Death And So Forth

It does seem to be the case that my workplace is closing. There was a meeting the other week, billed as an opportunity for staff to give their 'feedback'. I don't know what kind of feedback they were expecting from those staff members who are going to lose their jobs – constructive criticism with a positive spin? Or how about a torrent of bile? That was more like it, but it was clearly not what they were prepared for. The guy in charge was very defensive (an onlooker noted his 'clenched buttocks') and was heard to mutter, on a couple of occasions: 'I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.' But don't they explain all that when you become part of 'the Management'? That you are now inescapably one of the damned?

In the wake of all this morale is low. Lorraine has taken to pinging herself with a rubber band every time she is tempted to voice a negative thought. There was a lot of pinging going on on Friday. I was worried about leaving her to take a half-day, lest this progress into self-harming – or even Opus Dei-style self-flagellation. However, I went, even though it meant missing Chris Evans discussing his varicose veins on the Jeremy Vine show.

I was going to see an exhibition about death. The reaction I got when I explained this was: 'Oh'. Even my explaining that it was free didn't seem to help. But it was a lot of fun, especially if you like to see pictures of skulls and skeletons and Death performing cunnilingus on Saint Theresa. And who doesn't? To personify death is to triumph over it in a way. It's a hollow victory, but one that may at least bring a sardonic smile to the face. There was certainly nothing depressing in the exhibition (A Portrait Of Death at the Wellcome Collection) – or at least nothing as depressing as even the thought of Chris Evans' varicose veins.

Then I went to the Turkish Film Festival at the ICA. Reha Erdem's Jin is about a 17-year old female Kurdish guerilla and her travails in the wilderness. In between being shot at and sexually assaulted, Jin makes friends with the local wildlife, some of which are CGI. I felt that this looked odd in such a realistic film, which in these scenes did seem to be veering towards the sentimental: you almost expect an animated bluebird to perch on her shoulder. But I gleaned from the Q and A afterwards (it was just about the only thing I gleaned) that there is meant to be a 'fairy tale' element to the film, so maybe I missed that.

It wasn't the only thing I missed. I didn't know why I should be remotely surprised by this, but there were a lot of Turkish people at the Turkish film festival, many of them, in the Q and A, freely speaking Turkish, without subtitles: the director followed suit. Maybe it's something about the language but it seems to take five times longer to ask a question in Turkish than in English – a lot of the Turkish questions sounded more like answers. There was a translator, but he was a bit offhand, possibly feeling that anybody who had attended this without going to the trouble of learning Turkish or being born in Turkey was showing a lamentable lack of commitment.

Which may be true, since as I was watching the film I was aware of the kind of reactions you get from an uncommitted arthouse audience – laughing at things they wouldn't even think of laughing at in a Hollywood movie, and tsk-tsk-ing at the sight of a dead donkey covered in flies. Unforgivably, the man next to me arrived five minutes into the film and then proceeded to spend most of it looking at his phone. His elbows were invading my space too. Well, OK then – one of his elbows. It would have been weird if it were both.

I was asked to mark the film out of ten at the end. I gave it seven. Just hold the CGI next time please, Reha. I'd rather see a person unconvincingly dressed as a bear than a CGI bear. And no, I haven't seen Life Of Pi.

mbv

On Valentine's Day – or Thanksgiving Day as I prefer to call it – there I was in the queue at Marks and Spencers. In front of me, two men, both taking advantage of the £20 Valentine's meal for two offer, while I clutched my reduced-to-80p cheese-and-onion sandwich. Who's the mug here?, I thought, as I headed home to a quiet night in with Michael Haneke's 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance. That's a film, by the way.

Although I have to admit I liked the look of the Valentine's chocolates on offer in W H Smith's, half price with any Valentine's card. I was tempted. I could always send the card to myself – 'I'm so glad we decided to move in together!' Sod anonymity.

