flick a switch in him. He wants to kill people, this is more than just a name on a list. The professionalism of the first hit is forgotten as he uses a hammer to its full potential. The victim seems to know more about what’s going on than Jay does. Meanwhile, Gal has discovered that their victim has a file of photos and documents about them, even from the mythical Kiev assignment. What is going on?

The film’s final third takes an astonishing ‘left-turn’ into the occult. Almost like a much more malign version of The Wicker Man, Jay and Gal find themselves in a very, very bad place. The final scenes are as bleak and soul-crushing as any story I can think of. There’s no light, no glimmer of hope or redemption for Jay at the end. He has been duped into destroying everything and everyone that could have offered him a normal life, he has unravelled his self and revealed a very dark heart, but he almost seems to have accepted this willingly, and possibly even enjoyed it.

Kill List is by no means perfect. It deliberately leaves plot twists unexplained, there are MacGuffins galore, and I know that many people will find that infuriating. Jay’s downfall is complete, but what part did Gal or Shel play in it? What was that symbol Fiona scratched on the back of the mirror all about? What was that scene with the weird doctor?! The Director’s commentary on the DVD gives precious little away, as though Ben Wheatley wants to keep the different possibilities open for interpretation.

I don’t believe it’s sloppy film-making, quite the reverse. Kill List is an exercise in tone and mood. The oppressive dread and threat that builds from the early moments is inescapable. We witness the destruction of a man who seems almost complicit in this process by the end. We are afraid of what might happen next, as there seem to be no limits to the violence, nastiness and horrors the film is prepared to explore. The sound design and colour palette only add to the bleakness. The first half of the film is domestic and claustrophobic, mostly set in small rooms, with close shooting angles. The second half is very dark, often shot at night or in gloomy places, and the soundtrack is always unsettling.

My version of WTF happens in Kill List is as follows…

Fiona is doing ‘HR’ for the cult. She/they have observed Jay and Gal, and identified Jay as their ‘candidate’ to be a new leader. She uses Gal to recruit Jay for the Kill List job. She also encourages him to speak to Shel to get her on board first, making Jay more likely to accept.

Gal is NOT aware of the cult’s motivations, at least not at first. The Priest murder is very ‘straightforward’ and professional. They scope him out, prepare the scene, it’s a clinical killing. When the priest says Thank You to Jay, noone understands.

The second killing is slightly more dodgy, in that Gal definitely seems to send Jay in first, where he discovers the film that seems to send him (further) over the edge. While Jay is torturing The Librarian, Gal doesn’t rush back downstairs and intervene, when he could easily have done so.

The MP‘s murder is the one that makes me think Gal had at least received some kind of instruction. Why on earth would they camp out in the woods overnight? The house is isolated, but not so much so they couldn’t have approached it differently. Only because they were in the woods did they get to see the cult’s moonlit procession and human sacrifice. When they were in the tunnels, Gal screams at the blocked up wall “that wasn’t supposed to be there”, which made me think he’d been told about this route and that he could escape.

But I don’t think he’s part of the cult. He expected he could get away. His panic in the tunnel is real, and his ‘thanks’ to Jay is for the mercy killing. Nor do I think Shel is part of the cult. Fiona continues to woo her to keep her onside even as Jay loses his mind. Her smile at the end is a reaction to how ****ed up everything has got.

Bet you didn't see this coming from the start...

The cult’s mission is to have Jay sever ties with everything that means anything to him, so he has to kill Gal, Shel and Sam. I’d thought that ‘Kiev’ was a job-gone-wrong where Jay lost it and went on a frenzy. That’s why the cult identified him as a potential leader, but they needed him to ‘rediscover’ that frenzy. His expression at the end is a rictus, almost like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

Is Kill List about the dehumanising effects of war, about trauma and PTSD, about the dark heart of a society that sends professionals to kill in the name of democracy? I’m not sure about that at all. I Reckon it’s a fantastically scary, often disturbing, completely dark and bleak horror film that has lived with me after the final scenes. I’m sure it would reward a second viewing.

