In praise of one-star reviews

When I started thinking about this post, I was planning to call it The Curse of the Five-Star Review, and then I read this excellent blog post, The Dark Side Of Free, by Russell Blake. He's talking about the problems of free e-books (a contentious subject I've talked about several times before), and latches onto an aspect I've never really considered. When you give your book away, you end up with lots of people saying they didn't like it. As a result, you get a pile of one-star reviews, which he and many of his respondents, think is very unfair. All those nice 5-star reviews and a 4.8 average suddenly collapses under the weight of feedback that isn't unadulterated praise.

Who are you trying to kid?

Let me be honest here. If I see a self-published book with nothing but 4- and 5-star ratings, what's my reaction? Do I think, "wow, this must be an utterly amazing book and I must read it at once?"

No, I don't.

I immediately assume it's rigged and all those reviews are probably from family and friends, or they're paid reviews, or they're reviews swapped with other authors. I simply do not believe for a minute that nobody has anything bad to say about a book and that it's absolutely perfect. My reaction isn't to buy the book - quite the opposite! I assume it's probably mediocre and not worth my time.

I would far rather see a spread of honest reviews, telling me what's good and bad about a book. Sure, some people won't like it. That's fine. Some people don't like War and Peace. Some people don't like the Da Vinci Code. Some people don't like Tom Clancy's Op-Center. That doesn't stop people reading them. Frankly, if you're not getting negative reviews, you should be surprised. Nobody is exempt from criticism, and if you're not getting them, then you're probably surrounded by yes-men.

From a 3-star review of War and Peace on Amazon:
It's... overwritten, wordy,redundant, repetitious, chronologically clumsy, and loaded with structural defects, writer's errors and digressions. Tolstoy himself called it "verbose", and said it had too much that was "superfluous". I agree with Tolstoy.

What do these ratings mean anyhow?

As far as I'm concerned, ratings aren't objective. They're subjective. They tell you what I thought of the book, and I like to use the whole scale. An average book gets a 3 - and remember that average doesn't mean it was bad. It meant that I liked it. Something I really liked gets a 4, and a 5-star rating is reserved for those very rare books that absolutely blow my mind. On the other end, a 2 was disappointing, and a 1 is something I just couldn't finish or is really badly written.

Sadly, many authors don't see it that way. One author to whom I gave a 4-star rating asked why I'd "knocked a star off", even though I'd praised the book and said how much I liked it. They seem to see a 5-star rating as the default, and anything less is a failure. That, to me, totally negates the point of the rating system - how can I, or a potential customer, distinguish between a good book, a really good book, and an exceptional book if they all get 5 stars?

A 4-star or 5-star rating should be something to covet, not something to expect, and I actually think it does authors a disservice if they're led to believe that everything they write is as good as - or better than - the very best literature humanity has produced. If your YA fantasy really deserves that 4.5 average, why isn't it outselling Harry Potter with its mere 4.3 average? Is your 4.8-rated thriller really better than the 4.6-rated Day of the Jackal? Is your 5-star erotic short story a classic to overshadow the 4-star Delta of Venus? If you really want to know, then give it to a thousand people and they'll tell you what they really think - and if you can maintain that high rating, then congratulations, you're officially one of the greats! But don't be surprised if most of them aren't as awestruck by your masterpiece as your first few fans.

Who are ratings for?

The thing is, ratings aren't just for your benefit. They're for mine. Amazon recommend me books according to what I like, so if I tell them I didn't like a book, they won't recommend me other books like it. That 1-star review doesn't necessarily mean "this is a bad book," it means "it wasn't to my taste."

They're for my friends too. If Dave sees me give a book a 1-star rating, he can legitimately conclude he won't like it either. If he sees me give it a 4 or 5, he's likely to give it a try.

