Pet Sematary by Stephen King: a review (Contains Spoiler...)

'I don't wanna be buried / In a pet sematary!' sing The Ramones in the theme song from the soundtrack of the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's book. Those lines, and the lurid video that accompanied it, were my first exposure to the story, which to my teenage eyes looked deeply stupid. I have been guilty of sneering at Stephen King ever since but after recently viewing the TV versions of 11.22.63, Salem's Lot and The Stand, I have grown to admire his relentless storytelling and his weird, trash-Gothic sensibility. And so nearly thirty years after having laughed at The Ramones' song (which nonetheless remained riveted in my memory) I finally read Pet Sematary itself.

           In the book, Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, and his family move into a house in a small town in Maine located close to a pet cemetary. After the family's cat, Church, is killed by a passing lorry, elderly neighbour Jud Crandall urges Louis to bury the animal in an obscure area behind the cemetary, triggering a cycle of macabre events and revelations about the sordid history of the area.

            I will admit that there were stretches of saccharine dialogue (of the 'Daddy, I wanna go pee-pee' variety) that had me gritting my teeth in exasperation and the ending was little more than a B-movie custard pie in the face.  But otherwise this was a compulsive read with a lot of suitably taut prose and decriptive passages of real visceral power. 

             There is something very compelling and plausible about the book as an exploration of loss and grief that raises it above the level of the run-of-the-mill thriller and had King held back on the excesses of the ending, he might have achieved something genuinely haunting and even poignant. But this is clearly a writer wihout literary pretensions who is more interested in the grand guignol potential of his story and it's hard to begrudge him his wish to entertain his readers.   

Wild Cards in the World of TV Sport

Nowadays, snooker commands little more than a footnote in the sports news and most of the focus of BBC’s Forty Years At The Crucible was on the period in the 1980s when the green baize was a virtually inescapable presence on TV screens throughout the winter. So unsurprisingly, a good three-quarters of the programme was devoted to that era and to players who had the good fortune to be in the top tier at the time. They rolled out the old jokes about Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis, Dennis Taylor’s outsized glasses and Willie Thorne’s baldness, and there was talk about the 1985 final (the apex of the sport in terms of viewing figures) and Cliff Thorburn’s televised 147 (an extremely rare feat at the time).

In an audience mostly comprised of former and current snookerers, the Chinese players didn’t seem that interested – the camera caught several of them looking at their smartphones while presenter Hazel Irvine tripped down memory lane with one middle-aged ex-pro after another. In a country where Ding Junhui, their most successful player, commands viewing figures in the hundreds of millions, it would be easy to understand why they mightn’t be so interested in nostalgia.

While snooker is a ‘new’ sport in China, and one that is thriving, the sense that in Britain it is clinging to the past was compounded by supremo Barry Hearn’s announcement that veterans Jimmy White and Ken Doherty would be given invitational tour cards to allow them remain in the professional ranks for the forthcoming season.  Speaking on the programme, Hearn said, 'They are multiple ranking winners in their own right but great ambassadors for the sport of snooker'.

You can’t say they (White, in particular) haven’t given a lot to the sport but this move smacks of desperation, a decision based on sentiment and popularity rather than on the players' ability to compete at the highest level. 
Snooker has a history of depending on ‘characters’ to win over the agnostic viewers. In the 1980s, the players, most of whom had spent years as amateurs, were mostly very open in expressing their frustrations with what is a fiendishly complicated game. Grimaces, despondent head shakes and wry smiles were all part of the entertainment.  As in just about every sport, there was less money, less pressure and more fun.   The most successful player by far was the conspicuously professional, and impassive Steve Davis and the players who followed in his wake were by and large, versions of him. The puckish and brilliant Ronnie O’Sullivan, who has a mutual love-hate relationship with the snooker authorities, is the glaring exception, and interest in the world championship drains away after he is eliminated from tournament.   

  Women’s tennis is probably in a similar state. Maria Sharapova, recently returned from a twelve-month ban for neglecting to follow a directive regarding drug supplements, has received wild card entries for three tournaments who feel that they need her to boost their profile. Following the news that the pregnant Serena Williams has pulled out of the tour, it is likely that Sharapova will be offered further wild cards. After all, this is the second or third most recognisable tennis player in the world, the one whose face is on adverts and in magazines that reach far beyond the sport and tennis, like snooker, relies heavily on star quality to draw in spectators and viewers.

