Sharp Objects gets rated 18 by the BBFC

I finished reading Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects this week. The book has been turned into an 8-part HBO miniseries, and although I’m yet to watch it, it had very much been on my radar due to the expert way it had been marketed: ‘From the director of Big Little Lies, from the producers of Get Out, from the author of Gone Girl, and starring Amy Adams’. Any semi-cineliterate individual will know that that is a killer recipe for success.

‘Killer’ being the operative word. The plot revolves around a journalist, Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), who returns to her stifling Missouri hometown to investigate the disappearance of two young girls in the town. Having a tonne of baggage herself, including strained relationships with her frosty mother, the investigation causes Camille to revisit some of her demons, including the death of her beloved sister Marian, a death she never got over.

Film review: FALLEN ANGEL (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Eric Stanton, a penniless, down on his luck conman arrives in a Californian coastal town and instantly falls for Stella, the resident siren. Unfortunately for him, he’s not the only one to have fallen under her spell, as all the men in the town are equally smitten with her.

Film review: REPEAT PERFORMANCE (Alfred L. Werker, 1947)

Just before the turn of the New Year of 1947, renowned stage actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) shoots her emotionally abusive husband Barney, having reached her limit regarding his philandering and alcoholism. She regrets it immediately, wishing for the opportunity to go back in time to avoid making this mistake. Miraculously, as the clock chimes midnight, her wish is granted, and she finds she has been transported back to the beginning of 1946.

Alfred L. Werker’s drama plays like a blend of It’s a Wonderful Life with Groundhog Day, via the well-known trope of errant husbands. There is no doubt of the protagonist’s devotion to her cheating husband, even if, like Bette Davis’ character in Of Human Bondage, he doesn’t display any qualities that merit such love.

Despite Barney being a total cad, it is revealed that he, a playwright, gave Sheila her first big break as an actress, and thus, her patience towards him is heavily inflected with gratitude. But as her close friend William notes, ‘You can’t feel grateful to him forever. That’s going to wear thin at some point’.

Whilst Sheila’s success as an actress is part of the reason why she loves him so much, it’s precisely this why Barney’s so embittered towards her. Just as his play was the springboard for Sheila’s career, it was also the last good thing he produced, and watching his wife thrive whilst his own career stagnates fomented increasing feelings of bitterness towards her.

Love, Emma

This is a BBFC-ccentric blog. In the great tradition of the BBFC, I will now preface articles on film ratings with a film rating (how meta, eh?).

This entry would be rated 12A for references to murder, sexual threat, racist behaviour and snide digs at certain druggie actresses.

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Midnight Sun, a film which I have no interest in seeing (it stars that meth-head Bella Thorne (for future reference, just so you know, whenever I refer to ‘Meth-head’, I’m talking about Bella Thorne, and ‘Cokehead’ is Cara Delevingne), recently got handed a rather interesting BBFC insight.

It is rated 12A purely for ‘underage drinking’.

The extended insight reads:

There are scenes glamorising alcohol use in which teenagers, including some who are underage, attend a party where they play drinking games and do shots.

Seems a pretty draconic reason to hand out a 12A certificate, no? The actual 12A rating itself I’m not going to quibble with too much, as it got PG-13 in the States and 12A in Ireland, so it’s probable that the BBFC just didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb by giving it a PG rating.

But at least Ireland came up with a semi-plausible reason for their 12A, citing ‘moderate sex references’. By giving a film a 12A purely for underage drinking, the BBFC have opened up an unwelcome can of worms, a can of worms which BBFC pedants like me are quick to catch on to.

See, Love, Simon, another 12A-rated film, also contains a party scene where the characters (who are in High School, and thus underage), drank alcohol. Yet Love, Simon is rated 12A for ‘infrequent strong language, moderate sex references’, with no mention of the underage drinking in the extended insight or short insight.

Film review: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

Renowned sleuth Hercule Poirot finds himself in the first class carriage of the Orient Express, due from Istanbul to London. In torrid and icy weather, the train gets derailed, after which he discovers that Ratchett (Johnny Depp), an indecorous art wheeler dealer who was travelling on the carriage, has been murdered, by 12 stab wounds, spread indiscriminately around the body. 

