Sam Downing

Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, aka your new favourite film stars

Before everyone saw/sees The Artist they had/will have this exact conversation: “Every film critic in the world loves it, and it’s nominated for a million Oscars, but I’m not sure I’ll like it because it’s in black and white and it’s silent and it’ll probably be horrible.”

Critically beloved, Oscar-nominates bores are standard fare, especially at this time of year, so: fair enough. But The Artist is not boring or horrible! It’s really, really, great: unique and joyful and captivating and – best of all – unpretentious. Director Michel Hazanavicius didn’t make a black-and-white silent film then shove a stick up its ass just to show stuffy film critics how much he knows about cinema. He made a black-and-white silent movie because he’s passionate about cinema. The Artist glows with that passion.

There isn’t much to the plot – silent movie star is pushed aside by talkies movie star¹ but they fall in love anyway. That’s pretty much it. With an adorable dog. Spoiler alert! – but The Artist is nevertheless super-engaging. Because the story unfolds via expressions and body language and the occasional title card, you’re forced to pay attention. And this is a pretty rare thing in an age where everyone’s attention span is about three seconds long. Succumb to the siren song of your smartphone, and you’ll miss an important plot point… or at least the adorable dog doing something adorable.

There’s also the novelty factor of watching a black-and-white film – everyone onscreen radiates that spectacular monochrome glow – with almost no dialogue – “This is how people used to watch movies? Neat!”. But the old-timey gimmick doesn’t dominate The Artist to the point where that’s all there is to it. This is mostly down to leads Jean Dujardin² (his smile!) and Bérénice Bejo (her smile!), who are marvellous terrific wonderful amazing. Their chemistry! Please cast them opposite each other in another movie, Hollywood. I want to watch them together again and again and again and again.

Sadly, like many films before it, The Artist does not feature enough Missi Pyle. But it does feature just the right amounts of James Cromwell and John Goodman. I didn’t expect any of them to be in this film!

Don’t force yourself to see The Artist just because it’s got lots of Academy Awards nominations and you want to sound smart pretending you liked it. Go see it because it’s a fun, straight-up entertaining film.

1. “Talkies”. Isn’t that a great word. “Talkies”. What a shame it fell out of fashion. Let’s all start using it again! “Hey, want to go to the talkies tonight?” “Nah, I hate 3D talkies.” [↩]
2. Which is sexy-French for John Gardener. God, English is so dull. [↩]

Clockwork Prince is Cassandra Clare’s sixth book, on top of a heap of her fan-fiction, so by now we know what kind of writer she is. More importantly, she knows what kind of writer she is, and Prince is laden with her hallmarks: zippy banter; (borderline pretentious, questionably necessary) literary quotes and references adorning every other page; irresistibly beautiful but tortured bad boys to entice the plucky heroines.

It’d be so easy to write Clare’s books off as florid trash – and they are certainly floridly trashy – except there’s something about them that just works. Even when the dialogue sounds more like something from a contemporary teen drama than 19th-century Victorian London, you keep reading. Even when the stakes of the plot seem to have nicked out for a cigarette break (a long one), you keep reading. Even when Clare tosses in yet another ”They almost kissed but something interrupted them”-style, super-melodramatic cliffhanger… yeah.

(Minor spoilers ahead for Clockwork Prince‘s prequel, Clockwork Angel.)

The “clockwork prince” of the title is Mortmain, a shady fellow with ties to London’s Downworlders – Clare’s collective term for vampires, werewolves, warlocks, and other supernatural riff-raff. He had a hand in the mysterious birth of Tessa Grey, who’s grown up to learn she can take on anyone’s physical appearance, though she’s still yet to discover the true origins and nature of her power.

In Angel, Tessa fell in with London’s Shadowhunters, particularly the handsome but emotionally unavailable Will – a character delivered straight from the Cassandra Clare Factory for Devastatingly Handsome But Emotionally Unavailable Male Leads – and his kind-hearted best friend Jem. In Prince, the trio is tasked with uncovering Mortmain’s dastardly master plan, which apparently involves building menacing robots to kill all the Shadowhunters.

The Shadowhunters spend most of their time gossiping about Mortmain, yet strangely, he never appears in the book named after him. It means there’s never any real threat to Clockwork Prince - no jeopardy. Sure, there’s a subplot about mean Shadowhunters wanting to kick Tessa’s allies out of their headquarters. But there’s never any sense that anything bad will actually happen, and the book kind of shuffles to a close without ever really challenging its characters. In the last few pages I expected something shocking to jump out and ruin everything. It doesn’t.