But it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for less famous (or unknown) snooker or tennis players who may be bumped out of a tournament in favour of older, established stars who have been saved the bother of going through the qualification process.   

The National Broadcaster

Has anyone seen RTE’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’?  Hundreds of thousands of people apparently. What about ‘Operation Transformation’, another of the station’s sure-fire ratings winners? Despite having watched neither of them, I am very aware of their existence and I know that Des Cahill was a participant in the former show. During their recent runs, it was hard to avoid them because RTE radio one rarely missed a chance to advertise them via regular mentions on Ryan Tubridy and Ray Darcy’s shows. And there was even some light banter about ‘The Stars’ on the usually grim Morning Ireland. 

There’s an in-built assumption in this very parochial approach that the listeners are also regular watchers of RTE television and that other people (a fair-sized chunk of the population, mostly aged between 0 and 35) can go away.  RTE know their audience and are determined to hold onto them, rather than try to find new listeners and viewers.  As far as I can remember, Gay Byrne regularly tied in the Late Late Show to his radio programme but that was at a time when there was very little choice available on the airwaves and most people in this country had access to just two TV channels.  When he talked about a Late Late item, Byrne was continuing the conversation, but when Ryan, Ray, Miriam and even Aine talk gleefully about Op Trans or DWTS, it sounds rather desperate.   

Director-general Dee Forbes has been making some rather anxious sounds lately about the state of RTE, calling for a hike in the license fee and worrying about the 15-35 demographic most of whom obviously aren’t drawn in by the blanket coverage of dieting and celebrity dancing programmes.  David McSavage has drawn attention to what he considers the poor quality of the programming coming out of Montrose by refusing to pay his license fee. There is clear evidence that many others feel the same way – there is a high incidence of fee evasion in Ireland.

 This has led some people to wonder about the point of RTE. In this multi-platform media environment, for many people, it is another small fish fighting for attention in a vast pond of sounds and pictures.  Is a ‘national’ broadcaster necessary, they wonder? If so, what is it for?

Though it was heralded as a medium that would provide a ‘window on the world’ for the cave-dwellers of Ireland in 1961, RTE is at its best when it does uniquely Irish programming like ‘Nationwide’, ‘Ear to the Ground’, documentaries about the history of the country and investigative news programmes.  But it’s clear that RTE cannot compete with the bigger broadcasters.  Watching the BBC’s News at Ten after RTE’s Nine O’Clock News gives one an idea of the size of RTE’s budget – there are comparatively few ‘foreign’ news items on RTE and they only have two correspondents working outside of Ireland (in Brussel and Washington) while the BBC seem to be able to get cameras into emergency rooms in war zones everywhere. Watching the BBC news can be a hair-raising, visceral experience full of hellish violence from the four corners of the world while RTE is mostly about local trade union leaders’ grievances and bland comments from TDs.

 RTE has never been able to do comedy for some reason (Apres Match apart) and outside of soap operas, it is too expensive to produce drama programmes that can compete with the quality of shows coming out of Britain and the U.S.A.  Even so, the paucity of home-grown material is highlighted when one examines the schedule on any given day. On Monday, 24 April, 2017, less than ten of the 34 hours of programming on RTE’s channels was produced by the broadcaster itself and three hours of those ten were devoted to the daily news.

So surely RTE should stop trying to compete with the big fish and concentrate on what it’s good at? This bloated organisation that has a TV station and radio station (RTE 2 and 2FM) catering for a demographic that doesn’t care and the vast majority of programming on RTE 2 consists of imports that, thanks to digital, everyone can watch on other channels, while the national ‘pop’ music station plays hardly any music by Irish artists.  Sports organisations are following the money to richer pastures and RTE 2 will look especially denuded next spring without its live Six Nations rugby marathons.

So hasn’t the time come to get rid of RTE 2 and 2FM and leave whatever home-grown programmes that RTE feels might be a bit too edgy to the online RTE Player to which younger viewers will have easy access? RTE 1 and Radio 1 look and sound more and more like programming for the elderly - broadcasting for people who never tinker with the dial on their radio and rarely check the menu on the digital TV.