In isolating the suspects to the cohort of first class passengers, he interviews each of them to find out whodunnit. However, each person he speaks to happens to be, rather inconveniently, being imprecise with the truth.

I like how Kenneth Branagh's gone for the pretence of wanting alphabetical billing, yet conveniently abandoned that idea when it comes to Lucy Boynton. I wonder why?

Film review: THE THIRD ALIBI (Montgomery Tully, 1961)

Composer Norman Martell (Laurence Payne) is the very definition of would pass in 2017 parlance as 'fuckboy'. Married to a devoted wife Helen (Patricia Dainton), he nonetheless carries on with her sister Peggy, which leads her to getting knocked up.

Out of betrayal and spite, his wife refuses to grant him the divorce he needs and being the nefarious individual that he is, Norma devises a plan to dispose of her, with the help of his mistress and a piece of recording equipment so that he has a watertight alibi.

Film review: THE EYES OF MY MOTHER (Nicolas Pesce, 2016)

My second film viewed at the BFI London Film Festival, a surprising choice for me, a horror movie!
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Francisca lives an unusual but tranquil life with her reticent father and hands-on surgeon mother, who teaches her all about dissection, secluded from the test of the village. One day, her sheltered upbringing is rocked when a man purporting to be a salesman murders her mother, thus triggering and endless sense of longing, as well as morbid curiosity about the human, within her. This fascination with human bodies and a desperate need not to be alone manifests itself in devastating ways.

Horror is not one of my preferred genres (FYI, those would be 1) romance, 2) drama, 3) comedy), and the influx of mindless torture porn titles a la Hostel in recent years has made me even more averse to it. But The Eyes of My Mother is one of those rare things: a horror movie with brains and a beating heart.

In Francisca, you have a beguiling protagonist, whose motivations for her destructive actions are not jammed down your throat with a ham-fisted tale of past tragedy, but instead, hinted at in Kika Magalhães's haunting performance. Throughout the film, and whilst carrying out villainous acts, her character maintains a placid, almost cold facade. Yet the more intimate scenes where she speaks to her dead mother, betray her true vulnerability. The film's ability to make us empathize with such a monstrous character really cannot be applauded enough.

It helps that Magalhães, who was consulted by Pesce throughout his screenwriting process, also got to inject parts of herself into the character she portrays. In a scene where she dances freely to a piece of music, this was one of the actress' mother's favourite pieces. Having this personal touches injects flavour into Magalhães' mesmeric performance, a welcome subversion of how females in horror movies are usually presented.

The black and white cinematography, selected because director Nicolas Pesce wanted to homage the movies of the 1950s that he adored (in a Q&A following the film, he revealed a penchant for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, good man) suits the stark, bare set, and effectively conveys Francisca's heartbreakingly bleak view on the world. The jarring score adds to the sense of dread and discomfort that builds steadily throughout the film's 76 minute running time.

Nicolas Pesce, like Quentin Tarantino, is a director who loves films. His influences are peppered throughout the film, from the keeping a person barely alive held captive (evoking Takashi Miike's disturbing Audition), to the Alamodovarian underlying theme of the importance our parents play on our formation. Also like Quentin Tarantino, who's dextrous employment of the 'conceal and reveal' in Reservoir Dogs, Pesce fully understands that the best way to unsettle the audience is to not show them the darkest moments, but to leave it to their imagination.

Although Francisca's actions throughout the film are horrifying, the depiction of these are afforded surprising economy of expression; a murder will be indicated with a puddle of blood shown on the floor. The jumping from the serial-killing to the mundane also creates some off-kilter tonal jumps that evoke nervous laughter in the audience. However, there are some arresting images in the film, which impacts on a strongly visceral level.

Overall, The Eyes of My Mother is one of the most intelligent, haunting horror movies created. Pesce (who, depressingly, is only 3 months older than me) deserves a huge amount of credit for subverting the hoary horror movie tropes and put his own organic spins on them. In doing so, he has created Francisca, an enigmatic murderess for the ages.

