Menu

Just a log of books/music/TV/film that I read/watch/listen to/enjoy/find interesting/useful.

Assault on Precinct 13 – John Carpenter.

Classic Carpenter. Ominous, tense, dramatic. People holed up against the odds. Perfect soundtrack to the unfolding menace and LA streetscape.

The Thing – John Carpenter

Classic Carpenter. Ominous, tense, dramatic. People holed up against the odds. Perfect soundtrack to the unfolding menace and Antarctic snowscape. The effects are stunning and grotesque. The cast is great and gives Kurt Russell the opportunity to flex his cred. The scenario of a bunch of guys all compounded up together with a shapeshifting  killer alien that can take human form is superbly expressed. The fear, mistrust, paranoia but also camaraderie and humour is tangible.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

An absolute giant of a story. The language, the descriptive imagination, the expressed sense of journey, odyssey, the maniacal obsession of Ahab. It contains a whole book within a book with the recount of the Italian sailors. You get so close to the whalers work, they’re world. With Ismael as our guide, climb aboard the Pequod for a wonderful adventure in search of ‘The White Whale’.

Repo Man – Alex Cox

Emilio Estevez (Otto) falls into the nefarious world of the Repo Man under the tutelage of a street worn Harry Dean Stanton (Bud). They get involved in the pursuit of an extra-terrestrial Chevy Malibu driven by a lobotomised Fox Harris. Also in pursuit are the hilarious Rodriguez brothers who rib and psyche Bud and Otto at every opportunity. It’s a bizarre and highly entertaining LA punk slacker car movie with some great dialogue and overdubbing in the made for TV version. I gotta watch this again, it’s unreal.

2001: a space odyssey – Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke

Released 1968. Man landed on the moon in 1969. It’s hard to imagine how this film came over. Kubrick said the film is “basically a visual, nonverbal experience” that “hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting”.