Tailored ratings systems


What I'd really like to see is a more sophisticated system like Netflix which shows me both the average rating and an assessment of how it fits to my personal tastes. When I look at a movie on Netflix, it's not unusual for it to get a high average review but a low score for me - or vice versa. The latest teen comedy may score really highly with some people, but Netflix is smart enough to figure out that people who like the same movies as me don't think much of it, and it tells me I probably won't like it. On the other hand, most people don't like silent German movies, but it knows that I do, and gives me a rating based on that knowledge.

Netflix spent a fortune developing that algorithm and saw a huge increase in viewer satisfaction. If Amazon and the booksellers could do the same, I'm sure it would pay dividends in terms of sales.  Authors would benefit too: if you do a better job of targeting your book to readers, you'll get more satisfied readers.

It comes down to this. When I read the reviews of books, I want to know whether I will like it, taking into account my tastes. If I can be sure that a 4-star book is probably excellent, I'm more likely to buy it than if 4-stars is considered a low rating.

So I'm sorry, authors, but I'll keep on dishing out the 1s and 2s.

The Dodo Dragon and other stories

I've always enjoyed sci-fi shorts, particularly the sort of thing that appeared in magazines in the 50s & 60s, and in anthologies edited by Ellison, Sheckley, et al. This collection reminds me very much of those.


There are three types of story in here. Several of them are excuses for really bad puns. Asimov used to do a lot of those, and you either love 'em or hate 'em. I loved them. They're basically shaggy dog stories for sci-fi geeks. Then there are a few light humor stories. Again, these are a staple of the genre, and they work well. I enjoyed these; they're well written and the author's quirky sense of humor and witty writing comes through. Finally, there are a couple of more serious stories. I have to admit, they're well written, but I didn't enjoy them as much, with the exception of the title story, which is both sad and beautiful.


However, that's what I expect, and indeed demand, from short story collections: a mixed bag of writing, some of which will be to my taste, and some won't, and it's a great opportunity to showcase the breadth of what a writer can do. I've read a couple of her stories elsewhere, and it's been good to find more of her work that I enjoy.


Recommended for lovers of post-war sci-fi. They're perfect bedtime (or bathroom) reading.


Available on Kindle

Eatin' my way thru O-Town

It's kinda traditional for Europeans to take the piss out of Americans for being, how shall we put it politely, fat. Well, just try living here. Honestly, it's not their fault. Even if you avoid all the nasty greasy fast food, there's so much good eating on offer it's impossible to maintain a svelte figure without spending four hours a day in the gym. 

I've become a regular at the local farmer's market on Saturday mornings, where I load up with aubergines (eggplant) & courgettes (zucchini) as well as top quality honey, and oranges, and then feel morally obliged to stuff myself with cinnamon buns and Venezuelan pastries.  And then we've been working our way through the enormous Vietnamese supermarkets and filling the freezer with dim sum. Our current favourite is the Saigon market, which has a counter of unbelievably tasty French-style Vietnamese pastries. And, of course, there's now a Spice & Tea Exchange in Winter Park, so we have Pirate's Bite and salmon tea rub. So cooking's pretty much covered.

When it comes to eating out, there's loads of choice.  Highlights so far include:

The Enzian. OK, it's a cinema, not a restaurant, but the menu there is impressive. You don't get a huge portion, but it's really delicious stuff.  Just check out the meatball sandwich, for example.  Meatballs made with grass fed bison and fresh local pork, truffle parmesan tomato sauce, sauteed shiitake mushrooms. I mean, c'mon, how can that be bad?   Eating this while watching a movie makes for a great date.  The selection of wines and beers is pretty reasonable, but the absolute killer is the manchego cheesecake. It's cheesecake turned up to 11. It was a real struggle to finish one portion between two of us. 