8/10

Film review: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (Tate Taylor, 2016)

Rachel, a depressed 30-something alcoholic, embarks on a destructive Groundhog Day of a routine: taking a train which goes past her ex husband's house and peering at his newfound state of matrimonial bliss with the woman he cheated on her with, and their baby.

A few houses down from this seemingly perfect family is another equally photogenic, younger, couple, Megan and Scott, who have a penchant for shagging in clear view of commuters. One day, on her usual voyeuring, Rachel notices that Megan has switched up sexual partners, and, bringing up dark memories of her own, she reacts adversely, getting wasted and getting off the train at the station where she used to live. A while later, Megan goes missing.

In the title role, Emily Blunt is fantastic, giving a career best  turn. Her Rachel would be laughable if she weren't so pathetic, sipping vodka out of a plastic bottle, scaring off other commuters with her slurred speech and still pining for a relationship that long outgrew her.

Due to blackouts she gets from her deleterious drinking problem, her memory on the night of Megan's departure is hazy, rendering her a compelling yet unreliable narrator. Usually such a beautiful woman, Blunt de-glams considerably to play Rachel, looking quite rough indeed. She also convincingly plays drunk, no mean feat, given most attempts to act inebriated usually veer into insufferable caricature (see: Jennifer Lawrence as Rosalyn in American Hustle). 

With a stagger and slurred speech, Blunt evokes sympathy from the audience for such a broken woman, particularly her impassioned drunken monologues, which could be given from many a hammered young woman I’ve encountered on the 11.15pm train home, haha. That she was completely sober during filming (Blunt was pregnant), renders her performance even more remarkable.

As the audience tries to discern fact from fabrication, Megan and Anna, Tom's new wife, enter the fray with their narratives. In the novel, the story is told from the P.O.V. of all three of these women, but in film form, such a fussy storytelling device is frustrating and distracting. The end product feels like a very poor man's Rashômon, not aided by an awful script that features, amongst other things, whiny voiceovers from Rachel and Megan, and clunky conversations between characters. Note to the screenwriter: lines like 'I'm not the girl I used to be', and 'I'm the mistress of re-invention' don't really suit the big screen. They'd be better suited to stage. Or a bad shampoo commercial.

Furthermore, every single character in The Girl on the Train, from the therapist who Megan was confiding in to the incompetent cop investigating the case, are unlikable. The three main males in the film were all quite misogynistic in their own ways, and thus, I simply wasn't engaged with the plot. You find yourself not really caring what happened to Megan, and whodunnit. Although the plot 'twist', when it hits, is as contrived as it is predictable.

Finally, the film suffers from a crisis of identity, as Tate Taylor wants it to be both sensual (sex scenes pepper the film, but they’re loveless, mechanical, and as a result, completely unerotic) and unsettling at the same time. What he actually gets is a movie that is both bland and dull.

Emily Blunt deserves a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her tremendously convincing depiction of a fragile woman. Whether she gets one remains to be seen, but sadly, I have my doubts; it is a strong year for Best Actress with buzz surrounding a three-way frontrunner status for Emma Stone in La La Land, Natalie Portman in Jackie and hopefully the eventual winner, Viola Davis in Fences (it's Viola's time!).

Usually, for an actress to get nominated for her performance in a thriller (a genre that is not really one of Oscars' preferred), the film has to have fared well with the moviegoing public, as Gone Girl (the third highest grossing 18-rated movie in the UK after 50 Shades of Grey and Wolf of Wall Street) and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did. What those two films had, which The Girl on the Train lacks, was an extremely adroit director in the form of David Fincher, who's dexterous ability to manipulate the audience helped Rosamund Pike and Rooney Mara, respectively, give performances that transcended their films' pulpy roots.

Tate Taylor is, lamentably, a less gifted storyteller, seems to feel that, when all else fails, he can always go to Plan B: heavy-handed close-ups of Blunt's blotchy face. The actress deserves so much better than the director, or the film, have to offer.