The problem, I guess, is that Prince suffers from classic “middle instalment in a trilogy” syndrome. It’s a bridge between the origin story and the grand finale, without much to prop it up on its own.

But I doubt that will matter much to Clare’s ardent aficionados, who read these books for one thing: sex. And there’s plenty of that. Sexual tension runs high between Tessa, Jem, Will, and all the supporting characters – conveniently, Shadowhunters’ mores are way more relaxed than those of their Victorian peers. There’s love potions and secret weddings and nighttime trysts and more and more and more and more till the book practically throbs in your hands.

It is ridiculous. And yet, I will keep reading.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare

Young Adult is not the zany black comedy suggested by its trailer (which, by the way, basically spoils the entire movie, so you should probably avoid it. Here’s the link!). This is a dark, twisted-and-not-in-that-cute-Hollywood-way portrait of a disturbed woman, but it’s a portrait that doesn’t say enough about its subject.

(Light spoilers ahead.)

The trailer does get the basic plot right: beyond-beautiful Charlize Theron is Mavis Gary, the author of a failing series of young-adult novels who returns to her hometown to reclaim her high-school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson), who’s now married with a kid.

Soon after arriving in Mercury, a sort of Everywhere/Nowheresville that could stand in for pretty much any small town in America (or Australia, for that matter – the strip mall/fast-food landscape looks the same), Mavis encounters Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former classmate who was brutally beaten and crippled when he was at school. The two bond – who doesn’t love connecting with friends of the jocks who terrorised you as a teenager? – even as Matt tries to talk Mavis out of her ridiculous plans with Buddy.

The problem with Young Adult is that when I ask myself “What is this film about?”, I can’t really come up with an answer. “Continuing to behave like a high-schooler well into your adulthood has bleak consequences.” And… that’s it? The plot doesn’t move beyond that premise; it’s not thoughtful enough to be a character study, too sour to be a comedy.

Mavis sneers at pretty much everyone who enters her field of vision, but I didn’t dislike her because she’s so unlikeable. Unlikeable characters are fine in principle, and it’s not like I hated her: she’s best when her powerful sarcasm is turned up to 11, scoffing when a date boasts about travelling in South-East Asia and rolling her eyes at a stranger’s baby (strangers’ babies are the worst). Nor would Young Adult have been better if Mavis had experienced some vague redemption – that would’ve been way worse, actually – but unlikeable characters still need to offer some reason for us to follow them, and Mavis doesn’t.

She doesn’t feel complicated as much as she feels disparate; she’s mentally ill and an alcoholic and there’s a late reveal about an adolescent miscarriage that probably fuelled her present-day miscarriage, but none of it gels, and some her characterisations are just obvious (the bit where she looks over a chart used to teach autistic kids about emotions, then she remarks that she doesn’t feel any. CLUNK). There’s too little sense of Mavis and what her regular life is like, or how a bitchy high-school prom queen even became a writer in the first place.

(There’s a vague implication Mavis writes young-adult novels because she’s stuck in permanent adolescence herself, which I emphatically reject, and it suggests screenwriter Diablo Cody is pretty ignorant about YA as a whole. It’s not just Sweet Valley High these days.)

It’s not just Mavis who’s so oddly drawn: what is Young Adult trying to say about small-town America? Should we share Mavis’s contempt for Mercury and her classmates who stayed behind? Or come away believing that even escaping your past doesn’t guarantee you’ll escape mediocrity? I have no idea.

Director Jason Reitman offered a better portrait of a stunted adult in Up in the Air. Watch that instead.

Cherie Priest’s novel Boneshaker, the first instalment in her series The Clockwork Century, went heavy on the steampunk and the zombies. You might assume its follow-up, Dreadnought, would do the same, but by doing so you’d make an ass of u and me.

Sure, Dreadnought has elements of steampunk (walking robots appear right at the beginning) and zombies (which appear right at the end), but this is, ultimately, the story of a woman on a train.

Said woman is Mercy Lynch, a no-nonsense nurse working in a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. She learns her father is dying, which raises two problems: first, she hasn’t seen him since he ran out on her and her mother years ago; second, he lives all the way on the other side of the country.

But Mercy is weary of the gore she bandages up every day, and grieving the recent death of her husband, and so embarks on the long journey – travelling via dirigible (hey, another steampunk element!), then riverboat, then train. And what a train! The Dreadnought is a formidable Union war engine, loaded with weapons, carrying a mysterious cargo in the front and an even more mysterious cargo in the back.

Dreadnought is set in the same universe as Boneshaker, and features a handful of the same characters, but it’s a remarkably different novel to its predecessor… which is not a flaw! Once you adjust to Priest’s languid pace - it takes Mercy forever to finally board the eponymous Dreadnought – it’s a pleasure to read.