TV and radio, which are still young media, now look more like libraries (or in the case of sport, bookshops) with channels devoted to programmes to suit the most esoteric of tastes. It would be best for RTE to give up trying to be anything like BBC 1 or ITV and concentrate on being a high quality niche broadcaster aimed specifically at the Irish consumer.  RTE was heralded in the 1960s as a ‘window on the world’ for Irish people. As there are now a thousand windows through which we can look at the world, that role is now redundant and RTE would be better off providing a window on the country in which it is made for the people who pay its license fee.

Film Review: Cobra Verde (1987)

             

The last film on which director Werner Herzog collaborated with actor Klaus Kinski, ‘Cobra Verde’, like ‘Aguirre: Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’, features a European in conflict with hostile conditions in the colonies, a battle for survival that mirrored the famously fractious relationship between the two men. 

                Kinski, wild-eyed, wild-haired and utterly magnetic, is Cobra Verde, a wandering outlaw whose very name can inspire terror in the inhabitants of an entire Brazilian town in the opening scene. ‘Hide the children!’ people scream when he walks onto the plaza. Impressed by his icy demeanour, the owner of a sugar plantation makes him a slave overseer but lives to regret his decision when Cobra Verde goes on to impregnate all three of his daughters.  The owner plots with local dignitaries to rid Brazil of Cobra Verde by sending him across the sea to round up slaves in a colony in Africa. 

                Shot on location in Brazil,  Colombia and Ghana, the plot of Cobra Verde is simple and low on incident. Much of the film’s power stems from Herzog’s long shots of jungle and mountain, of scenes featuring masses of Africans, walking in lines that stretch for miles or taking part in ritual celebrations. Kinski has one of the great faces in cinema and for all his professed misgivings about working with him, Herzog is clearly happy to let the camera linger on the actor’s granite features.  His appearance - long blond hair, bulging eyes, scowling mouth and full uniform - stands in marked contrast with the naked Africans, and, together with Popol Vuh’s eerie electronica soundtrack, this serves to accentuate the sense of an unbridgeable divide between two cultures.  What the two civilisations do appear to share is a complete lack of sentimentality.

                 Though not as celebrated as ‘Aguirre: Wrath of God’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, ‘Cobra Verde’ has its own sense of brutal grandeur and contains images of intense beauty that will sear themselves into the memory of the viewer.

Review: The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

‘The eye is enticed by a path and the mind’s eye also. The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land – onwards in space, but also backwards in time, to the histories of the route and its previous followers.’ So writes Robert MacFarlane in a book which explores a range of ancient paths and passages in locations as diverse as the chalky Sussex Downs, the Guadarrama of central Spain and the mountains of Tibet.

                   Each of the sixteen chapters features an account of a journey by foot (or in one case by boat, between islands off the north coast of Scotland) which is enlivened by the author’s deep knowledge of the history of these places and of their natural features.  His regular references to his path-treading predecessors – pilgrims, traders, farmers, adventurers – give the book a sense of timeless communion between travellers, especially between the writer himself and his fellow Downs explorer, the poet Edward Thomas. Near the end of the book, there is a moving account of the last years of the life of this restless wanderer who was killed in World War I.  

MacFarlane’s prose is peppered with precise naturalist terms and richly descriptive passages.  ‘I found my sleeping place at twilight, not far from the beacon’s summit: a swathe of grass, the size of a double bed-sheet, overhung by a spreading hawthorn tree and hidden from the path by a ramp of gorse whose yellow blossoms lent their coconut scent to the breeze. A green woodpecker yapped in the distance. Planes flew past every few minutes, dragging cones of noise. Lichen glimmered on the trees.’

 He also provides some fascinating character sketches of the people he meets on his journeys – an artist on a remote island who makes sculptures from the dead creatures and detritus he finds washed up on the beach, a couple who create what look like hardbacked books but which are actually bound boxes containing objects collected on different walks.  It is hard not to envy MacFarlane’s easy attitude to what sometimes sound like arduous expeditions (he travels light, walks long and is unfussy about where he pitches his tent) and his ability to appreciate just about everything he sees is extremely life-affirming.  The book is a good advertisement for reading up on local flora and fauna before hiking.   Like all successful travel books, The Old Ways will make even the most sedentary of readers wish to go outside and explore.

A Late-comer's View of The Sopranos (Contains Spoiler...)

