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THESE WE HAVE LOVED
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This page lists books, movies, tv drama and music that more than one person I know has very much enjoyed. Coverage varies from the obsessive to the perfunctory. Prolific authors of dependable quality get extra points for making life easier for those of us who are reluctant to leave a groove once they find one.
The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs
If you don't already know this album, your cult-cred is shot to hell. My review of January 2001's live show at the Lyric Hammersmith is here.
American Beauty
Fabulously conceived, with some great lines, more than enough to justify the 'unhappy' ending (which is foreshadowed in the first few lines of the film). In the director's commentary, Sam Mendes goes out of his way to explain that listening to other directors' commentaries on DVD has taught him so much about how to make this (his first) movie - he himself recommends the DVD versions of Boogie Nights and Sex Lies and Videotape.
More detail at The Internet Movie Database
Topsy Turvy
Mike Leigh has always been fascinated by work, and this, his first 'Hollywood' movie (if that's not too grandiose a term for something that cost just £10m), concentrates on the fabrication of the first production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado.
If you like Gilbert & Sullivan, you ought to love this; if you don't, you will.
Mike Leigh's humour is rarely kind, but here he makes up for lost time with a hugely comic performance from Jim Broadbent, all bluster and bravado. The pain behind the laughter is there, but it's reined in and carefully orchestrated, swelling in the final minutes in a virtuoso scene between Gilbert and his childless wife.
The DVD is greatly enhanced by the additional option of a Mike Leigh's commentary.
More detail at The Internet Movie Database
Ride with the Devil
This has to be the best ever American Civil War epic made by a Taiwanese director. Ang Lee's American Civil War epic (two and a half hrs) is a tender mix of the epic and the intimate, with a great script and some fabulous performances. (I particularly liked the way that Jeffrey Wright's character develops from token nigger to become almost the heart of the film.)
More detail at The Internet Movie Database
The Ice Storm
Ang Lee again (and Tobey Maguire again too). One of the few films that Kevin Kline can be recommended in. Christina Ricci hurrah. Sigourney Weaver, hurrah. Everybody grows up, painfully.
More detail at The Internet Movie Database
Existenz
Great dvd features, including an amusing commentary from director David Cronenberg
More detail at The Internet Movie Database
Fight Club
This film is nothing like what you'd expect from the reviews - apart from anything else it's extremely funny. Brad Pitt is excellent, and gorgeous.
The Sixth Sense
A good example of an acceptable film made into an excellent DVD by the addition of a directors commentary, pointing out sundry clevernesses that you may have missed (of which there are many).
Wag the Dog
Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, in a David Mamet script. An ensemble piece shot on a very short time-scale. Global issues. Directors commentary by director Barry Levinson
Pi
Applause for the DVD as opposed to the movie. Very amiable commentary turns a student-nightmare film into a vituoso masterclass in lo-budget film-making.
The Secret of Sleepy Hollow
Another merely-amiable movie redeemed by the DVD commentary of Tim Burton, who underlines the film's attitude as a tribute to Hammer Horror movies (with Johnny Depp as the best fainter in the business). Astoundingly, it was all filmed on a closed set. Great supporting Hammer Horror cast that includes Christoper Lee and Richard Griffiths
More detail at The Internet Movie Database
The Talented Mr Ripley
Great cast in a very intelligent movie, shot almost entirely in Italy, with a script by Minghela himself (whose parents are Italian). Jude Law and Matt Damon are superb (and nicely nude - the homo-eroticism of the book is much louder in the film, and the film is the better for it). Good music (Minghela is a musician). Directors Commentary. (And Philip Seymour Hoffman!)
Magnolia
Such a generous, large film. And Tom Cruise _acts_ shock horror. (And Philip Seymour Hoffman!)
His Dark Materials
The Harry Potter books are that rare thing, a children's book that's enjoyed by adults. Northern Lights (the first volume of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy) is rarer still: a children's book that you'd hesitate to give to a child.
Like Harry Potter, this book has a strong narrative thrust, irredeemably evil villains, and a child-heroine travelling towards maturity. But Northern Lights is a children's story told by a hard-headed father: there is no candy-coating to sugar the pill, no sentiment, no whimsy, no humour - only the final glacial battle between free will and fate.