The American Civil War isn’t my favourite historical period, but Priest mostly makes it interesting – “mostly” because there’s still the odd infodump that I skipped over. The dry, oh-so-American tone is pitch-perfect, though the book’s greatest achievement is Mercy herself: she’s strong and capable and smart, and the best, most memorable thing about Dreadnought.

There is one thing the book is lacking: a map of the US, or at least all the states Mercy passes through on her journey. Most of the time I couldn’t picture her location in my head. My apologies, America, for not knowing exactly how all your states fit together.

Previously: Book review: Boneshaker, Cherie Priest

Here is what I was asked a million times (literally) last year: “Hey have you read Bossypants? Now have you read Bossypants? When are you going to read Bossypants? You should read Bossypants right now. Why haven’t you read Bossypants yet?!”

Like, god, I get it, sheez, I need to read Bossypants already. So I did. (It’s such an easy book I finished it in a day. So there’s really no excuse for not having read it. Why haven’t you read Bossypants yet?!)

And it’s great! Is it really necessary to point out that this is a smart and funny book? We all know Tina Fey is a smart and funny woman. We’re all fans of 30 Rock and Mean Girls and Mom Jeans here. (Right? If you answered “No”, GTFO.)

She’s an attractive woman, too, but it feels weird pointing that out for a couple reasons. First: would you point it out in a review of a male comedian-writer-actor’s book? Why must a woman’s achievements still be framed around her appearance? Bossypants is a pretty explicitly feminist¹ book, and Fey raises a lot of questions like these, mostly arguing that institutionalised sexism exists less because everyone is a misogynist and more because it goes unchallenged too often.

The other reason it’s weird to point out Fey’s attractiveness is that she doesn’t seem comfortable with that label. The book is so rife with references to her physical flaws – 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon is the personification of all those neuroses – that it’d feel like she was exploiting the “I’m so not attractive!” thing, if it didn’t read so genuinely. It’s startling to come to the chapter in Bossypants that documents Fey’s discomfort at photoshoots (fame isn’t as eternally glamorous as everyone makes out?!), and even more startling when she name-drops her own pubic hair (famous women have that?!).

But even as she’s writing about herself there’s an impression that Fey is very guarded, unwilling to open herself up completely for us. There is a genuine sense of her personality revealed in Bossypants, but there’s also a sense of the “real-life” Tina Fey lurking off the page, unseen and unrevealed.

Which is fine! Since when is Fey obliged to offer a reality TV-style, warts-and-more-warts expose of every aspect of her personality? Instead, Bossypants is more akin to a really great stand-up show, in book form. There are a lot of LLOLs (that’s literal laugh-out-louds) in there.

And, unexpectedly, the best and funniest bits are Fey’s recollections of her off-camera life: her awkward formative years, her early dabblings in improv comedy (I admire her unironic, earnest, heartfelt passion for the form), her experiences with marriage and motherhood. I say “unexpected” because much is made of the book’s anecdotes about Alec Baldwin and Oprah and Sarah Palin and who have you, and they’re interesting, but they’re not what makes the book.

So what I’m saying is: why haven’t you read Bossypants yet?!

1. Important note!: “Feminist” is not meant to imply “Overbearingly feminist”! [↩]

The best argument against the existence of the supernatural is this: if all that stuff was real, someone would exploit it for profit. (There’s a great xkcd comic about it.) In Holly Black‘s series The Curse Workers, magic is real – and it’s exploited for profit.

Curse workers – those who possess the ability to alter memories, invade dreams, transform one thing into another, or other fantastic powers – rule New Jersey’s organised crime. Think The Sopranos with magic, but instead of a focus on Tony Soprano our hero is Cassel Sharpe, the youngest member of a worker family tangled up with a powerful mob syndicate.

White Cat, the first Curse Workers instalment, detailed Cassel’s discovery of his place within his family and the worker world. It was a great book, honestly, but felt light-weight despite its heavy themes – high on set-up, low on plot. But! All that establishment in White Cat means we know the rules coming into its sequel Red Glove, freeing Black up to get into the meaty stuff. And she gets right to the meaty stuff.

(Some spoilers ahead for White Cat.) (more…)

It’s been a looooong time between instalments, but Scott Westerfeld‘s Leviathan trilogy wraps up with a sterling conclusion in Goliath. Probably the best word to describe the third and final part of the series is “cracking”… which is also the best word to describe the series as a whole.

Minor spoilers ahead for Leviathan, Behemoth and Goliath.