This month, I became a bit more like most people I know: I watched the entire series of The Sopranos.  At the very end of the final series, Dr Melfi realises that after years of one-to-one sessions, she has done nothing more than enable Tony, that his sociopathic personality is beyond therapy.  And so, after eighty-six hours of watching him shark his way through seven years of his life, we realise that Tony is little more than a two-dimensional thug whose main motivation is instant gratification (food, alcohol, sex, gambling, consumer goods) and keeping his family relatively happy. As David Thomson suggests, in his largely negative assessment of the show, it’s a far cry from the complexity of Michael Corleone.

                But perhaps Thomson is missing the point. Of course, Tony is shallow: he is chiefly defined by what he owns and the money he makes and the simple code of omerta he follows. The packets of money that his cronies give him help finance Tony’s high-rolling lifestyle, help make him attractive to a string of much younger women, help him buy favours from various associates, help him purchase the tokens that keep his wife tolerant of his behaviour and his son and daughter relatively quiescent.

              It’s a simple world in which people can be easily bought, including Tony’s main enabler, his wife Carmela. She prioritises her immediate family over the Christian principles with which she was raised even though she has sharp pangs of guilt about the source of the money she has used to furnish their enormous house and to finance their children’s educations.  Despite her misgivings, like the other mob wives, she plays the role of the attentive, pampered housewife who doesn’t get ‘mixed up’ in her husband’s ‘business’ despite the violent deaths of friends of the family and the money and guns she finds hidden in the house.  When she temporarily separates from Tony, the issue that causes the rupture is Tony’s womanising, not the thuggery and racketeering that finances her lifestyle and which no one wishes to talk about.

                It’s painful to watch her return to Tony in exchange for his assistance in helping her buy a plot of land to start her career as an estate agent, but it is also grimly inevitable as she is just as shallow and self-serving as Tony.  Their son AJ ends up doing much the same thing.  He is about to join the army, after expressing his doubts about the corrupted ways of the world, but then accepts Tony’s counter offer of a position as executive producer on a film financed by mob connection Little Carmine. These are sharp reminders of the various compromises we make, and how we allow malpractice and corruption to thrive when it doesn’t impinge negatively on (or even improves) our own lives. This is why tyrants can thrive where ‘good’ people live.    

For all its bloodletting, The Sopranos is essentially a jet-black comedy, a satire saturated in the cynicism of its times in which nothing ever really changes. By the end, Tony has become a major target for the Brooklyn family and several of his closest henchmen are dead but Meadow is due to marry (the traditional end to a comedy) and his wife and children are still with him, sitting around the table, about to eat yet another hearty meal in an Italian restaurant.  The final black-out leaves the ending to the viewer’s imagination but the scene in which AJ’s friends, the sons of two of Tony’s associates, punish another boy for his failure to re-pay a debt by burning off his toes is perhaps the most fitting conclusion – the cycle of cruelty and selfishness continues.     

A Minor Observation on Foreign Films.

I watched Pak Chan-woo’s ‘The Handmaiden’ at the weekend, a film set in the 1920s with a tricksy plot in which two Korean thieves try to swindle a Japanese heiress.  Much as I enjoyed the sumptuous visuals – the gorgeous interiors of the Edwardian/traditional Japanese hybrid house, the close-ups of exquisitely made-up faces – the film was a little too arch and artificial for me. The incredible attention to details in costume and sets and the quirkily detached characters, reminded me of Wes Anderson’s films, and I wondered whether I would enjoy an English language version of ‘The Handmaiden’, set in a more familiar place.   

                But I suppose much of the enjoyment of watching a ‘foreign’ film involves seeing a place and people who are not familiar (in other words, not Americans), and in learning something new about another country or culture.  For most us, after years of saturation in its culture, the U.S. feels like a second home, even if we have never actually been there. We have seen the insides of a thousand suburban homes and city apartments, watched people drive SUVs on countless multi-laned highways, shop in malls and sit at the chrome finished bars of a hundred diners. And most of us are familiar with Depression-era New York, the wild west and the deep south of the civil rights era. 

And so it is refreshing to simply see something different, to see how people live in a remote village in nineteenth century Jutland in ‘Babette’s Feast’, or to watch the wild gypsy wedding in ‘Gadjo Dilo’ or to hear the drunken throat-singing around the campfire in ‘Mongol’.  Even if the script isn’t up to much, at least we take a trip away from our natural film environment.

This can also apply to movies set closer to home: the grey skies, small houses and poorly-stocked fridges of films set in Britain and Ireland often seem strangely foreign on the big-screen.