Paranormal Activity

Tweet After much hype in the press, I finally went to see Paranormal Activity today. I'd heard mixed reviews in the UK, but I have to say that despite its tediously slow start, I actually enjoyed it. By the end of the film, I was aware that my heart was attempting to crawl up into my mouth - the last film to have that effect upon me was Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes. I do think in part that Paranormal Activity relies too heavily upon jump-scares, although its utilisation of sound to achieve these, instead of the CGI equivalent of a ghost train rubber skeleton, lets it wriggle somewhat off its hook.

It brought to mind the more 'Gothic' tradition of horror, as opposed to the gore-soaked franchises courting controversy that we have become used to of late. A slow burner in many senses, it scatters clues about the pasts of our protagonists thought the narrative, foregoing the typical chunk of backstory exposition that many filmmakers feel is necessary. The film piles weird occurrence onto weird occurrence until the suspense is pulled so taut that you could probably pick out a tune on it. Maybe Danse Macabre?

Anyway. It's nice to see a film that never actually shows you its 'monster'. It never manages to come quite as close to the pure genius of Robert Wise's 1963 classic The Haunting, and it's not quite as creepy as Poltergeist (incidentally the only horror film to actually scare me) but its low budget, limited location and restricted point of view serve well to ramp up the claustrophobia felt by the couple. We only know as much as they know, although we do clearly benefit from some awareness of cinematic conventions, i.e. ouija boards rarely spell out good news and broken pictures are often bad omens.

Still, I'm glad to see that people are still making ghost movies, and telling ghost stories. I am personally a bit of a believer in ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties having had a few very peculiar experiences myself, and there's something a lot more unsettling about a thud during the night with no obvious source, as opposed to a zombie lurching toward you clutching the scabby remains of a human arm. I was beginning to worry that ghost stories had become a dying art, but I think there's life in the old dog yet...

Feeling Fear, aka Procrastination

Tweet I originally composed this entry while sat in a coffee shop just off Piccadilly Circus one rainy Monday evening. Yes, I wrote it with a purple fineliner, by hand, in a ringbound shorthand notebook. What can I say, it satisfies my inner Luddite. The purple ink was for my inner drag queen.

Anyway, I follow a very useful blog named Procrastinating Writers, designed to help writers overcome their inherent procrastination, and the whole thing got me thinking about how much I indulge in this particular artist's malady - and, more importantly, why.

I always told myself that I didn't write as often as I may have wished to because I didn't have enough time. I reasoned that if I had more time, I'd write all the time. Nonsense. It would have been incredibly easy to have simply spent less time messing about on Twitter, and used that time for writing instead. Now I actually have more time than I know what to do with and still I don't write.

I can only say it's because of two reasons. First, there is the matter of technique. I have the idea, but I'm unsure how to begin. Afraid of not doing justice to the idea, I then don't even try, and the idea scuttles off to hibernate in some dark, cobwebby recess of my imagination. Second, I just don't write in case anything I do write doesn't meet the ridiculously high standards that I set for myself.

I suppose it all comes down to fear, which is completely irrational since I'm fearless in so many other aspects of my life. Yet it is fear all the same, and it is this fear which I must conquer if I'm to progress down the writer's road further than the Inn of Indecision.

It's a few weeks early for resolutions, but now seems as good a time as any to start. I intend to stop being so afraid and simply get on with the thing I enjoy most - writing. And if it's not good enough? Well, that's what second drafts are for!

Who's with me?

Writer's Digest short story competition

Tweet I just decided to enter the short story competition currently being run by Writer's Digest. If you have a story under 1500 words that you'd like to enter...click here and do so! You never know what'll happen until you try...

Cookie recipe!

Tweet I wanted to write something today. I wasn't sure what, only that I wanted to write. Given it's now 4pm and I'm absolutely shattered, I've decided to do something a little different. A very late night involving air hockey, arcade games, pool and wandering around London until 3am left me with a craving for peanut butter cookies, so I decided to make some...and share the recipe. Enjoy!

This recipe makes 10 cookies. Half or double the amounts to make 5 or 20. I'm sure you can work the maths out for yourself.

Preheat the oven to 190°c and lightly grease a baking tray.

Mix 60g butter with 75g peanut butter. Mix well!

Add 115g granulated sugar. Again, mix well.

Stir in 75g plain flour, and 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

By this point the mixture will be quite dry and look like crumbs. Stir in a few splashes of milk until it binds together.

When you have a wet (but not sloppy) consistency, spoon balls of the mixture onto the baking tray.

Bake for 15 minutes, and hey presto! Yummy cookies!

Brand new site!

Tweet I finally got fed up of the limited templates offered by my previous website provider, and took the plunge into personal webspace yesterday. I bought my domain name, set up an email address, and cobbled up a site in Dreamweaver. My blog is still my main point of focus, but at least now I have somewhere to host those stories that I haven't been able to place. There are currently six stories, ranging in length, available for free for you to check out!