So! Fresh off their adventures in Constantinople, our heroes Alek – secretly a prince – and Deryn – secretly a girl – venture to Siberia, Japan and then New York City in the flying warship Leviathan. On their quest the duo encounters several historical figures – including Nikolai Tesla, William Randolph Hearst and Pancho Villa – and finally confronts the romantic tension that’s been brewing between them the past two books.

Alek and Deryn are terrific characters, but Westerfeld’s greatest accomplishment is the world he’s built: set in the lead-up to World War I, the Leviathan trilogy pitches “Darwinists” (roughly equivalent to the Allied powers, who genetically engineer animals into terrifying war beasts) against “Clankers” (the Central powers, who battle with colossal hulking machines). There’s a lot going on here. It might’ve been laboured, or too complicated. But Westerfeld handles it all so cleverly!

Grown-ups will get into Goliath but be aware it falls squarely into the YA camp (never a bad thing, but some adults are weird about reading books “for” teens). Know a smart kid who you want to indoctrinate into the awesomeness of steampunk and alternate history and science-fiction? Give them this whole series.

If there’s a problem with Goliath, it’s that the story hints – and Westerfeld’s afterword makes it explicit – that 20th century history turns out very different because of Alek and Deryn. Their actions basically stop a world war. And that’s only a problem because World War I is this huge terrible epic thing, and the threat of it looms over all three books, but then it… doesn’t happen (or at least, happens on a much smaller scale than in our timeline). Which, on the one hand: yay, WWI averted, millions of lives spared. But on the other hand, from a narrative perspective, the climax loses some of its oomph.

But it’s a minor quibble. Especially since I don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of Alek and Deryn – or at least, not the last we’ve seen of the Darwinist/Clanker universe. With an entire century of history ready to be rewritten, Westerfeld’s got loads of territory left to explore. (Also, I want to see the perspicacious loris Bovril talking for reals.)

Lastly, major credit must go to Keith Thompson’s beautiful, lively illustrations, one of the true delights of all three books.

Previously: Book review: Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld, Book review: Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld

Remember that feeling after you finished school or university or college or whatever but before you got moved out into the Real Adult World? That feeling of being surrounded by an overwhelming number of opportunities, of being paralysed by the dread of choosing the wrong one, of not really being sure what was going to happen next, of wondering if this is really what life is meant to be like for the rest of forever, of not wanting to move forward but not forward but not wanting to stay? The Magician King is about that feeling. And magic.

(Some spoilers ahead for the prequel, The Magicians.)

Quentin Coldwater is a king of Fillory, the magical land from a series of books he adored as a child, which he discovered was real in the previous instalment. He’s growing fat and comfortable.

But Quentin being Quentin, he’s still unhappy. He wants more, and he gets it when he ventures out on a seemingly straightforward tax-collecting mission in Fillory’s farthest-flung tropical corners: circumstance tosses him and his co-royal Julia – his childhood friend who, you’ll remember, failed the entrance exam to magic academy Brakebills in The Magicians – back into the real world, where they stumble into a quest to save Fillory and magic itself.

The synopsis reads like standard magical-fantasy-land stuff, but Lev Grossman is awesome at blowing up your expectations of those kinds of stories. In Magicians he turned “boy finds out he’s magical, is educated in the ways of magic” tropes on their head. In Magician King he does the same for “boy finds out he must save the world”.

These books also address the realities of fantasy, as dumb as that sounds. If your teenage fantasies came true as an adult, you’d probably be pretty disappointed, as Quentin is. And, like Quentin, you’d soften the blow with layers of hip, disaffected cynicism and knowing pop-culture references. (You wouldn’t see Hermione using as iPhone, as King‘s Australian witch Poppy does)

And this attitude is important because, you know what, fantasy – if taken literally – is kind of lame. (I say that as a fantasy aficionado, FYI.) Grossman recognises this, which stops his work from falling into the twee trap of the classics he’s working with.

Like The Magicians, The Magician King meanders all over the place: Quentin visits Venice and talks to a dragon, then later descends into the underworld. He meets a sloth called Abigail along the way. It’s dreamlike, patched together, and it suits the story wonderfully.

Unlike its predecessor, King is not just about Quentin. Julia’s desperately sad, compelling backstory unfolds in tandem with the A-plot: these flashbacks to her magical education tell a dark, grimly satisfying tale with a devastating kick-in-the-balls climax. Julia’s magic is old and dangerous, nothing like Harry Potter or even grown-up stuff like True Blood: magic is barely under human control, and there are real consequences to using it. It’s fascinating.