The Black Bean Deli. This isn't eating out, in that there's nowhere to sit, so if you want to get picky, yeah, it's take-away. (Or take-out, as I'm learning to call it.)  This is the best Cuban food I've ever had.  Well, if I'm honest, it's the only Cuban food I've ever had, but everyone tells me it's the best I'm ever likely to find anywhere outside Cuba. The medianoche is filling and yummy - ham and cheese on Cuban sweet bread, and the chorizopan is similar, but with chorizo instead of ham.  One of their sandwiches for lunch, with a tub of rice and black beans, and then a flan to follow... oh yeah!  I can see this becoming a regular mid-week thing.  Set something rendering or uploading, a 10-minute drive down 17/92, grab myself a bag full of Cuban goodness, and then not bother with dinner.  No, really, no more food today.

El Bodegon. My benchmark for good tapas is whether it's as good as the Tasting Room in St Augustine. El Bodegon most certainly passes that test.  Tapas isn't really their speciality, but like any good Spanish place, they have a good selection on offer. Not so great for vegetarians - if you're OK with seafood, you'll be fine, but you really need to be a carnivore to enjoy this place. We munched our way through five plates with a pitcher of sangria.  The serrano ham was some of the best I've ever tasted, the patata bravas were just perfect, and the garlic mushrooms were succulent and mouthwateringly mushroomy. The piece de resistance, though, was the chorizo flambeed in brandy. Chorizo is good anyway, and I love the effect of pouring liquor on food and setting fire to it. We'll definitely be going back there for evenings when we can't decide what to eat and fancy a little bit of everything.  

The Nile Ethiopian Restaurant. No prizes for guessing the speciality of this place tucked away off I-Drive. Ethiopian food is quite unique, and something I love.  It's good communal finger food: it comes on a big tray, with piles of different dishes, and you eat it by scooping it up with pieces of pancakey sourdough bread. When it arrives, you wonder whether you've ordered enough. Two thirds of the way through, you wonder whether you can finish it all. The yasa tibs (fish) is truly gorgeous, the doro wat (chicken stew) is total yumminess, and I seriously recommend the veggie combo, even if you're not a veggie. Don't skip the coffee. They roast the beans right there, and then bring the pan round for everyone to have a sniff. It's the best coffee I've had that isn't Turkish. Try it if you're looking for a friendly meal with friends that's a bit out of the ordinary.

And there's more...  Urban Flats had a variable selection: basically posh pizza, the good ones were good, and the rest were mediocre.  Chipotle is just a Mexican fast food chain, but they do a damn good pork burrito, and it's all free-range, hormone-free meat, so it's actually good food, just served fast.  Tomorrow, we have a big family meal at Buca di Beppo, where I intend to eat pasta and chicken saltimbocca until I look like Luciano Pavarotti  Next, I need to try the various steakhouses (Ruth's Chris and Colorado's both recommended, for completely different reasons), and find myself some catfish and some grouper, and at some point I really need to get back to the bagel place...

We've been making the most of coupons from restaurant.com. Basically, you buy a $25 coupon for $10, so there's an instant saving of $15.  But it gets better. As the month goes on,they discount the coupons that haven't sold yet, and you can pick up a $25 coupon for $2.  We just spent a mighty $10 to buy ourselves $125 off in various St Augustine restaurants which we intend to use in about a week while we're on honeymoon.  And yes, that includes the Tasting Room. 

Oh, God, please can I have just a salad now? Before I explode?

The Pope Room in Buca di Beppo. Look, that's the Pope in the middle of the table. Holy spaghetti,  Batman!

Conversations With Other Women

Conversations With Other Women is a quite remarkable film, for two reasons. Firstly, it has one of the sharpest and best scripts for ages, superbly acted, and utterly convincing. It's a character study of two people who meet up at a wedding, and, well, I really can't say any more without giving away the plot. The whole film basically consists of just these two people, played by Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, and it takes place in a single night. The emotional intensity they deliver is something you more normally associate with the stage, rather than the screen. However, they don't act like they're on stage; they make the events seem completely real.

