Lone Star scares
Set on an isolated Texas goat farm, Bryan Bertino’s new horror movie The Dark and the Wicked blends elements from The Exorcist and The Shining to memorable effect
The Dark and the Wicked (18)
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Wrong Turn (18) ✪✪✪✪
Pelé (12) ✪✪✪
Back in 2008, US horror writer/director Bryan Bertino scored a boxoffice hit with his debut movie The Strangers, a home invasion thriller starring Liv Tyler that was rooted in the senselessness of the Manson murders and a wave of break-ins Bertino remembered happening in his own neighbourhood growing up. The premise itself was shamelessly derivative – the motiveless-killers plot was almost exactly the same as the French film Ils [Them] from 2006 – but the execution was so taught and economical and scary that today it holds up better than most of the extreme horror movies coming out of the US in the first decade of the 2000s. Those same qualities apply to Bertino’s new film The Dark and the Wicked. Set on an isolated Texas goat farm and revolving around a pair of grown-up siblings returning home to say goodbyes to their dying father, it take elements from The Exorcist and The Shining, but comes at this story of an estranged, secular family confronting unexplainable forces in a stripped-down fashion that’s unsettling because of how lacking in bombast it is.
But while he takes a slow-burn approach, Bertino sets the freaky tone early with ominous nighttime shots of desolate farmland and a subtle sound design in which you can’t quite be sure if what you’re hearing is part of the real world or inside the characters’ heads. Soon enough we’re introduced to Louise (Marin Ireland) and her taciturn brother Michael (Michael Abbot Jr), though from the way their mother (Julie Olivertouchstone) barely acknowledges their return, it’s clear that not only are they not close to each other or their parents, but that their mother harbours a lot of resentment towards them for absenting themselves from their parents’ lives. When Louise’s mother tells her, “I told you all not to come,” it’s in a guilt-tripping tone loaded with self-pity. Or at least that’s how it comes across at first. Her exhortations to go home might actually be warnings that Louise and Michael are failing to heed precisely because they are feeling guilty about neglecting their duty of care towards their ailing parents.
Lest this make the film sound like a grim family drama about grief and regret, though, it should be pointed out that Bertino ratchets up the tension swiftly and efficiently and turns familiar jump scares into disquieting moments of disbelief.
Horror fans know, for instance, that a character carefully chopping vegetables on screen is never going to end well, but when a character does it here early on, their response – and the way Bertino’s camera lingers on it – is so far out of the bounds of normal behaviour that it throws you off balance. Ditto the way Bertino punctuates his horror setpieces with inter-titles marking the passage of time – a creative choice that, yes, is a big nod to The Shining, but also creates an elliptical effect that encourages us to fill in details the script deliberately withholds by studying the subtleties of the actors’ performances.
This is not a film that spells out its mysteries, but nor is it so abstract as to be impenetrable. It hits that horror movie sweet-spot of being scary in the moment, but with plenty to contemplate as its images linger long past the end credits.
Anyone looking for a more fun, roller-coaster-ride type horror movie could do worse than check out Wrong Turn, a surprisingly good reboot of the not-very auspicious 2003 cannibal-themed slasher of the same name (despite its forgettability, the original did, apparently, give rise to five sequels). This new film smartly doesn’t require any previous knowledge and instead takes its cues from the Purge movies in its determination to create a weird mythology that interrogates America’s violent origins and, oddly enough, ends up speaking to the current politically divisive moment in the US (let’s just say it features hornhelmet-wearing maniacs stomping around with heavy weaponry and acting with impunity in their demented efforts to protect their way of life).
Before it gets to any of that, though, the film is part detective movie, part survival thriller. The detective part finds Matthew Modine on the trail of his daughter, Jen (Charlotte Vega
– excellent), who has disappeared while on a hiking trip with friends in the Appalachian Mountains. The survival movie part kicks in via flashbacks to Jen and her friends as they fail to heed the advice of comically sinister locals to stick to the marked trails and head into the woods in search of Instagramable life experiences. Though essentially a riff on Deliverance and Southern Comfort with entitled hipster ingrates for protagonists, director Mike P Nelson gets a lot of juice out of this set-up and to his credit, when the two storylines converge, it gets really strange and, true to its title, keeps taking enjoyably bizarre turns right up until the final credits.
Pelé, Netflix’s new high-end documentary about the legendary
Wrong Turn takes its cues from the Purge movies to create a mythology that interrogates America’s violent origins
Brazilian footballer, features extensive interviews with the man himself as it trawls through the archives to examine his legacy as Brazil’s top goal-scorer and the only player to date to win three World Cups. But his story isn’t as compellingly told as it could be and directors Ben Nicholas and David
Tryhorn’s efforts to examine the political turmoil of the era doesn’t quite come off. One for football aficionados only.