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I could turn you inside out…

I don’t get ill very often. Indeed, compared to many families we know, our children seem quite robust as well. We don’t seem plagued by constantly streaming noses or sore throats, and haven’t succumbed like a row of toppling dominos to the multifarious viruses that seem to thrive in classrooms.

Last week both proved an exception to this rule, but (thankfully) also demonstrated again our collective resilience.

I spent most of the-Sunday-before-last wrapped up under layers of clothes, coats, scarves and a hat, shivering. Even staggering doses of paracetamol and ibuprofen seemed barely to take the edge off how bad I felt. My stomach felt less-than-normal, so I didn’t eat a great deal either. By Monday evening the shivering had subsided (not the all-over aches and pounding head), but a nasty stomach bug had reared its head.

This all got quite unpleasant quite quickly, and I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I didn’t eat anything between Monday evening and Wednesday lunchtime, and even after that and several doses of Imodium it was clear things were still Not Quite Right. The ‘episodes’ themselves weren’t too horrible, but it was the in-between-times that got to me.

Now I realise this is hardly the material for rapier-like insights into the human condition. I was lucky to be ill in my own home, with effective medicines easily available, with comfort and support. I was lucky it was just a bug that appears to have pretty much run its course in only a few days. But it was all new for me and it wasn’t a whole load of fun.

Being ill and not eating is not a nice way to spend any time: in fact, it’s debilitating. I don’t experience it very often, so last week was an unwelcome novelty; the first time in almost 20 years of employment that I’ve had three consecutive days off sick. This bug had control over me, as I couldn’t venture very far from a bathroom,  but I was also afraid to eat or for most of Tuesday even drink. Anyone who knows me or has read some of my more foodie blogs will understand that I think about food a lot. But last week, as soon as anything reached my stomach, fierce gurgling and cramping set in. My insides felt like they had been vacuumed out: instead of being pleasantly full they were now shrivelled husks.

On Wednesday the medicines were kicking in and the cramps subsiding a bit, but what should I eat? A cracker? Toast? Probably best to avoid dairy (although I’m not sure why?) or anything too fatty. Perhaps a krisproll? I remembered an article by Ben Goldacre claiming that a water/sugar/salt drink (combined with proper handwashing) would do more to combat infant mortality in many countries than most expensive drugs. Those two things could prevent the spread of diarrhoea and help victims to recover more effectively: it’s 1 litre of water, 8tsp sugar and 1tsp salt, if you’re interested…

I was able to indulge my cinephile habit as well… indeed, last week I managed to watch Coraline, Rope, The Innocents, Inside Man, (most of) Amélie (a Valentine’s Day treat since our plans for a lovely dinner were trashed), Kill List, Black Narcissus and  Brick…

Lastly, my strenuous efforts of the last 14 months to get fit, eat healthy and lose weight have been well-documented here, and while I wouldn’t recommend this as Plan A, I lost 4lbs last week, and even now that everything seems back to normal, it’s stayed off. I’m now 26lbs lighter than I was at my heaviest, and slimmer and fitter than I can remember. Things that didn’t fit me for being too tight now don’t fit for being too big.

I’m not ill very often, but last week I was, properly and genuinely poorly. Which is why I can sign off with this…

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I can see for miles…

Our bid to stride out around the countryside in 2012 continues…

A few weeks ago we were pressed for time, so took a slightly lazy approach to a wonderful viewpoint on the Cotswold Escarpment. Uley Bury is an iron-age hill fort that offers terrific views in virtually every direction.

It lies immediately above the village of Uley, which is beautifully nestled in a gorgeous valley, and also home to a fine local brewery. I Reckon the best and most satisfying walk starts in the village, climbs steeply up to the plateau before returning down through the woods for a well-earned pint. But we were stretched for time, so instead parked close to the top and walked around…

It was a stunningly clear winter’s day with great visibility down to the plain of the River Severn and beyond. Even the slightest breeze up there has a keen edge at this time of year, but wrapped up warm it was wonderful to breathe the fresh air and appreciate the undulating landscape all around.