The other thing that makes Conversations remarkable is that it's filmed in split screen throughout, one half focused on each of the two protagonists (mostly). It takes a little while to get used to, and I have to confess that after about 15 minutes I really wasn't sure whether I was going to sit through the rest of it. But I'm glad I did. Unlike Mike Figgis's Timecode, which is incredibly clever but unwatchable, this works really rather well. You just get used to having two viewpoints on the same scene, and effectively doing your own editing. Your eyes naturally flick between the two sides of the screen, depending on who you're interested in at any one moment. This is occasionally disorienting and disconcerting, but as a story-telling device, it's really rather effective.

Conversations is more than just a piece of technical trickery. In its way, it's as intriguing a piece of work as Memento, albeit with a focus on romance rather than action. It won't be to everyone's taste, but I'd strongly recommend that you see it and make your own mind up.

Evil Aliens

You will need beer to watch this movie. Oh yes, you will. And lots of it. Evil Aliens is a gloriously cheesy, low-budget, British sci-fi horror with its tongue very, very firmly in its cheek and gore all over its face. Think Aliens plus Predator plus Shaun of the Dead plus Evil Dead meets The X Files in Wales, and you’re about there. It’s from the twisted mind of Jake West, who made the vampire flick Razor Blade Smile. If you’ve seen any of his films, you’ll know what to expect; inyaface outrageous action, dark humour, and women with not enough clothing. In this case, West gives us the lovely Emily “Bouff” Booth, who British viewers may recognize as the presenter of various late-night TV shows such as outThere.

This is as close as you get to seeing boobies.

The plot is really simple. A Welsh woman claims she’s been abducted and impregnated by aliens, and the presenters of a failing TV show go to investigate. And guess what, there really are aliens, and they’re, um, evil. When they find themselves trapped by the tide, the killings and the multilations begin. If you’re squeamish, don’t watch this movie. Really, don't. You may not get past the opening sequence where the aliens carry out a rectal examination on the woman’s boyfriend. And don’t let your kids watch it either.

Everyone gets completely blood-splattered. It's that kind of movie.

The highlight of the movie was a wonderful scene featuring a combine harvester which wins a Mongoose Award for Most Inspired Use Of Wurzels Music In A Movie. (For my transatlantic readers, The Wurzels are the English equivalent of hillbilly music. Everyone in England knows the words to their songs, but nobody will admit to it.) It’s sheer cinematic genius, right up there with I Will Survive in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It had us all drunkenly humming Combine Harvester several hours later, still unable to stop laughing. I’m not saying any more. Watch it for yourselves.

So come on now, let's get together in perfect harmony...

The character acting is magnificently hammy, especially the three Welsh farmers – who don’t speak a word of English. They start off as really unlikeable, grotesque characters, but after a while – ok, ok, once they get going with the chainsaws and shotguns – you really find yourself rooting for them. The “UFO expert”, Gavin Gorman, is another great character, the quintessential UFO nerd, very much like the Lone Gunmen in the X Files. You’re never quite sure whether to laugh at him, hit him, or root for him. And the aliens themselves? Brilliant. For men with silly masks and silver suits, they’re really rather entertaining. They’re unbelievably stupid cannon fodder, and really evil at the same time, just like good Doctor Who baddies should be. And yes, that is Norman “Holly” Lovett in a bit part at the start.

Aliens with satanic symbols on their masks. Huh?

The special effects are much better than you’d expect for a low-budget movie. The alien spaceship is quite impressive really, and while it’s no Independence Day, it’s a long way from crappy models on fishing wire. And the prosthetics are great - limbs and heads get ripped off with gleeful abandon, people get impaled on all sorts of objects, and the surgical scenes are really ghoulishly visceral.

Actually rather effective for a cheap lighting trick.

I thoroughly enjoyed Evil Aliens. If you’re not British, you may not get it, but that’s OK. I can imagine several people I know who would love to make a living out of making movies like this; cheap, cheerful, entertaining. Sometimes "quality" is overrated, and all you need is an irrepressible sense of fun. Evil Aliens is never going to win critical acclaim, but it’s earned a place in my DVD collection.