But I stuck with the cheese-and-onion sandwich. At least I can be fairly certain about what's in it. They have apparently discovered a Findus lasagne that is '100% horsemeat'. What? The pasta is horse? The bechamel sauce is horse? Perhaps what they have found is a dead horse that has been accidentally labelled up as a Findus lasagne.

Luckily meat will soon be completely unrelated to the animal kingdom. Ben in our office said the other day that they are now able to 'print meat'. Wow. Once upon a time we dreamed of the future as a place of antiseptically gleaming cities and hover cars. Well it didn't happen, but here is our compensation – I will soon be able to fax you some bacon. Happy Valentines Day.

the best medicine

Please be aware, Notional Reader, that episodes of this blog may be less frequent over the next weeks and months, since I do not 'have' the internet and am therefore reduced to projecting these words onto the world-wide-web through sheer force of will as I sit in my lonely garret.

What do you care, anyway, since I'm only going to review another film you've never heard of and wouldn't want to see even if you had?

In this instance it's Antiviral, directed by Brandon Cronenberg (no relation). Except, oh yes, he is a relation. He's David Cronenberg's son.

Not that you could tell. There's no similiarity between this and David Cronenberg's films, unless you count minor matters like theme, setting, visual style and – well, pretty much everything you see on the screen. But then, Cronenberg is (in Stephen King's words) the King Of Venereal Horror, making Brandon the Prince Of Venereal Horror. Or I suppose that's how it must work.

Or it could be a 'train set' scenario, of the kind where the father ends up playing with the kid's toys. Maybe Brandon wanted to make a romcom starring Jennifer Aniston, and David said: 'Great idea, son! Just a suggestion though - how about just a touch of celebrity disease fetishism...?' And before you know it, we have Antiviral's grim future world, in which people are so obsessed with celebrity that they are clamouring to have their favourite stars' diseases injected into them, and sinister clinics are only too happy to oblige. As a concept I'm not sure that this holds water – I can't really see anyone (outside of a BBC3 documentary) wanting to claim their share of One Direction's herpes - but the film manages to maintain a queasy fascination despite this.

Our hero (Caleb Landry Jones) works for one of the sinister clinics but is just as celeb-fixated as his clients, to the extent that he injects himself with icon Hannah Geist's deadly disease. Cue a lot of sweating, stumbling, and vomiting of blood – it's a splendidly visceral performance – before Jones manages to turn his celebrity crush into a 'cell garden', a kind of freakish copy of the original that still lives and breathes after a fashion. Funnily enough, this is just what Brandon Cronenberg has done to his father's body of work in this film. Good for him.

Also frantically trying to preserve a loved one is the hero of The Brain That Wouldn't Die, from 1960. I have this on a DVD that claims to have been 'digitally-remastered', though perhaps this can legally be said of anything that has been transferred from a non-digital format onto DVD, because watching this is like watching a poor-quality videotape from a distance: blurred and choppy. It suits the film, a sleazy little number in which a surgeon preserves the head of his wife after she is decapitated in a car accident, using the 'new special serum' that he has invented. Then he goes off to look for a new body for her, a process which is less about matching blood types and tissues, and more a case of touring bars to find the best-looking woman he can pick up. He even attends a beauty contest, before settling for a model with a scarred face (perhaps calculating that she will therefore be more willing to let go of her head).

As for the existing head, she isn't too thrilled about the whole thing. 'Let me die', she keeps moaning, before discovering (or rediscovering) a mean streak and joining forces with the thing in the closet (a mutant creature representing a compendium of all of her husband's previous mistakes). This monster eventually lays waste to the laboratory, and walks away from the resulting conflagration with the model in its arms. Is it carrying her to safety or... what? The film doesn't answer this question, instead leaving us in darkness with the sardonic laughter of the severed head ringing in our ears. Of course Monster Carrying Girl is a cliché of this kind of film, but this is the only time it has ever ended a film as far as I know. Which is all quite of a piece with the film's refreshingly cynical attitude to love, the medical profession, and society in general. Recommended.