Dead Girls, Richard Calder

Current reading is appropriate for a Halloween post, we’d think.  Richard Calder’s Dead Girls is not about corpses, although a few turn up along the way. It’s set in an extreme dystopian near-future where artificial intelligence, robotics and lethal fashionista rivalries have collided to produce a plague, the effective end-product of which is the transforming, by dint of their fathers’ corrupted DNA, the girls of the world into plastic creatures, dolls, and the men who love them into enslaved doll addicts. This is the first of Calder’s Dead… trilogy and it follows Ignatz, the central afflicted male, and the doll of his life, Primavera, back from a hyper-roboticized “Wild East” Asia to a quarantined London in search of the origins of the plague.

The edition we’re reading has a great cover, which is similar to this one below. It’s more exactly like the one you’ll see in the author’s link above  (with the title in a black box) , but this version could be rendered here in larger image, and has the same effect:

Dead Girls, by Richard Calder

Dead Girls, by Richard Calder, excerpt:

We drove through an empty concrete wilderness that might have been twinned with Troy, Carthage or Pompeii; all about us were the lineaments of greatness soiled by sudden defeat.

‘Whitechapel,’ informed our driver. ‘Brick Lane.’

Whitechapel. That was where Mum and Dad lived when they first came to England. Jumping the kerb to avoid a burned-out car, the Bentley swung into a warehouse.

We got out, Jo leading us across an oil-stained expanse littered with automobilia – the sort of place grease monkeys dream of going to when they die – to where a rusted samovar stood. There, bending over, she grasped an iron ring set in the floor, and pulled. A trap opened.

Beneath our feet, a spiral staircase unwound into infinity; a plume of green light rose from the depths, casting a halo upon the warehouse’s roof.

‘Down we go,’ said out escort.

***

No we  didn’t choose that passage just because in included the word ‘infinity.’ It’s dystopian! But we are attracted to the green and blue in the cover, the InfinityBound colors.

***

A more detailed capsule review of Dead Girls will appear in the “Dark Streets” Suspense/Mystery column. Deadline is tomorrow (!) so we must get to it but now that the subject meshes some with the new swerve of this blog here’re the links to the previous efforts.  The next will appear on the 15th of November. If we forget to post it, remind us.

Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 8 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 9 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 10 – DARK STREETS
Night Owl Reviews Magazine, Issue 11 – DARK STREETS

Film: The Lives of Others

This one deserves the honor of the label “film” as the word might be defined by film snobs, as opposed to “movie,” and not just because it’s not the usual Hollywood product. Bourne There’s plenty of German trash out there, we’re sure. (We just watched something called Stalingrad– “by the producers of Das Boot.What a mess.)

The Lives of Others, though, ranks right up there as one of the top two in the surveillance genre with The Conversation. There’s not a single wasted frame. The tension is palpable and the plot subtle, both drawing you in to the multiple dilemmas of the multiple characters. The mood is perfectly set with a simple sound track and the spare austere settings befit the desolate time and place, the East German police state just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The imminent changes about to befall all in the film may be the overriding dramatic irony at  work, but it is just one of many, an event that none of the characters would  never venture to predict from their viewpoint; and the filmmakers do well to resist any kind of easy hindsight along these lines. Subtlety is the by-word and they abound, even down to the background sounds of the final scenes. 

We wouldn’t want to spoil it for you though, just get it, rent it, NetFlix it.  Watch it with someone you love who doesn’t undervalue freedom. You won’t be sorry.

Final note: And it was nice, for once, to see the “Bohemian” types in opposition to an actual oppresive regime.

Déjà Vu Times Two

Two movies in a row where déjà vu makes an appearance. Just the other day the happy little elves and I sat through our first ever DVD viewing of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure…

Mickey: I’m bad, Pee-wee. You don’t want to get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner. A rebel.
Pee-wee: Déjà vu.  

And in a completely different vibe, man, we’re now in the middle of Deja Vu, a sci-fi thriller starring Denzel Washington (or, as Sinbad would say, “Den-zale!”) Denzel gives a kind of strange mixed performance. He’s somehow even lower-key than his usual moody jaw-juttung self for most of it, but then he’ll suddenly toss out a line with a huge smile or shout it for no apparent reason. But then there’s not a lot to chew on in the script. They give him the hilariously porkly Val Kilmer to bounce against but nothing flares. His big shouting scene setting all the Feds and their geeks straight has an odd distance, like the director just set up the long shot and said, hey, this is Denzel, let me just record his awesomeness and leave it at that. Not as bad a part for Denzel as that horrible, and horribly mistitled, Out of Time, but close.

We’re in the middle of it because we watched the first half then took a little break, which included getting a night’s sleep,  going to work and having a few meals. The break was kind of forced on us because this is one of those thrillers that PUTS YOU TO SLEEP.  Several second act problems in this one. I mean, watching Denzel drive a car with a video camera on his head is only interesting for so long , even if he is following a guy in another dimension. Plus the Fed geek technician explanation for the time shifting phenomenon was clearly off the mark.  I mean, here they are they’re explaining bending space into wormholes and they don’t address time at all. Didn’t anybody notice?  It was really an insult to the elevated brain patterns of the sci fi fan. Either they had a good basis for the science and it was thrown out because the studio execs couldn’t understand it or they just took the short-cut through that important piece of screenplay terrain: “Oh, they’ll buy it because they’ve probably heard wormhole stuff like this many times.” Sorry.

We’ll see the rest of it through tonight. Why? Because Mrs Shears and I, we’re like that.  (Plus we’d probably both go home with Denzel. But only of he asked.)

We may have to wind it back a bit to see some earlier parts, though. 

Déjà vu!