5/10

Film review: GONE GIRL (David Fincher, 2014)

Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel on which the film is based and for which she wrote for screen herself, was ubiquitous on the Tube throughout 2012 and to a lesser extent, last year. It opens with a quote from playwright Tony Kushner that reads: “Love is the world’s infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.” Fincher’s big-screen adaptation of the book captures the essence of this quote perfectly, slowly biding its time to illustrate the thin love between love and hate, and how, when it’s crossed, marriage morphs into deadly bouquet of barbed wire.

Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a writer who lost his job in the recession in NYC, returned to his hometown of North Carthage, Missouri with his beautiful and decorated wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), a Manhattanite who suffered a similar plight. On the afternoon of their fifth wedding anniversary, he returns home to find she’s missing. A table has been upended and glass shatters are all over his dining room floor. He calls the local cops to investigate, but events transpire and soon he becomes their prime suspect.

Meanwhile, the film gives us Amy’s side of the story in the form of diary entries. The early entries are just as saccharine as described in the novel, from the flirtatious banter the couple first exchange at a party, to the way Nick poses as a journalist at a press event for ‘Amazing Amy’, the book series of Amy’s parents which is based on her childhood, to propose for her. This latter detail was actually missing from the novel, but played out on the big screen, has an appropriate Hollywoodesque touch which shows just how photogenic the couple are, not to mention the potential in their relationship.

However, as Amy notes herself, the true test of a marriage comes when the recession hits, they are both laid off their writing jobs (Nick, for a men’s magazine, Amy, putting her Ivy League Masters-level education to good use constructing personality quizzes). Nick’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and they move back to Missouri, a decision she resents not being consulted about. Further diary entries reveal Amy wanted a baby but Nick didn’t, and when pestered about it, he turned violent. The diary ends with Amy wanting to buy a gun, fearing her husband may murder her.

These entries, however, jar with Nick’s side of the story. He protests that he’s the one who wanted and a baby and she was opposed, and the spending habits of his described by her, non-existent. But it doesn’t look good for Nick. Evidence is mounting up against him: credit card bills for expensive golf clubs, a neighbour who claims to be best friends with Amy even though he never even saw them speak, and most damningly, a pert 20-something mistress.

With a running time of 2 and a half hours, Fincher takes his time telling the story, but even then, a whole lot of detail was cut from the novel, so it would be churlish to complain. Practically every scene is a necessity. His leads are both very good, perhaps surprisingly so.

That Ben Affleck has two Oscars to his name is a piece of trivia that surprises many, given the quantity of clunkers on his CV, but in the unlikable, unreliable role of Nick, he’s spot-on. As the main detective examining the case Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens, doing the character justice with her brand of non-nonsense girl power) notes, we can’t tell if Nick is saying the wrong things because he’s actually that dumb. Affleck imbues Nick with just the right amount of moral ambiguity for us to hope that he didn’t do it.

As the eponymous lead, Rosamund Pike absolutely knocks it out of the park. It might initially jar to see an actress so used to being typecast as the pretty airhead a la Jane Bennett (in one of Nick and Amy’s happier days, they romp in a library, and Pride and Prejudice is mentioned, a quasi-meta touch) in such a villainous role, but it is my belief that this is the part Pike has waited her entire life for, and she seizes it with aplomb. Whether she’s Amy the glamorous Upper East Side princess with the unwanted mild celebrity status, or Amy the poor shunned housewife fearing for her life, she’s never less than fully convincing, which makes the starkness of (what we perceive to be) Nick’s lies ever the more brazen.

In my favourite scene of the entire film, Pike's line-reading on Amy’s ‘Cool Girl’ monologue is fantastic, and one of the parts of the book that benefited from a big-screen translation; that whole sequence was a thrill to watch. The venom in Pike’s voice there was so real it was almost contagious. It was rumoured that Fincher cast Pike on hearing she was an only child, just like Amy, and perhaps it was that little touch that gave Pike the extra mileage to really bare her teeth. Channelling Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, she's deliciously evil when she needs to be, yet unsettlingly unreadable at others.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ eerie score suits the creepy vibe of the film perfectly, although I did feel they tried a bit too hard with the sound effects to unsettle the audience. The supporting cast are uniformly impressive bar Emily Ratajkowski (aka the hot brunette from the Blurred Lines video), who plays the mistress as a caricature. Admittedly we are never supposed to warm to Andie in the novel, but I did get the sense that she was whiny, misguided girl acting in her best interests there. In the film, Ratajkowski does nothing but rack up the horny college student stereotype.