Feel free to check it out here, and you can always send me an email at icy [at] icysedgwick [dot] com. (Writing the address like that stops spam spiders finding it and sending me junk. Useful tip!) Let me know what you think!

As an aside, the photo at the top of this entry is one of my own. So I don't just write, I do photomanipulations and graphics as well!!

Twilight - why vampires are rubbish.

Tweet Unless you've been living under a rock for a while, you'll be thoroughly familiar with the Twilight phenomenon. I myself have never been the greatest fan of vampires, either in fiction or cinema, finding them to be far too...well...dull for my liking. It's too easy to be a vampire. Good-looking, usually wealthy, strong, fast, blah blah blah. I'm still not 100% sure why people would even like to be vampires. The living off other humans is bad enough, but living forever? Surely that would get boring after a while. There's only so many times you can go around the world before it becomes repetitive. Taj Mahal? Seen that. The Eiffel Tower? Done that. The Empire State Building? Spat off the roof.

Anyway. I don't really like to slag things off without some sort of awareness of them, so I finally got around to watching Twilight this evening. I felt I should probably familiarise myself with the story in some form before continuing to vehemently rip it to shreds, and I decided that the film would be quicker to watch than having to trawl through the book. It's clearly aimed at lovestruck fifteen-year-old girls - oh, the clumsy new girl at school winds up making friends on her very first day (yeah, because that always happens) and catches the eye of the best-looking boy...excuse me, Ms Meyer, can you say "wish fulfilment fantasy"? Anyway. Throughout the entire film, I found myself thinking, "What would Cassidy do?" (If you say you like vampires and you DON'T know who Cassidy is, then go to the back of the class and write "I must go and research Preacher" 800 times).

Exactly why would a family of vampires decide to put itself in harm's way to protect a human, just because this human is dating one of them? Let's be rational for a second. Lions don't decide to date antelope, and if they did, I bet the rest of the pride would just tuck in, regardless of whether or not another pride had their eye on said antelope. Don't for one minute try and say it's any different - it's not. Vampires are predators, humans are prey. Just because they both have the same basic collection of body parts does not make them suitable bedfellows. Look at Morecombe and Wise.

Vampirism has somehow become romanticised in popular culture. Why? What is so 'romantic' about a human-shaped leech? Let's be honest, people, that's all a vampire is. The beloved Edward even explains this concept to the hapless heroine Bella, and she says she doesn't care. Ah well, love is blind, and all that. Or, in Bella's case, simply stupid. The idea of a very old man (Edward has been a vampire since 1918, and if he was 17 when bitten, then he'd be 107 in total by 2008, when the film was released) falling in love with a teenager is just a little creepy, isn't it? It might look like a seventeen year old male, and sound like a seventeen year old male...but that doesn't mean that it IS a seventeen year old male (I sound like those campaigns warning about online predators, don't I?).

I can't really slag off the book as I still haven't read it, and based upon the film certainly don't intend to, but I can certainly dismiss the film as trash. Enjoyable in a 'chick lit' kind of way, but trash nonetheless. So Hollywood, if you're listening, ditch the brooding Sir Fangs-A-Lot and ensure that all future cinematic vampires are Irish drunkards who are pricks as often as they are heroes. Cassidy FTW!

Beauty is truth, and truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Tweet The title of this post comes from the final two lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn, written by John Keats in 1819. I'm not usually a fan of poetry, but I do have a soft spot for Keats. In my humble opinion, he was the greatest of the Romantic poets, and it's a crying shame he didn't receive the attention he deserved during his lifetime.

Since I'm such a fan, I decided to go and see Bright Star, Jane Campion's latest film depicting his romance with Fanny Brawne. Critics are touting it as her best work since The Piano, and I'm deeply saddened to say that this may be so, but it's also by far one of the most boring films I've seen all year - and I forced myself to sit through the travesty that was Dorian Gray.

Scenes are left woefully unfinished as though Campion got so bored of her own work that she simply wandered off to do something else, while the actors seem prone to occasional fits of over-acting. The costumes are gorgeous, but the dialogue lets it all down as it attempts to be pithy but instead comes across as self-indulgent. The film focusses more on Fanny and her talent for dressmaking, which in itself doesn't bother me as it's nice to see a film that re-trains the focus on the muse instead of the genius. What does bother me is how happily the film skips over Keats' actual poetry, only occasionally referring to it, in favour of burning glances between the star-crossed lovers.

As a seemingly headstrong, independent young woman, I desperately wanted to like Fanny. She's at odds with society around her and simply wants to pursue her heart, regardless of convention or practicality. Yet I couldn't like her at all. Yes, she inspired some of the greatest poetry ever written in the English language, but based on this depiction of her...I can't fathom how.