5 - The most overpriced DVD I ever bought*

I have a lot of free time and very few decent shops in my town. As a result I spend many days going into WH Smith, smirking at the ridiculous prices of their poor selection of DVDs then heading home.

Over the period of about a fortnight last year I must have gone into Smith's pretty much every day and every day I was tempted by Timecop on DVD for only £1! I remembered it being pretty bad and as I saw it, films from your teenage years are rarely as good as you remember them.

Eventually I relented due to the pressure from my friend who was working in Smith's at the time mixed with the view that I was probably being too hard on the film. My film taste has after all changed drastically as I have matured. I now have a near-perverted adoration for the big dumb action films that I didn't appreciate when I was a gormless teen. In this case I was wrong to give it a second chance.

Timecop is still bad.

Like really, really bad.

You know those films that are so bad they're good? Then there are films that are so bad, that they're just bad. Timecop is somewhere below them.

It's even worse than I remember. So much so I actually started regretting my purchase. I was feeling guilt as if I'd just splurged out £500 on a new TV to find out that it was a piece of shit. For a quid I could have bought a really good pastie.

It's just so bad.

You haven't seen it? Don't, it's bad.

You have seen it? Then you know it's bad.

You don't think it's bad? You're wrong. It's really, really, really bad.

I suppose I should qualify my staunch view of Timecop's badness. It's ludicrous for a start. Not the good kind, but the crappy, ridiculous, riddled with plot-holes, poorly made kind of ludicrous. The action is mediocre at best, which is unforgivable coming from the star of Blood Sports, Hard Target, Desert Heat, The Quest and Universal Soldier.

The whole film rushes from start to the finish without achieving anything more than a bewildered feeling of 'This film shouldn't be this bad, but somehow it is.' Even the one-liner at the end is bad. As a general rule one-liners are brilliant. Timecop's barely makes sense.

'Same matter can't occupy same space.' Sure I know nothing about physics etc. but what?

JCVD immediately follows that up with 'I'm still kicking - I must be on Broadway.' What the hell? Sure he roundhouse kicks the bad guy from the past/present into the version of himself from the future/present and creates some kind of being that vomits in on itself - but still, what?

Timecop's two taglines are both bad too.

'They killed his wife ten years ago. There's still time to save her.' - That's bad.

'Murder is forever...until now.' - That's really bad.

It's so bad.

I've tried convincing myself that Timecop was worth a quid to repeatedly watch the scene in which JCVD does the splits onto a kitchen worktop to avoid getting electrocuted by a Taser pinging into his wet kitchen floor (quite,) but it just isn't.

When a film is only £1 and is still criminally overpriced, you know it's bad.
*not really

4 - Philip K. Dick: Page to Screen

I'm a massive Philip K. Dick fan and there have been plenty of adaptations of his work. Here's my thoughts on those I've seen, in case you wondered.

A Scanner Darkly based on A Scanner Darkly
Controversially, this is my favourite Philip K. Dick adaptation. Arguably pointless in that it brings little new to the story, it pays the most respect out of all the films based on his work. The bleakness, the paranoia and the characters of the novel have been transferred near-perfectly and large sections of dialogue have been lifted word for word. The rotascoping is a stroke of genius bringing the scramble suit to life and creating a surreal, hypnotic experience that gets the 'feeling' of the novel spot on.

Blade Runner based on Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Although Ridley Scott made an absolute classic with Blade Runner, bringing enough to the story to make it is own while keeping its core, I'm too staunch a PKD loyalist to admit this is the best of the adaptations. Too much of the novel was changed for my liking and Harrison Ford isn't the right casting for a true PKD hero, but it's undeniably cinema gold.

Total Recall based on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale
Arnold Schwarzenegger is the antithesis of the PKD character - a paranoid, insecure everyman. Strictly speaking, it's a fairly dire adaptation, but it's a fantastic film in its own right. Verhoeven's trademark violence plays out beautifully and Arnold delivers those one-liners with his usual charisma. 'See you at the party, Richter!'