The narrator of a novel may be an actor or he may be an observer. One thinks of Isherwood’s “I am a camera,” but Scott Fitzgerald was there before him. Nick Carroway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is of very little interest himself. “Colourless and boring” I called him in a review many years ago. We learn the bare details of his life to date: growing up in the Midwest where his father owned a hardware store, brief war service, return home and now work as a bond dealer on Wall Street, spending summers on Long Island. But he’s there as a point of view: to give us the mysterious Gatsby, the rich and careless Buchanans and Jordan Baker.
Now Michael Farris Smith, already widely praised for novels about the post-faulkner South, has written what is advertised as a prequel to Gatsby, Nick’s story before Fitzgerald gave him voice.
Apparently the novel was finished some five years ago, publication delayed till Fitzgerald’s work dropped out of copyright. The law relating to infringement of copyright can be strict, but really Farris Smith and his publishers might reasonably have risked an early publication, for, apart from the name, Nick Carroway, and the fidelity to Fitzgerald’s brief notice of Nick’s pre-gatsby life, there is no other connection.
Indeed the distance between the two novels is so great that Farris Smith might have called his hero Dick rather than Nick, and the connection with Gatsby might not even have been remarked.
Of course, highlighting the connection and delaying publication till now clearly makes good commercial sense. “Prequel to Gatsby” is a selling-point. Indeed yes, but it may also be a distraction. In truth the reader is well-advised to forget Fitzgerald and read Nick as a novel which exists in its own right.
The first section is a war novel, interspersed with memories of Nick’s childhood. His service at the front is interrupted by leave in Paris where he meets and falls in love with a girl who sells picture-frames from a cart which she trundles round the streets.
All fictional accounts of war on the Western Front are nowadays derivative; they can’t be anything else, so many memoirs and earlier novels about life and experience in the trenches and tunnels having been written. Nevertheless, Farris Smith has absorbed the abundant material and let his imagination play on it so well that Nick’s experiences are convincing. One might add that at times the rhythm of his prose is more Hemingway than Fitzgerald. There are some nice scenes behind the lines too. As for the waif-girl in Paris, she belongs very pleasingly to the French
silent films of the Twenties or Rene Clair’s first talkies.
Back in America, Nick goes to New Orleans instead of returning home. There he becomes involved in the city’s low life, just as Prohibition is being imposed on the USA, with war veterans asking if they had fought the war in order to be denied a beer or Bourbon on their return home. The New Orleans section of the novel inevitably has echoes of earlier fiction set in that city, but nevertheless exists convincingly and enjoyably in its own right.
One does find oneself wondering how one would have read this novel if one’s attention hadn’t been drawn to its relationship to Gatsby. This indeed
The rhythm of his prose is more Hemingway than Fitzgerald
is rather distracting. Moreover, just as in the war section, the prose seems to echo Hemingway more often than Fitzgerald, so also the post-war dislocation of the returned soldier is at least as reminiscent of Hemingway’s short stories as of anything Fitzgerald wrote; and not perhaps only because his war service didn’t take him overseas to France or Italy.
Being always somewhat suspicious of prequels or sequels written by someone other than the original novelist, I approached Nick without much enthusiasm, and was agreeably surprised to find myself held by the story and finding it both good and enjoyable – not always the same thing. In short, it’s a novel that works even if you have never read Gatsby, perhaps works better indeed if you forget all about Fitzgerald.
POP
Arab Strap: As Days Get Dark Rock Action
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Steg G: Live Today Powercut Productions ✪✪✪✪
Alice Cooper: Detroit Stories
EARMUSIC ✪✪✪
Bonnie Tyler: The Best Is Yet to Come
EARMUSIC
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While their mates Mogwai mark a quarter century of uninterrupted postrock trailblazing, Arab Strap ride back into town with their first new album in 16 years, like the exes you’ve forgiven but not forgotten. Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton first went their separate ways in 2006, beaten down by the commercial slog of the mid-ranking indie outfit. Man shall not live by critical acclaim alone but the joy with which their 2016 reunion was greeted kindled the creative fires again and As Days Get Dark is the fully realised result, a higher-fi reboot of their idiosyncratic candid confessionals, like a whiff from an illicit still, or a bad habit you don’t want to resist.
For evidence that Arab Strap are older, wiser and utterly unrepentant, listen no further than opening track The Turning of Our Bones, with its stealthy, gothic guitar, squalling saxophone, ominously circling strings and synth handclaps forming a seductive backdrop to Moffat’s narrative “about resurrection and shagging.”