It’s a bum-note that is fortunately drowned out by excellence elsewhere, especially Carrie Coon as Margot, Nick’s twin sister (balancing sisterly love with a gritty determination to avoid a self-pity parade) and Tyler Perry as the legal eagle who specialises in defending shady husbands Tanner Bolt (slick, confident and exactly the kind of man you need if you were in Nick’s dire straits). I was extremely excited to see How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson on the cast list when the film was in production, but sadly Neil Patrick Harris is somewhat underused.

The film covers a lot of base, examining marriage, revenge, the media, to name but a few. In lesser hands, Gone Girl could have been a hot mess, but David Fincher knows how to tell a story better than anyone, being the man who even made even the tale of Facebook an engrossing one.

There’s plenty of dark laughs to be had in Nick and Amy’s journey, and ironically reinforces the point that hell hath no fury like a woman scored. Flynn’s handling of her own material is superb; trimming the fat, adding tweaks here and there, but retaining tone of misandry present the book. The end product improves on the novel to make for a disturbing, entertaining and hugely enjoyable cinematic experience.

9/10

Two Short Book Reviews: CELL (Stephen King) and HICKORY DICKORY DOCK (Agatha Christie)

Cell (Stephen King)

A chillingly crafted novel channelling the dystopian world that unravels after mobile phones have the ability to send people into crazy killers, and how those who weren’t affected by “The Pulse” try to survive as the initially mindless “phone crazies” begin to get smarter. 

The protagonist Clay, is a likeable, resourceful guy who we can root for, and his sidekicks Tom and Alice, are good foils for him, interesting enough in their own right without detracting from Clay's voyage - to get to Maine to find his son. 

The story sometimes moves a little slowly, with Stephen King being particularly languid with Clay’s voyage, but there are shocks galore throughout the book, as well as dark laughs. Well-written with descriptions so vivid you could actually imagine this happening, this is a science fiction novel that even I could enjoy. Grade: A-

Hickory Dickory Dock (Agatha Christie)

Hercule Poirot gets up to another one of his adventures, this time, introduced to him by his assistant, Mrs Lemon. Mrs Lemon’s sister works at a youth housing centre, where things have inexplicably gone missing or been sabotaged. These petty thefts, however, are soon owned up to, but the perpetrator then appears to have committed suicide… or did she? 

As with most Agatha Christie, the joy isn’t in so much as the whodunit (though I never would have guessed, I was foiled again!), but in getting to know the characters, this time, the boarders in the hostel. Each have their idiosyncrasies and quirks, and it is to Christie’s merit that she pulled the wool over my eyes once again, and got me suspecting completely the wrong people. 

Grade: A-

For more of my book reviews, click here.

Book review: MURDER MOST FAB (Julian Clary)

Having just suffered his first love and heartbreak, Johnny Debonair is uprooted from his farmhouse in Kent to the big city, where his grandmother enrols him in drama school, believing the change will do him good. However, his classes are filled with self-absorbed people, who think too highly of themselves, and he soon becomes disillusioned with acting, long realising that he won’t be going anywhere with his pipe dream.

Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.

Pretty Little Liars is the latest American teenage drama to captivate me and give me something to look forward to on a Tuesday morning. 

Based on Sara Shepard's unflinching teen novels of the same title, it revolves around four girls: Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson), former 'fatty'-turned-it-girl; Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), a competitive swimmer who’s harbouring her feelings for her friend Maya due to her strict conservative parents; Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario), a high-achiever who feels the need to compete with her catty older sister for everything; and Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), who returns from a year abroad in Iceland only to fall for the dishy Ezra Fitz, who is soon revealed to be her English teacher. 