Minority Report based on The Minority Report
One of the better Spielberg films of the past 10 years, this film is a little too sexy for its own good. Tom Cruise is a bit cool and everything is slick, neatly tied-up and ultimately happy. Good fun with some neat ideas and it's solid in its own right, but it's just too 'Hollywood' for a PKD story.

Screamers based on Second Variety
Critically panned and regarded as being nothing more than a wannabe Blade Runner mixed with The Thing, I have a deep love for Screamers. It's a paranoid, bleak '90s sci-fi with the legendary Peter Weller playing the lead. The ending of the story was changed and it suffers as a result. Not a great film, but for nostalgic purposes, I adore this film.

Paycheck based on Paycheck
The biggest crime with this film is not that it doesn't do PKD's story justice, but that John Woo's career had completely hit rock bottom. Vaguely entertaining but generally stupid.

Next based on The Golden Man
Horrible. Simply horrible.

3 - Thoughts from Phil

I have a love for sci-fi and a general aversion to fantasy. It's quite irrational. It's something I can't pin down, only that I have read many examples of great sci-fi novels and few examples of great fantasy novels. Of course I have read far less fantasy novels and always approach them with a less open mind than I do with a sci-fi novel, so that's probably not a fair answer.

I think it has something do with the realistic element. Sci-fi is within the realms of possibility, if not probability. Fantasy hasn't enough rules for my liking.

I recently came across the distinction between sci-fi and fantasy worded perfectly by my hero and sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick. His definition comes from a letter he wrote in 1981, now serving as the preface to Beyond Lies The Wub:

Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment-call, since what is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.

Philip K. Dick (May 14, 1981)

Reading this made me reevaluate what it is I'm writing and I guess I'm writing part-sci-fi part-fantasy. There are elements I regard as possible and those I regard as impossible in my story. Arse.

2 - Frak you

I'm currently watching season 3 of the exceptionally good Battlestar Galactica. Like many US shows, the characters don't say 'fuck' -generally they'll make do with 'damn' or 'shit' or simply nothing. In Battlestar Galactica, however, the writers have come up with an alternative. Instead of saying 'fuck' the characters use the word 'frak' and all variations thereof.

frak off - motherfrker - let's frack - fraked up

Characters use it from the start and we pick up on it quickly. We take it to be an example of semantic shift and although it seems odd at first, it works.

Thing is though, as much as it works, it just doesn't compare with the impact of the real 'fuck.' It's a step closer than shows like 24 or The Shield that have no strong swearing. Shows don't depend on swearing, but a great deal of credibility and believability is lost when all a guy who's just been double-crossed and left for dead can say is 'damn.'

Take The Wire. The characters swear in The Wire, a lot. One particular scene, one of the great scenes of TV history, has our two heroes Bunk and McNulty investigating an old crime scene. This scene is the best part of ten minutes long and literally all Bulk and McNulty say throughout is 'fuck' or variations thereof. It shouldn't really work, but it does. It's a powerful, indulgent scene that says so much more than a lot of crime procedural waffle.

I'd like to analyse this scene but I'm sure there are already many essays out there on it written by people with greater insight and verbal dexterity than me. So I just want to remind everyone who's watched The Wire of that scene. I just want you to remember watching it for the first time. I want you to smile as you reminisce. I want a shiver to run through you as I'm sure it ran through you nearly every time you watched an episode of The Wire. For anyone who hasn't watched it - you must, if just for that scene.

1 - Evolution, of a sort

I’m failing to get any further with redrafting my novel at the moment and yet I’m somehow alive with a huge compulsion to write. I think it’s simply that I want to be writing new things. That’s why I’ve joined One A Day. I won’t go into the details, suffice it to say the aim is to write one blog a day for a year. It seems fitting to kick start the process by writing about writing itself.

What I love about writing most is that it’s an organic process, constantly evolving and transforming until it becomes something so very different from what you started out with that you forget how you got there. I can generally remember where a single idea for a story originated from, but most of the finer points are lost in the annals of my mind.