Babe with a shotgun and a welsh psychopath in tow. You should have got the idea by now what you're in for.

"I changed my life today, what did you do?"

The Verdict

A legal thriller that isn't based on a John Grisham novel - something of a rarity these days!

Sidney Lumet cut his directorial teeth on the tense courtroom thriller Twelve Angry Men in '57, before going on to gritty action flicks like Serpico in ‘73 and Dog Day Afternoon in ‘75. He returned to the legal genre in ‘82 with this highly acclaimed tale of medical incompetence and the fight for justice.

The Oscar-nominated script by David Mamet centres on the question of whether the parents of a girl who died in hospital should settle out of court without making a fuss, or whether to take the case to trial and force the doctors to admit that they were negligent. The drama, of course, is that the judicial system is so heavily on the side of the medical establishment (and, in this case, the Church who runs the hospital) that it doesn’t look as though there will be a fair trial. Should they cave in and take the money, or stand up for justice?

Paul Newman, pushing sixty when he made this, delivers a powerful performance as Frank Galvin, the cynical, hard-drinking, world-weary lawyer who finds he has a real case for the first time in years. (The quote at the start is, of course, from him.) A cliche of a character, sure, but well done. Think of Tom Cruise in The Firm crossed with Sam Spade and you’re about there. Newman lost out on the Best Actor Oscar to Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, which is, admittedly, hard to argue with.

James Mason plays the opposing lawyer, which he does in his usual suave manner. I like Mason, I like him a lot, but on this occasion he doesn't seem to quite come up with the goods. His performance is polished enough, but he portrays the character in such a fair and reasonable light that the result is bland rather than dramatically ruthless. A little more melodrama wouldn't have gone amiss. Mason got an Oscar nom as well, though it’s hard to understand why, until you look at the competition that year. For me, the real villain of the piece is Milo O'Shea as the judge who's obviously biased in favour of the defence.

Charlotte Rampling is at her most icily gorgeous as Laura Fischer, Newman's supportive lover who's playing both sides. (This was the last film she made before getting hitched to Jean-Michel Jarre.) Oddly, though, I kept on wanting Sigourney Weaver in the role; Rampling comes across as a bit of a scheming, unfeeling bitch, rather than the tough, powerful woman Weaver would have been. I wasn't really interested in the sub-plot with her, though. It was never really as developed as it might have been, and I couldn't really work up any interest in her character.

Where The Verdict really wins for me is the very elegant style. The camerawork is well worth a close look. It's not flashy or complex, but it's a very good example of how to use simple shots very effectively and economically. Some scenes are shot entirely with a single static camera in long shot, which works surprisingly well. Normally this technique only turns up in very early films or in arty movies like Werner Herzog's unremittingly bleak Woyzeck, but Lumet makes it work. The simplicity of the camerawork, combined with almost total absence of music, gives the film a very real feel that is quite different from the cinema verite style the directors of the Seventies were trying to ape.

The very few 'tricksy' shots are nicely constructed; there's one sequence where we look through a window at Newman and Jack Warden coming down the stairs inside the courthouse, and then the camera pans gently to pick them up as they come out through the door. This is very distinct from the more 'in your face' style of filming that Lumet picked up from movies like The French Connection, and it makes for easy viewing, allowing you to concentrate 100% on the story. Aspiring cameramen, editors and directors would do well to see how much you can achieve without ever drawing attention to the camerawork, moving the camera only when necessary, and cutting smoothly and efficiently to keep the viewer engaged.

Gene Hackman in The French Connection

On the whole, I preferred this to Lumet's earlier action films, and I'd undoubtedly rate it as one of Newman's best roles. In my view The Verdict isn't a great film, despite also getting Oscar noms for Best Picture and Best Director (did you count ‘em? That’s five noms, no wins, thanks to Gandhi) but it's very definitely a good, solid, well-made drama with an easy-going style that's well worth a couple of hours.