Popcorn (Ben Elton), The Virgin and the Gypsy (DH Lawrence) and Murder in Mesopotamia (Agatha Christie), amongst others.

Thanks to a lengthy commuting time to and from work everyday, I've read a fair few books this Summer already. And, as a lot of these books have been wonderful, my thirst for reading has been re-ignited. Thus, if you have recommendations for reading material of any kind, hit me up!

Popcorn (Ben Elton)

Well, well, well. I'd thought Ben Elton had nailed down social satire in his book Past-Mortem, but it turns out he'd done an even better job of it 8 years earlier. Bruce Delamitri is a trendy film director who has just won an Oscar for his ultra-violent film Ordinary Americans, a film which he claims represents America in its brutal, bloody-thirsty state, but others have condemned for influencing America's violent condition. 

With an Oscar under his belt, Delamitri is highly sure of himself, spouting various tidbits of pseudo-philosophy and expecting people to lap up his every word. However, he really learns the meaning of the word hubris when two white trash serial killers hold him hostage on the very night he wins his Oscar. 

As with Dead Famous, this is deliciously dark stuff, some of the funniest moments being at things the reader really should not have found amusing. The epilogue was pithy and the fact that there were no really likeable characters meant that, amidst the horror, the reader derived a twisted sense of glee from everything that occured. Full of characters you can see in celebrities today and short, staccato chapters, this is as good a condemnation of the pliability of the masses as you'll ever find, I can't recommend this enough.

The Virgin and the Gypsy (DH Lawrence)

Despite usage of the word "insinuate" that definitely veers on the repetitive side, DH Lawrence's novella proved to be a brilliant read nonetheless. It tells the story of two vicar's daughters, Lucille and Yvette. When the daughters were little girls the vicar's wife had run off with another more virile man, and this hangs over him in all the puritanical things he does. 

That, along with the somewhat-deranged nan who lives with the girls, has affected them and their thinking in different ways, Lucille is more conservative but Yvette, free-spirited, finds herself drawn towards a local gypsy, who's sexual attraction (and interest in her) cannot be masked. Despite being warned off him, that only serves to make her more and more beguiled by him, and their relationship, though not high on the verbal interchanges, is compelling as it is beautiful. 

I won't lie, I was a tiny bit disappointed at the lack of a deflowering scene of any kind, but there was a metaphorical orgasm, when he was drying her off. Evocatively written and with an oddly banal ending, I was far more taken with this than Lady Chatterlay's Lover.

10 Reasons Not to Fall in Love (Linda Green)

This novel is, as the fluffy title would imply, a romantic comedy chicklit, but it was surprisingly, deeper than just that. It tells the story of a woman living up North (she resides in the Yorkshire area but works as a part-time news reporter in the Lancashire area) who has a two-year-old kid, Alfie, who's dad walked out on them on Alfie's first birthday. She's recently gone back to work as a reporter, wherein he's been promoted to her boss. Somewhat awkward. 

Not surprisingly, she hates men. Until this super-sweet, hot guy called Dan walks into her life. So far, very Sophie Kinsella. But it managed to balance the sweet with a surprisingly sour bit about Dan's backstory, wherein his dad got drunk and hit his mum (hence causing him to be somewhat of a closed book). 

The depiction of domestic violence was actually pretty disturbing in the book, especially how it escalated from verbal abuse to the odd slap to life-threatening amounts of violence. I found myself shedding tears at the most unexpected of moments during this book, and, surprisingly for a chicklit, there was football banter! At first I thought the author was a closet Kopite when she made Richard (the bastard ex) a Man Utd fan and hot Dan a Scouser, but then the narrator was a City fan so I don't know frankly. 

Anyway, I really liked the narrator's writing style, a fine balance between colloquial and intellectual. And I love how it demonstrated that amidst all the shit life throws up, we can eventually get our happy ending, if we're not afraid to try. Recommended.

The Big Four / Murder in Mesopotamia (Agatha Christie)

Not, as I'd blithely wondered, about the "big four" teams in the Premiership, but instead about a cartel

of mastermind criminals who collude to bring down entire empires.