I know that when I was writing a piece I made conscious decisions. I know when I was writing a piece I was influenced by what I was reading, watching and listening to at the time. I know that when I was writing a piece I did some things by accident and they just stuck.

Sometimes I wish I could tear apart every little detail of a story and see why this is this, even if it’s for the most banal reasons – such as the time I made a character obsequious simply because I came across the word and liked it.

I started writing a piece yesterday. It’s a truncated form of a novella idea I’ve been toying with for some months and for some reason that I have already forgotten, I have started writing it in a garbled, semi-phonetic version of English.

I’ve clearly taken direction from A Clockwork Orange, Riddley Walker and 1984’s Newspeak but I’m sure I wasn’t consciously paying homage to/ripping off these pieces when I started. Now I’ve got to such an involved level with this language that I can’t stop.

I know I’m alienating any audience by making the piece tougher to read. I know it adds little if anything to the story. Worst of all, I’m finding it hard letting go. The language is evolving every time I return to the piece. I’m deciding on specific spellings and new rules, but I guess that’s the basis for an entire other blog. I just wish I could remember why I thought it was a good idea.

The Day of the Triffids & back-story

This is a sort of sequel to my last post, 'The Lost Room & depth.' When watching the BBC's 2009 adaptation of The Day of the Triffids last week, it occurred to me that seeing as this was a mostly-loyal adaptation, you could view it as a rewrite of the original text.

Some parts were changed to contemporise it, such as the Cold War subtext and the 'cosy catastrophe' feel. Some parts were altered to breathe a little new life into the well-know story - the character of Torrence was expanded without really fleshing out his character and the ending included some nonsensical and unbelievable escape plan that involved funnelling Triffid poison into the eyes using a tribal mask. Quite.

There was one change that made sense, however; most of the back-story was thinned out. In the novel we get an entire chapter of exposition that gives us far more than we need to get through the text. This scene was kept in the 1981 TV adaptation, but removed entirely in the 2009 series. The back-story we do get in the latter is revealed in small amount gradually through the show.

Though I do have some fondness for the novel's approach, there's no denying that that exposition chapter slows the pace terribly. The 2009 TV show, much more at the mercy of pacing, skips over it. Okay, a lot of the depth has been removed, and I'm a sucker for depth, but the show zips on at a far better pace.

It has made me yet again consider when and how to leak out exposition. I love John Wyndham's writing but I admit that info-dumping can be a pretty clumsy and pace-slowing, if informative and elucidating, way of giving the back-story. Of course novels can get away with slower sections easier than TV and film, and we even expect them. Then again, and I refer once more to Cube, if done right, you can get by with absolutely minimal to no back-story and create something altogether more powerful.

The Lost Room & depth

I’ve just finished re-watching the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries The Lost Room. I discovered it by chance a year ago and it’s a phenomenal TV show, compelling to the brink of addiction. In themes and levels of mysteriousness, it draws comparisons with Lost but unlike Lost it hasn’t been drawn out to a ridiculous length and subsequently become diluted and confused.

At only six episodes in length The Lost Room is an intense, incredibly deep story. It’s this depth that I admire most. It’s breathtaking just how much back-story and potential for future events there is. Rather than coming across as a show too crammed-full of ideas for its own good, it’s a rich experience that reveals its depth with subtlety and intelligence. I’ve drawn a huge amount of inspiration from this show.

When I think of my writing I don’t want to simply create an intricate, deep world that’s either clumsily exposed or kept from sight. I want to create one that expands beyond the plot and reaches both off into the past and into the future just like The Lost Room. I believe a story should sit perfectly in a moment of time. We should feel like we have come partway through it and that the plot, and the lives of the characters, continues off into the future. I believe that under the surface should be a whole other level that we only get minor glimpses of.

No other TV show that I have come across does this so succinctly and so successfully as The Lost Room and I would benefit greatly from emulating this in my own writing. If I can write something as fantastically hanging in time as The Lost Room I’d be a happy writer.