Silkwood, or how to make plutonium mundane

It’s odd to realize that this movie is now 25 years old. Even though it fits right into one of my sweet spots (loner takes on the evil bastard Corporation), I’ve managed to avoid watching it all this time, largely because I don’t like Meryl Streep. (Who, according to IMDB, is "considered by many movie reviewers to be the greatest living film actress". Bollocks. Lauren Bacall is still alive. And still acting.)

Even the DVD cover looks dated.

I decided to give it a go, after realizing that a lot of the actors and films I “don’t like” are actually rather good. Unsurprisingly, my opinions and tastes of 20 years ago aren’t the same as my opinions and tastes now. Humphrey Bogart is a case in point. I don’t like Bogart, except for Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, which are two of my all-time favourite movies. And The Caine Mutiny, which is tense, well-acted, and gripping. And several of his film noir classics; Key Largo, Dark Passage, and The Big Sleep, which is just brilliant (and better than The Maltese Falcon, even though Peter Lorre isn’t in it). And High Sierra, which is a tight nailbiter of a film. And Sahara is a perfectly enjoyable war movie. Now how can I say I don’t like Bogey? What I really mean, I think, is that Casablanca is over-rated. But maybe I should give it another look soon and see if maybe it’s not that bad. Watch it again, Sam.

Bogey. Portrait by E. Smyth. That's not bad going - getting Bogey and Bacall into a review of Silkwood, and we're only two paragraphs in....

Yeah, Silkwood. Where was I? I hadn’t realized Cher was in it at all, let alone the fact that she was nominated for Oscars and BAFTAs and stuff, and actually won a Golden Globe for her performance. I thought her first major film role was Mask, which was a gobsmacking movie. I was going through my biker phase at the time, so any movie about bikers was pretty well guaranteed to get my attention, and I really liked the portrayal of bikers as human beings, not just stereotypical bad guys. I didn’t think she was that good in this, though. She was OK, but I wouldn’t have marked this as one of the great performances of 1983. Not that 1983 was a vintage year, or anything, but this really wasn’t anything to get excited about.

Kurt Russell plays Kurt Russell, as always

I’m finding it really hard to stick to the subject here, just like I found it hard to stick to the movie. I kept on going out and making coffee or finding a biscuit, or suddenly remembering that I had to make a phone call. Frankly, the movie just didn’t grab me. It was slow, and I wanted it to be far more like The Insider. Now that was a punchy movie. Silkwood just left me feeling like I didn’t really care. We’re talking true stories about plutonium here, folks, and I’m not caring that big companies are screwing around with it? That can’t be right. The whole sub-plot about Karen’s relationship with her boyfriend was tedious, and the film was far more focused on her attempts to organize a union than on the fact that the safety procedures were slipshod and frequently bypassed. Let’s face it, Karen Silkwood wasn’t exactly Jimmy Hoffa or Arthur Scargill when it comes to exciting, larger than life personalities in the union world. (Ah, bring on The Comic Strip presents… The Strike! That was a lot of fun.)

And the end was just limp. She died, and nobody knows exactly why. Not the writers, and not the viewer. That could have made a great start to the movie, though. Throw in some mystery, some confusion, a bit of conspiracy, and then take us on a journey to show how we got here. Then everything would have dark, ambiguous overtones, and it would have been a very different movie.

A high-tech nuclear facility run by the lowest bidder - should be much more scary than it is

I reckon it was a successful film only because it dared to tackle the subject it did, and not because it’s actually a good film. Meryl Streep was actually pretty good, though. But not good enough to make me re-watch Kramer vs Kramer or Out of Africa.