I guess with sequels there’s always the question: is The Magician King better than The Magicians? But I don’t think the question even matters here. One is foundation, the other is build. Magicians was startlingly fresh, but Magician King enriches what we already know.

Grossman has confirmed there’s a third book coming (yay!) – he’s created too rich a universe not to explore further, and the end of King leaves Quentin’s story wide open. Like the magic in his books, the potential of Grossman’s fantasy world is near-limitless.

Previously: Book review: The Magicians, Lev Grossman

Rory Deveaux has two near-death experiences in about as many months: the first comes when she nearly chokes on dinner soon after quitting her native Louisiana for London – where she enrols at Wexford, a posh boarding school smack in the middle of Jack the Ripper’s old stomping ground.

The location is important, because Rory’s arrival coincides with the start of a series of murders that mirror the Ripper’s infamous, gruesome killings. Is it a copycat at work, or something even more nightmarish?

As Rippermania grips London, Rory encounters a mysterious man who her (adorably English) roommate Jazza can’t see. He’s a ghost, and Rory’s rare ability to see him grants her entry into a team that hunts London’s “shades”… which ultimately leads to her second near-death experience at the climax of the book, as the Ripper’s killings come to a head.

The Name of the Star has some great ingredients: English boarding school hijinks, murders, young people with implausibly awesome jobs with the police. But something about it is all a bit unsatisfying: I wanted the story to be more sinister, more romantic, more London. Johnson only captures flickering senses of the city and the sensational dread of the Ripper’s return, and the plot twists are often contrived; when the villain’s motives were revealed (via monlogue), my reaction was pretty much, “Why would anyone go to all the effort of X just to achieve Y?” And many of the supporting characters fall flat, though others are terrifically vivid – especially Rory’s oft-mentioned, never-seen American relatives.

I really wanted to enjoy this but I just wanted more; it’s less than the sum of its parts. Johnson is a lively, funny writer but The Name of the Star feels like it’s going through the motions of setting up a new supernatural YA series, rather than transporting us to spooky and mysterious London.

The Magicians is sinister and dangerous and adult, high-stakes and smart and sharp, a fantasy novel about fantasy novels and for those of us who read them, and an exploration what happens when your wildest childhood fantasies are realised in adulthood. (Spoiler alert: it’s never as good as you hoped.) It’s a remarkable book.

Quentin Coldwater is a Brooklyn teenager who grew up obsessed with Fillory and Further – a Narnia-ish series of books written in the ’30s, about a family of English children who escape World War I by nipping out to a parallel world populated by evil witch villains and friendly animal companions. Now preparing for college, Quentin is unenthusiastic about his future despite being a young genius who could do anything he wants.

What Quentin really wants – what a lot of us want, actually – is for the world to be a bigger, more fantastic place than it is. Unlike us readers, though, he’s not constrained by the limitations of reality: his wish comes true when he’s invited to take the entrance examination at Brakebills, an elite college of magic in upstate New York. Unfortunately he’s not accepted, and that’s where the novel ends. Just kidding! He gets in.

Quentin’s education at Brakebills is incredible – its highlight comes when Quentin and his whole class are transfigured into geese and fly all the way to Antarctica for one freezing, rigorous semester. Nevertheless, he’s unsatisfied – the magic world is ultimately as mundane and difficult and disappointing as the real world. The only place he might still discover happiness is in Fillory, which may not be as fictional as he thought. Unfortunately he never gets to Fillory, and the that’s where the novel ends. Just kidding! He finds it.

If you ever dreamed of visiting a fantasy land from a much-loved book, you must must must read The Magicians. It explicitly references a tonne of fantasy novels, especially the Harry Potter series – the simplest way to describe it is “Harry Potter for adults”, or maybe “The Secret History set at Hogwarts”. The magic is mixed in with sex and alcohol and maddening social politics, and a dark streak of danger: in Harry Potter you always kind of knew Harry and Ron and Hermione were shielded from death, but there’s no similar sense here. It’s telling there’s no Dumbledore or Aslan or Gandalf stand-in – Quentin’s teachers are an unsure and wary of magic’s power as he is.

The pace of The Magicians is bloated and messy but its episodic nature suits Grossman’s story (it’s both easy and impossible to see how it might be adapted into a TV series). It’s never obvious where Quentin’s adventures will take him, though in hindsight it all seems inevitable. But it’s often hard to get a fix on the characters – oftentimes Grossman will describe some supporting character as being a certain way, and it’s the first time you got that sense from the character.

I dreamed about this book. The moment I finished it I picked up the recently released sequel, The Magician King. It’s dumb and hackneyed to review a book about magic and call it “enchanting”, but The Magicians really is enchanting.