Lyra, the book's heroine (definitely a heroine: spunky, wilful, dogged), lives in a universe familiar yet harshly different: Tartars, witches, armoured panzer-bears, and an all-powerful Church pre-occupied with original sin and the dual nature of mankind.
Every human has their daemon, a twinned creature whose form settles only as the child matures. (One sailor's daemon settles as a seagull: the sailor can never set foot on land again.) Lyra's demon is Pantalaimon, sometimes a mouse, sometimes a moth, sometimes an eagle.
Lyra, like Harry Potter, is driven to discover the true story of her lost parents. Unlike Harry, however, Lyra discovers a cold truth: her parents are Machievellian political scientists, each single-mindedly pursuing power at whatever cost.
Read Northern Lights and, after you've unclenched your fingers from the thrall of the final pages, ask yourself: how on earth are they going to film this?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay
A loveable, big book from Michael Chabon, following the adventures of two creators of strip cartoons through World War II and beyond. One of them is gay, and one isn't. One survives, one doesn't. Epic, funny, true.
David Foster Wallace
I wish he would hurry up and write something else as gloriously complex as Infinite Jest. (Btw: Dave Eggers - bastard child of David Foster Wallace and Douglas Coupland?)
King of the City
Michael Moorcock at his sprawlingly sulphurous best (and those of us who have read him at his sprawlingly sulphurous worst appreciate the good stuff when it turns up). Appropriately enough for a book that imagines and inserts whole imaginary blocks into the existing London terrain, this book was reviewed in the LRB by Iain Sinclair.
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
If you haven't been near science-fiction since you were spotty, you may not be aware that, sometimes in the Nineties, the whole genre took a distinct turn towards the ecological: machines are no longer the heroes.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is an excellent example of this: stronger on character, culture and politics than on plot per se, the series (about the colonisation of Mars) has a steady historical sweep that may put you in mind of War and Peace. (You read War and Peace already, right?)
Antarctica pursues the same themes in a terrestrial setting.
Neil Stephenson
With Cryptonomicon, Stephenson moves beyond the cyber-themed Snowcrash and The Diamond Age to engage with larger issues (and writes William Gibson and Bruce Sterling into a cocked hat as he does so).
Patrick O'Brian
Bluff Captain Aubrey and effete Stephen Maturin battle and scheme their way through the eighteenth century, largely at sea. Hornblower for grown-ups in a 20-book series.
To my mind, there's a strong homo-erotic tide swelling beneath the relationship of Aubrey and Maturin, and the tone of the books is surprisingly gay-friendly ("Would the sahib wish me to bring him to a house of boys? Cleaned, polite boys like gazelles, that sing and play the flute?" "No Mahomet: just the elephant, if you please.")
Dean H King's recent biography reveals O'Brian to be just as complex as any of his characters.
James Lee Burke
The Robicheaux novels. Ex-alcoholic detective deals with his personal demons, sociopaths and pyschopaths in the deep bayoux of Louisiana. The prose loses some of its purple as the series progresses, which is a good thing - there's only so many dawns like bruised peaches that a stomach can stand. 'Purple Cane Road', the latest at the time of writing, is the best yet. Outstanding.
Ian Rankin
The Inspector Rebus series. Another hard-boiled-yet-human detective, this time in Edinburgh. As the series develops, Rankin's cynicism about Scotland's new power elite bubbles to the surface to excellent effect.
Dorothy Dunnett
Frighteningly intelligent historical sagas. The House of Niccolo series, recently completed, is the best. Robust, epic, touching.
"Dunnett wrote big, fat 500-page, 300,000-plus-word books raging with life and colour and plot. Particularly plot... She had a mind attuned to deviousness, and nowhere was this quality more apparent than in her last sequence of novels, the splendid "House of Niccolò" series. Set in the 15th century, in the worlds of commerce and banking in the Low Countries, Italy and the Levant... the books follow the up-and-down fortunes of Claes, sometimes known as Nicholas or Niccolò, who rises from bastardy to a position of great power." -The Independent
Geoff Ryman
'Was', 'Lust', fabulous.
The Sopranos
Epic, funny, scarey, with some fantastic characters, not least the wife.
The West Wing
By no means as good as The Sopranos (same production company I think), but nonetheless manages to be the most intelligent drama on TV this season.
Queer As Folk
The UK version, not the US version (which manages to be dull, from what we've seen so far). The first TV programme that made metropolitan queens feel wanted.