Animusic - music video extreme

One of the unexpected things I got for Christmas was a pair of DVDs from Animusic. These are, no question, the most amazing music videos since Peter Gabriel did Sledgehammer back in 1986. (Which was an early work from Aardman Animations, of Wallace and Gromit fame, collaborating with the Brothers Quay, apparently. I never knew that. Wonderful thing, the Internet. But already I digress, after a mere two sentences.)

Resonant Chamber: a truly baroque instrument, which sounds as wonderful as it looks

What the Animusic guys do is to create unbelievable virtual instruments. No, that’s not quite true. The instruments they create are all too believable. They’re so detailed, and they play so right, that you actually start believing in them and forget that what you’re watching is just CG. They’ve been doing this for about fifteen years, so the earliest of their videos are older than the first Toy Story movie. As you might expect, some of them look a little dated now – but only a little. Fair enough, the mid 1990s lighting effects are a little simplistic, and the shadows and reflections aren’t quite as perfect, but that’s about it. After all this time, they’re still jaw-droppingly good. And by the time you get to what they've been doing in the last few years - well, it's easily comparable to anything you'll see from Dreamworks or Pixar.

Whatever Jimmy Page can do, we can do better!

But these videos aren’t just impressive for their computer animation skills. To the musician, they’re quite simply mesmerizing. Animusic use MIDI to drive the animations, so every note is perfectly played – strings vibrate harmonically, cymbals wobble and tremble, and so on. It’s just like watching a real instrument. If you thought the piano animation in The Corpse Bride was good, you ain’t seen nothing. After spending much of the last few months working on the music video packs for Moviestorm, I really, really respect what they’ve done here. They use a proprietary bit of software called ANIMUSIC|studio that enables them to do stuff that nobody else can even come close to. This isn't just your standard music animation. This is artistry and sheer genius of the absolute highest order. This sets the standard that the rest of us should aspire to.

It's like having a musical fish tank - utterly relaxing

The music’s damn good too. It mostly has an 80s prog rock feel to it, very Alan Parsons, ELP, or Yes-ish, and you often get the feel that what they’re trying to do is out-Jarre Jean-Michel – and succeeding! These are the stage shows he’d have liked to have done, if only it were physically possible and he’d had the money. I’d love to see some of these videos on a huge IMAX screen – now that would be quite something. They have a fairly wide musical range: some of the pieces are pure percussion, others are acoustic strings, with styles ranging from jazzy to techno. There’s stuff on there which appeals to everyone from my retired mum to my teenage kids (one Goth, one metalhead) and even my youngest daughter, whose taste mostly runs to Andrew Lloyd Webber and novelty singles in the charts. That alone takes some doing!

Like Jarre in Docklands, but turned up to 11!

I’d be hard pressed to pick a favourite from the 15 tracks on the 2 DVDs, but for me, three in particular stand out. (Click for YouTube links.) Resonant Chamber features a stunning multi-stringed guitar thing. This was the first Animusic piece I found, and it made me go and hunt out the rest. Aqua Harp is another beautifully relaxing piece, most notable for the picks which swim lazily around like fish. And Pipe Dream is an Internet classic, featuring bouncing balls and a percussion kit that has to be seen to be believed. (There I go with the believability thing again!) Not only are these so beautifully executed it leaves me open-mouthed with the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, but the wonderfully warped creative vision that goes into each piece is like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

A truly steampunk percussion device

I spent much of 2006 and 2007 evangelising about the HPLHS Call of Cthulhu movie. Now that I’ve told as many people as I can about that (and persuaded several of them to buy it), I’m going to start babbling on about Animusic. I promise not to do this very often, but here comes the plug. Go to their site and buy their DVDs. No, really, do. Whether you’re a musician or an animator, it’s a very, very fine way to spend 35 bucks.

The more wings, the better!

The Lost Squadron (1932)

I’ll lay my cards right on the table. I’m a sucker for anything with biplanes in. Or airships. Or any other form of vintage air travel. So a movie about a bunch of Air Force buddies who become Hollywood stunt pilots after the First World War is right up my street. Sadly, it's not available on DVD or even VHS, as far as I can see. I watched it on a tape recorded off TCM some years back, so finding a copy may not be trivial.