The dynamic created by Moffat’s eye-watering poetry and Middleton’s atmospheric soundtracks is more expertly wrought than ever. Heady disco strings soundtrack Fable of the Urban Fox’s parable on racism. Another Clockwork Day’s catalogue of online porn (“wearing nothing but a new postcode”) is teamed with pastoral picking and mournful melodica (is there any other kind?) Tears on Tour ponders the triggers for teardrops from raw, uncomprehending bereavement to “the Muppet movie, Frozen, Frozen 2” over some surprising Mark Knopflerstyle burnished blues guitar.
The brilliantly titled Kebabylon, inspired by the twilight zone of the nocturnal road sweeper, finds them in familiar territory, melding tinny rhythm, post-rock guitar and Moffat’s sinister breathiness, while Here Comes Comus! celebrates the almost forgotten art of the wild night out. As lurid as they can be, there is something bittersweet about these nighttime dispatches from a precovid age.
Hip-hop producer Steg G ,aka Steven Gilfoyle, also takes to the streets in the company of community orchestra The Glasgow Barons and guest MCS, including Stanley Odd frontman Solareye and rap duo CCTV, for a Glasgow odyssey chronicling 24 hours in Gilfoyle’s native Govan.
Live Today kicks off with smashing glass on Wee Small Hours, inspired by the sectarian riots of 2019. Rapper Empress is eloquent as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Freestyle Master plays a local shopkeeper “slap bang in the trenches” who has seen it all.
Mental health issues loom large, from the literal self-reflection of Enemy in the Mirror to the confidence boosting My Destiny (“so I invest in me”), while the soundtrack flows from folky flute and low-slung beats on Then It All Goes Wrong to the bold symphonic soul backing of Space Age Addictions.
Veteran shock rocker Alice Cooper also looks to his locale on Detroit Stories, an irreverent homage to his birthplace – where “you couldn’t be a soft rock band or you’d get your ass kicked” – which he has recorded with Detroit musicians including MC5’S Wayne Kramer, Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner and the Motor City Horns, with namechecks for other natives such as Suzi Quatro, and the spirit of Bob Seger all over the rootsy soul number $1000 High Heel Shoes.
Bonnie Tyler, meanwhile, inhabits 80s AOR Bonnieland on The Best Is Yet To Come – debatable on these anachronistic terms, though she might have boosted her Eurovision chances with the fun melodrama of Stuck To My Guns.
Through a patchy playlist of covers and originals, Tyler is generally better served with an imaginary wind machine in her hair or flexing her gravelly rhythm’n’blues vocal muscles on her version of I’m Only Guilty (Of Loving You).
CLASSICAL Catriona Morison: The dark night has vanished
Linn
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With songs by the 19th century German composer and Mendelssohn protégé Josephine Lang, the Scots mezzo soprano has given her solo recording debut a unique point of interest. There are also songs by Grieg, Brahms and Schumann, which are testament to the rich mezzo timbre that distinguishes Morison’s maturing voice and interpretational artistry. In tandem with the collaboration of pianist and fellow Scot, Malcom Martineau, she journeys from Grieg’s Sechs Lieder Op 48, through a miscellany of Brahms to Schumann’s Op 90 songs. It’s with the latter two composers that Morison best finds natural vent for her fullest expressive powers. But in Lang’s songs too, crafty and mainstream, she captures the essential spirit of a woman who battled personal difficulties – the early death of her husband – to succeed in what was predominantly a man’s world.
Tyler is better served with an imaginary wind machine in her hair or flexing her gravelly rhythm’n’blues vocal muscles
JAZZ
Shez Raja: Tales from the Punjab
Ubuntu Music
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Anglo-asian bassist Shez Raja has collaborated powerfully with such jazz-fusioneers as Randy Brecker, Mike Stern and Trilok Gurtu. Here, however, he travels back to his cultural heartland, his warmtoned bass guitar exhibiting a funky dexterity that leaves space for Ahsan Papu’s bansuri flute and Zohaib Hassan’s sarangi violin to swoop and soar exhilaratingly. Typical is Angel’s Tears, as rolling bass and tabla (Kashif Ali Dani) set an easy gait, Fiza Haider’s vocals and Papu’s flute sounding in unison before Raja embarks on a lightly intricate solo, the querulously microtonal keening of sarangi following on. Adventures in the City of Wonders is one of three improvisations, with introductory vocalising, sarangi and flute hanging above a drone before the bass launches a steadily ascending riff. Maharaja develops over terse percussion, deftly ranging bass and an outburst of wah-wah violin – musical tales eloquently told.