alexsarll | People in the 21st century ain't never seen a rock'n'roller

Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon is perhaps best known as the source of "It's in the trees! It's coming!" on Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love', but Mark Gatiss' recent history of horror made some mention of it, and got me rather intrigued. And yes, it's very good, a proper old-fashioned frightener like Dead of Night. It's an expansion, adaptation and updating (albeit only to the fifties, when you can smoke in airports and board moving trains and shoot mentals up with speed and not get in trouble when they run out of a window - happy days) of MR James' 'Casting the Runes', and like so many screen takes on his stories, it works a lot better than you might expect. This in spite of the producer overriding the objections of screenwriter, director and star and showing an actual demon, which is clearly a cheap and dated model effect - yet somehow still works.
(As in the James original, the sorcerous villain is named Karswell, which in fifties accents sounds quite like Carsmile, leading one to occasionally wonder what

carsmilesteve is up to. This becomes particularly acute at one seeming mention of Carsmile's Demon, which I could only picture as an indie cousin of Maxwell's Demon)

I read a piece in the paper about Patrick Keiller's Robinson films shortly after reading an essay by him which was one of the better contributions to a somewhat disappointing anthology called Restless Cities. The two I watched both consist of Paul Scofield narrating the thoughts and journeys he takes with this Robinson, over (mostly) still camera shots of...nothing in particular. London feels very Saint Etienne - at one stage Robinson wishes, like 'Finisterre', that the 19th century had never happened - but where St Et love London, Robinson is more pessimistic even than his fan Iain Sinclair, thinking of it as "a city full of interesting people, most of whom...would prefer to be elsewhere". "As a city it no longer exists" he claims, in 1992, seeing only the worst in the future. And of course we know that the fears of 1992 were misplaced then, but they seem more applicable now. One can only hope that this is the human tendency to forecast doom again, and that they are once more misplaced*.
Robinson in Space, the sequel, roves further afield, making "a peripatetic study of the problem of England", looking at the out of town shopping centres and the container parks, talking about the present of a country whose past includes the Martian invasion of the late 19th century, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula as surely as it does Thatcher and the dawn of the motorways. The library's DVD seized up at the end, but somehow it didn't much matter.

If you'd told me ten years ago that Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie could make a film together that would look boring, I would not have believed it, yet trailers for The Tourist entice me not at all. And yet, Depp remains a hero.
"I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘[Jack Sparrow is] ruining the movie.’ Depp reveals to Smith, however, that he remained unfazed by the studio’s hysteria. “Upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?… And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite… ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ Which really made her nervous.”

Bit of a misfire of a weekend, all told. One party I'd intended to rendezvous with relocated, and if ever there was a night when you didn't want your boots to somehow extrude an internal nail, it's got to be one where you're attempting a glam stomp. Which then of course left me unfit for Tubewalking on Sunday. Oh, and These Animal Men's new incarnation is distinctly samey, but that may be because all their effects pedals were snowed in. Still. One goes on.

*Speaking of things misplaced, Michael Bywater's Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did it Go? is not the book one might expect. At first it seems a little fogeyish in its laments for Meccano, proper doctors, the rubbishness of modern music - but Bywater knows that for all the arguments he can muster against modern music, they're also a generational obligation, not to be trusted. He knows that the proper doctor may have had a reassuring manner, but that most of the time he couldn't do much to stop you being ill. He knows, in short, that the past was often not all it's now cracked up to be. Many of the entries have a sting in the tail, as when he moans about how everywhere in Europe smells the same nowadays - but then twists and says how much better that is than the smell of fire and burning flesh 60 years ago. And he writes beautifully: "The gifts of life do not turn to dust, nor does loss cast a shadow. Loss sheds its light on what remains, and in that light all that we have and all that we have had glows more brightly still."