There was a bit too much bluffing and double-bluffing regarding whether or not a pretty integral character was alive or dead in The Big Four to render it believable, plus it focussed more on the espionage side of things, when I prefer the murder mystery. But Agatha Christie showed just why Hercule Poirot remains one of the most beguiling, ingenious men in literature.

Murder in Mesopotamia, I was less taken with, just because I got rather confused when more and more and more characters got introduced (lol, I'm so clever NAT), but the plot twist was as audacious as I'd expect from Christie, and I'm glad the cold-hearted bitch at the centre of it all got what she deserved.

Tales From a Hen Weekend (Olivia Ryan)

Katie Halliday, a vivacious, happy 30something who believes in true love, is on the brink of getting married to Matt, the man she believes to be the love of her life. As he jets off for a weekend in Prague, she's off to Dublin with her friends, aunt and mother, but over the course of that holiday, home truths and murky secrets are revealed left, right and centre. 

This was a rather more predictable checklist than 10 Reasons Not to Fall In Love, and although the characters were all sweet enough (although I found it hard to warm to the protagonist because she seemed to have the gift of being loved universally, which I found hard to believe), the book itself had nothing new to contribute to the genre. 

A fun enough read, just massively forgettable.

Dead Lovely (Helen Fitzgerald)

Oooh er. Whatever I was expecting from Fitzgerald's novel, which revolves around a claustraphobic set-up of married couple Sarah and Kyle and their best friend's Krissie's camping holiday in the Scottish highlands, it wasn't this. 

Krissie, you see, is a free-spirited woman who likes the length of her sexual conquests to be inversely proportional of the willy size of the men inside her who has recently given birth to Robbie following a one-night stand in a public toilet whilst on holiday, and Sarah, despite being married to Kyle and copulating in cycles, can't conceieve for love nor money. 

Add into this equation the fact that Kyle finds himself increasingly attracted to Sarah and it doesn't take Stephen Hawking to work out that this seedy threesome is just an accident waiting to happen. And, sure enough, there's murders, failed murders, attempted murders, and finally, a plot twist so dark that I was surprised such a thing got published. 

But credit to Fitzgerald for her accomplished fusion of sex, murder and human relationships, as well as the way she evoked laughter even at the most dastardly of actions.

Not a bad bunch, on the whole!

Reading & Writing.

Last night and this morning, I was reading Ben Elton's Past Mortem, a murder mystery centering around a murderer who, as the book goes on, is revealed as someone who is killing people who were/are bullies, and killing them in bold ways that re-live how the bullies treated their victims in the past. Investigating the case if 5'4" ginger policeman Ed Newsom, who, despite a mediocre childhood, is now fairly prominent and of good status, albeit short. He is also alone, and harbours an all-consuming crush on his sergeant Natasha, who is sadly attached to her abusive and good-for-nothing freeloader boyfriend Lance. One day, on a whim, Ed logs onto friendsunited.com and finds himself opening a door to his past. His childhood object of lust, Christine, holds a get-together for everyone in his year, and he finds that work and pleasure most certainly do not mix, as the killer's next strike is much closer to home.

Aside from a far-too-long and downright wrong sex scene, Past Mortem proved a highly enjoyable read. Ed Newsom is an engaging and likeable protagonist and the blend of mystery and bathos is very well done. I'm kind of slow, so, whilst some people said they saw the twist coming a mile off, I genuinely was surprised when the true culprit was revealed. And, whilst killing off bullies is not a sensible solution to bullying, the long-term effects of bullying (even if intended casually by the proprietor) are investigated with sensitivity and compassion. The book actually has a great range of scope, tackling issues such as domestic violence, friendship, insecurity, and the need to feel validation. Some of these topics are tackled better than others, and some of the characters are downright dislikable, but aside from that, this is fine, frothy stuff from Elton.

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'Tis the WGA tonight. My predictions for winners...

Will win / should win
Original Screenplay:
(500) Days of Summer
A Serious Man
Avatar
The Hangover
The Hurt Locker

Adapted Screenplay:
Crazy Heart
Julie & Julia
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Star Trek
Up in the Air

44. Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954).