Night walks

I was reading this over the Christmas period.  It is one of the beautifully designed little Penguin 'Great Ideas' books.  It is fascinating.  It is basically Dickens describing insomnia-induced walks around London at night.  But it is more of a mental journey, as each street, each building, he passes, triggers a paragraph or two of musing.

My son asked me today if I thought Dickens was overrated.  Far from being overrated, I said I thought he was in fact underrated.  He is a much more powerful writer than he is often given credit for being.  Much darker too.  At his best his work is as good as writing gets.

Shutter island

We watched Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND over Christmas.  The DVD has been sitting on the shelf for weeks now, but we have never been in quite the right mood to each it.  I note that the poster above says that it 'demands multiple viewings'.  I'm not really sure that's true, but I enjoyed it.

I think DiCaprio has turned into a really interesting actor and I thought the opening shots were great.  In fact, the look of it was superb.  It had that Hitchcockian hyper-realism and a great soundtrack.  It was just a shame that the story didn't seem quite strong enough to carry the movie.

Wyeth continued...

Michael Palin's BBC4 programme about Andrew Wyeth inevitably touched on his father, N C Wyeth.  Michael Palin was keen to show his eccentricities and influence on the young Andrew, but he did not seem to be very interested in his work.  He pointed out that he was a very successful illustrator, but he did not point out that he was also a brilliant one.

Father and son are very different as artists and it may be that Palin just did not like N C Wyeth's work.  But it is also true that he is not as well known in the UK as he is in the US.  I've always loved his work.    Very few illustrators get into the business of modelling to the degree that N C Wyeth did - line and wash still dominates (even if the 'wash' may now be done on Photoshop).  N C's illustrations are all about modelling.  They have a depth and weight to them that sets them apart from much of the European illustration output of that era, full of big, muscular, square-jawed men, solid as oak trees.

N C Wyeth's illustrations to R L Stevenson's KIDNAPPED and TREASURE ISLAND are fantastic - although  the locations in both seem to look remarkably like Maine.

Wyeth

It was nice to see a programme about Andrew Wyeth pop up in the listings over the Christmas break.  Unfortunately the programme was fronted by Michael Palin, who is a very nice chap and everything, but did not seem to have much in the way of any particularly fresh or revealing insight into the work.  I assume he admires Andrew Wyeth's paintings and came up with the notion himself, otherwise he was a very odd choice indeed.

That said, few art historians or critics would have done it.  Wyeth rarely gets that kind of attention.  And it is true that some - maybe even a lot - of his output was simply well crafted and nothing more, but the best of it is wonderful, I think.  I love the intensity of the temperas - they have such a haunting atmosphere.  He slowed the world right down to the speed at which he painted it

The ghost story returns

The BBC gave many of us a wonderful Christmas present this year in bringing back to life - if that's quite the right expression - the much loved Ghost Story for Christmas.

I have blogged about these programmes from the 1970s many times before, stating what an influence they were on me - and many others, I'm sure.  I have also been lucky enough to meet Lawrence Gordon Clark, the man who brought those stories to our screens, at the Halifax Ghost Story Festival.

Mark Gatiss was at the helm this time and I'm sure that it is his personal enthusiasm for the project that has resulted in these programmes being revived.  He deserves a medal.  Or some sort of dusty amulet.

Having said all that, I was little bit underwhelmed by THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH - his choice for the film.  As with most of the Lawrence Gordon Clark adaptations, it was an M R James story.  Unfortunately, I don't think it is M R James' strongest.  It relies on a coincidence of such unbelievable proportions it undermines the whole tale.

It is a mistake to think that because a ghost story is inherently fantastical, you do not need to follow the normal rules of logic outside of that part of the story.  The more believable the details of the story are, the more the reader (or viewer) will be pulled in.  I think Gatiss should have shown a bit less respect to the story and given it a tweak.  He did after all move it forward in time a few decades.

But I can't be too hard on it, because I am so pleased to have the Ghost Story strand back.  I just wonder whether its time - as Gordon Clark did with Dickens' THE SIGNALMAN - to leave M R James in peace and go elsewhere for stories.  A version of W W Jacobs THE MONKEY'S PAW perhaps....?

Or...ahem...some other, more recent, purveyor of creepy fiction....

Twinned

The BBC showed an adaptation of THE THIRTEENTH TALE over Christmas.  I haven't read Diane Setterfield's book - though my wife has and was full of praise - but I really enjoyed the film.

The acting was first rate - from all concerned, but especially from Vanessa Redgrave, Olivia Coleman and Madeleine Power who played the younger version of both twins. The locations were excellent too, and it was beautifully shot.  So often these things are shot under incongruous blue skies, but they weren't afraid to film under leaden clouds and it made it all the more atmospheric.

I can say almost nothing about the plot without spoiling it for anyone watching so I will just say that it had a lovely fairy tale feel to it whilst still clinging to the possible (just).  It had some genuinely creepy moments too.

Lets have a bit more of this kind of thing, BBC

Hammer's Hill

I finally got round to watching the recent Hammer adaptation of Susan Hill's THE WOMAN IN BLACK over Christmas.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK is, in my opinion, one of the very few novels that manages to make a ghost story work at that length.  There are many great creepy short stories and the odd novella, but it is a very hard trick to pull off in a novel.  Even Susan Hill herself has found it difficult to repeat.

There was a very good - or I remember it as very good - television adaptation many years ago, and there has of course been a very successful stage version in the meantime.  This adaptation seems to have divided critics and my own friends - some love it, some not so much.  I saw it on DVD and by all accounts, it was much better at the cinema.

It is as hard to make a genuinely creepy movie as it is to write a genuinely creepy novel - so most directors don't try, they simply try to make you jump.  I loved the opening few minutes.  The three girls silently walking to the window and throwing themselves out was wonderfully unsettling and dreamlike, but there weren't enough moments like that.  The Woman in Black herself glimpsed fleetingly in the shadows and a spectral boy climbing out of the mud to approach the house were nice and creepy - and the look of the whole was nice - muted colours and nice locations, but it fell into the trap of going from one 'Boo!' moment to the next.  The problem with that is that by the time you reach the end it will almost always appear a bit weak.  As it did here.

Unlike the ending of the novel, which is every bit as strong as the premise.  And that's a hard trick to pull off.

It wasn't a bad movie - and it did have a real Hammer feel about it (and I mean that in a good way) and it was so much better than many of its kind - simply by dint of being rooted in such a good story - but it could have been much better.  It could have been troubling.  The television adaptation has clung to me ever since like a bad memory.  I will have forgotten this one in a few weeks.