Another recent outing was from our front doorstep. We had been invited to lunch with friends who live in Avening, a village just a few miles from Tetbury, so had planned ahead. We dropped off a car at their house in advance, intending to walk across the fields to them, then drive home afterwards. The day itself was foggy and proper winter cold, but with no wind. Together with a friend and her three girls we set out, the children often running ahead, narrating their own stories and adventure scenarios as we went. Despite a brief navigational issue when we realised that dense fog and a fairly featureless landscape made navigating quite tricky, Google Maps on my phone proved we actually were where we thought we were, and we made it safe and sound. It was less picturesque than Uley Bury as visibility was no more than 100 yards across ploughed fields with only occasional hedgerows to break up the murk, but the shared experience was still fun.

I made this using mapmyrun.com

By the end the kids were getting tired and a bit cold, not to say hungry, but after 3.5 miles they deserved the excellent lunch.

Last weekend wasn’t a winter walk, but instead a fantastic hour or so of late-afternoon sledging at Batchwood Golf Course in St Albans. The snow was firmly packed and pretty icy, perfect for sledges, there were enough families there to make it fun but not dangerously crowded. The fairway slope was just long and steep enough for our kids to have a great time going down either with us or by themselves, and the grown-ups had a ball too. Given the weather forecasts, that may be our only sledging day this winter…

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Is a picture really worth a thousand words…?

 It must be a trial to adapt a book for film or television. Without the budget and time to bring the nuances of every character arc and description to life, you must always feel like you’re on a hiding to nothing. The fans of the original text will reject every altered or omitted scene, every composite character. If you yourself admire or love the original, it must be like Sophie’s Choice in deciding how to approach the material.

I’ve Reckoned before about the brutal poetry of Cormac McCarthy’s prose, most especially in The Road, possibly my favourite book of all time, and how that was adapted into a film by Joe Penhall and directed by John Hillcoat. McCarthy’s prose is unlike almost everything else I’ve ever read: often lacking punctuation or indications of speech, it forces the reader to concentrate on every word, on the rhythms of the sentences, which adds astonishing depth and richness to the mere words.

In Blood Meridian he makes real the savagery of the Old West in constantly unflinching terms. Early in the novel, a group of riders are set upon by marauding Comanches, who appear to have arrived from some surreal version of Hell…

A legion of  horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil…

…and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like the vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Sentences are extended and extended, until you feel your imagination cannot take the brutality, the rush of images and descriptions that assault every sense and every sensibility. The attack and slaughter goes on for a couple of pages, there is no escape.

…And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

I’m not sure about you, but I think I need a lie-down after that. Apparently a film is in development. I can’t see it will get even close to that level of violence (and that’s just one scene…).

The BBC recently produced a two-part, just-shy-of-three-hours adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong. Billed as a flagship drama, it condensed the shifting times of the plot into a simpler story of the WW1 trenches and one soldier’s memory of a doomed love affair before that war. The production was beautiful, with excellent period detail and impressive effects, and the trenches were recreated to terrible effect.

Nevertheless I Reckon that Abi Morgan, who adapted the work with Faulks himself, effectively conceded the limitations of the medium in doing so. Subtleties within the original storytelling, the order of revealing events and the emotional journey of the reader were lost. The structure of the TV version repeatedly intercut from the trenches to the pre-war affair and vice versa, when in the novel the protagonist only rarely had those ‘flashback’ moments of recall. The experience of the fighting was so intensely realised in prose that it was overwhelming, all-engulfing. TV adaptations have to accelerate the action, and inevitably miss out on the underlying meaning.

After the Big Attack during the Battle of The Somme, the survivors regroup and a roll-call is held, where the full extent of the tragedy becomes clear. This was well-handled in the TV version, as it panned across the men; exhausted, shattered, realising their comrades are all dead. But even that doesn’t get close to the amazing richness of Faulks’ original…

Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forbears, the villages and the towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sounds of fathers and their children, without young men in the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers’ shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes instead to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

Only in this beautiful, heartbreaking sentence do we get the full impact of WW1, of the loss of humanity in both physical and spiritual terms. Throughout the novel’s sections in the war, the characters reflect that nothing will ever be the same for mankind now that we have proved ourselves capable of inflicting that level of inhumanity and violence upon each other. This much greater meaning is lost in the TV adaptation, as it concentrated the drama into one soldier. But I Reckon that does Faulks a disservice. His novel, for all its personal intimacy and beauty, depicts the personal losses against the larger impact of the war, across communities, nations and generations.