Four guys (three pilots and their mechanic) come back to America to find they have nothing waiting for them – one’s lost his business to a crooked partner, one’s lost his job, one’s lost his girlfriend to another man. So they decide to stick together and use their skills. Cue a fairly predictable plot about an unscrupulous movie producer who not only is sending his pilots up in dodgy planes, but is also the man who married our hero’s girlfriend. She’s an actress, and guess what, she now has to work with her ex. And her husband doesn’t even like her – she’s just a trophy wife. Suffice it to say, it’s about what you’d expect for this type of film. Strangely, although many reviewers refer to the movie as a comedy, it isn’t. It’s more like a Dick Barton thriller.

The opening sequence is really unusual. It sets the scene with an air battle. However, when all you can see is a helmeted head with goggles in a cockpit surrounded by rigging and machine guns, you have no idea who’s who, or even which side they’re on. If the movie were in colour, you could probably work it out; after all Flyboys and The Blue Max don’t seem to suffer from that problem. But in black and white they all look the same. So they superimpose a roundel or a cross in the corner of the screen so you know who’s on which side, which makes it look rather like a computer game. The aerial battle also looks very static. As is brought out so effectively in The Aviator, unless you have some background, you can’t tell that the planes are moving. Hughes had the luxury of delaying shooting until he had the right cloud conditions, even though waiting around for cloud in California was costing him a fortune: RKO obviously didn’t have that option, and the planes are shot against a dull grey background. Worth a look, though, just out of curiosity.

However, the rest of the flying sequences are wonderful. There’s a great range of different aircraft on show, which is enough to pique my curiosity. Some of the stunt flying is really quite hairy, particularly a sequence where they are strafing a village. And the great thing is that because the movie was made in 1932, they’re all real, genuine planes. No replicas, no models, and no CG.

(Quick aside, speaking of CG biplanes – have a look at Faith, Hope and Charity, by Wingmen Productions, which is a dramatized documentary on the air battle over Malta in 1940, where three Gloster Gladiators saw off wave after wave of the Italian air force. What makes this a special film is that it’s machinima. The entire thing is shot using a commercial flight sim game, and the quality of the models and the flying sequences is right up with the kind of stuff you’ll see on Discovery. Most machinima gets painful to watch after 20 minutes: this keeps you hooked for an hour and leaves you wanting more. It’s a free download, and if you like it you can make them a donation or buy the DVD.)

Anyway, back to The Lost Squadron. There are a few well-known names from the 1930s in the cast and crew, including Mary Astor (as actress Follette Marsh), David O. Selznick (producer), Max Steiner (music) and Herman Mankiewicz (dialogue). However, this isn’t their best work. The only really memorable performance is from Erich von Stroheim, perfectly typecast as the tyrannical producer. The character was clearly based on Stroheim himself – in fact, in the first draft of the script, the character was actually called "von Stroheim". The name was later changed to "von Furst" at Stroheim’s request. While I’d always thought of von Stroheim as a director, it turns out that while he only shot 12 films in 14 years, almost all silent, he acted in over 50 films in a career that lasted over 45 years, right up to his death.

While The Lost Squadron isn’t in any way comparable to Hell’s Angels, which is superior in just about every way imaginable, or Wings, which was the first movie ever to win an Oscar for Best Picture, it's an interesting look at an era of Hollywood where health and safety was a non-existent concept. It’s a fairly workmanlike run-of-the-mill story, with no particular flaws, but no nothing that makes it a must-see film for anyone except film buffs or biplane freaks. Which, I guess, is me, on both counts.

Here's what others have said about it:

• Time Out
• New York Times
• MSN
  

And did I mention it’s got really cool contemporary footage of World War One biplanes in? Oh, OK.