Birdsong and Blood Meridian are both masterpieces, but their ambition and achievements in realising the horrors and beauty of humanity cannot easily or satisfactorily be translated onto screen.

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Who’s winning…?

It still doesn’t seem that long since last summer when I exalted in England becoming the No.1 ranked Test Cricket nation in the world. We had just demolished a bedraggled Indian team – the previous No.1 – in a series of tests held in England. India have subsequently been humbled again in Australia, while the England team seemed to take an extended holiday, well-deserved after their amazing progress in the last few years. By the end of the summer of 2011, England had several of the top-ranked batsmen and bowlers in the world and the team was on an irrepressible run of form. They had won 16 out their last 25 tests, losing just 3.

It’s a well-worn cliché among test cricket aficionados that those less familiar with the intricacies of this 5-day spectacle often ask…

Who’s winning?

to which there is no easy answer. It just doesn’t work like that. It really is more complicated than that.

…until the recent series between England and Pakistan, held in the United Arab Emirates. Pakistan came into this having suffered an extended pounding over the atrocious match-fixing scandals, several years of controversy over captains, disputes in the dressing-room, and poor (or at least inconsistent) results – most notably in England in 2010, when they lost 3 test matches heavily and were bowled out for under 100 on three occasions.

On 17th January 2012, England won the toss and decided to bat on what seemed a good pitch. By lunch they were 52-5, and by the end of Day 3 they had lost by 10 wickets. A week later and England seemed to bounce back. They were largely in control of the 2nd test, and just before the end of Day 3 needed 145 to win. By the end of that day they had struggled to 39-4, and capitulated to 72 all out. Another week later, and the bowlers again performed, skittling Pakistan for just 99, but again Pakistan were victorious for a 3-0 series whitewash.

Who’s winning? Well, whenever England were bowling, we looked pretty good, except for one day in the final match when Azhar Ali and Younis Khan played with exemplary skill and patience to blunt our attack and sap our will. When England were batting, there was only ever one side in it. The Pakistani spinners made us look very ordinary, and especially the middle order of Kevin Pietersen, Ian Bell and Eoin Morgan.

Apparently a good player doesn’t become a bad player overnight. These three batsmen have made a case to be acclaimed as exceptions to the rule in recent weeks.

• In the 2010/2011 Ashes series, Pietersen and Bell scored 689 runs in 5 tests at an average of 63
• In 2011 against Sri Lanka, Pietersen, Bell & Morgan scored 661 runs in 3 tests, averaging 83
• In 2011 against India, the threesome scored 1,231 runs in 4 tests, averaging 77 (Bell & Pietersen both hit a double-hundred; Morgan also scored a century)
• In this last series against Pakistan, they combined for just 200 runs in 18 innings during the 3 tests at an average of just 11. Their highest score was 32, they only managed double figures 8 times in those 18 ‘efforts’, they only achieved one partnership of more than 15 runs in the series. They were outscored by bowlers Graeme Swann and Stuart Broad, who scored 210 runs in 12 innings and also managed to take 26 wickets during the series.

By almost any reckoning this is a pretty catastrophic performance and more than reflects the difference between the teams. Effectively only one of the three turned up for these matches. Compared to recent series, England might as well have played with only 9 batsmen. They seemed clueless against the spin of Ajmal and Rehman. Bell has subsequently been ‘rested/dropped’ for the upcoming One-Day Internationals, while KP has been given a chance to regain his mojo by opening the batting. Morgan must be going through his contacts looking for spinners he can get some practice against.

They’ve not become bad players, but they’ll never be thought of as great players if they can’t (re)learn how to bat against all bowlers on all surfaces.

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