Anne Billson on Film 2009

By Anne Billson

For three years, Anne Billson wrote a film column for the Guardian newspaper which became obligatory reading for anyone interested in the world of cinema. She combines in-depth knowledge of her field with an eminently readable and unpretentious style and makes sometimes surprising and controversial observations with wit and elegance. Quite simply, she's a must-read for anyone who likes reading about movies.

Billson, born in the UK, is a well-known film writer with thirty years experience (including eight years as film critic for the Sunday Telegraph) and half a dozen books about film and three horror novels to her name. After reading her vampire novel Suckers, Salman Rushdie called her, "a superb satirist"; Jonathan Carroll described it as, "a rare and impressive piece of literary juggling" while Christopher Fowler called it, "dark, sharp, chic and very funny." Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian wrote of Spoilers, another collection of Billson's film writing, "she's on the ball, and funny with it." Ian Freer in Empire magazine called her monograph on the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, "a fun, stimulating exploration of a modern masterpiece."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Billson
• Release date: Jan 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465855435

Anne Billson

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist, photographer, screenwriter, film festival programmer, style icon, wicked spinster, evil feminist, and international cat-sitter. She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Antwerp. She likes frites, beer and chocolate.Her books include horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex, The Coming Thing and The Half Man; Blood Pearl, Volume 1 of The Camillography; monographs on the films The Thing and Let the Right One In; Breast Man: A Conversation with Russ Meyer; Billson Film Database, a collection of more than 4000 film reviews; and Cats on Film, the definitive work of feline film scholarship.In 1993 she was named by Granta as one of their Best Young British Novelists. In 2012 she wrote a segment for the portmanteau play The Halloween Sessions, performed in London's West End. In 2015 she was named by the British Film Institute as one of 25 Female Film Critics Worth Celebrating.

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Foreword

The following pieces were originally published in The Guardian's Film & Music section in 2009. The sharpwitted among you may have already worked out that you could probably read them for free on the Guardian's own website, so what can I offer here to make you feel your outlay of 99 cents has been worthwhile?

Firstly, of course, there's the convenience of having all these columns collected under one cover, whence they can easily be downloaded to your e-reading device, thus absolving you of the need to scour the web, and ensuring you don't accidentally skip a single pearl of my accumulated wisdom. Then there's the knowledge that - for better or for worse - the pieces are you are about to read are the raw unadulterated texts, unmodified by subeditors and untrimmed by the necessity to accommodate last-minute advertising on the printed page.

And then - I'd like to think - there's the satisfaction of knowing you are helping, in some small way, to sustain the career of a struggling writer. It could well be that the job of arts journalist, film critic, will shortly cease to exist as a paid profession, and will instead become the province of people with lots of time or private income on their hands. I'm not suggesting this is necessarily a Bad Thing, just that I wish I'd got the memo back in the early 1980s, when I was starting out, so I could have learnt a more useful trade, such as plumbing or dentistry.

But as an extra sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection The Psycho Murders, a novella inspired by the 1973 Vincent Price movie Theatre of Blood and first published on Twitter in increments of 140 characters. It used to be on my blog, but now it's a piece of writing you can find nowhere on the web.

I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Beatrice, Francois and Seraphine.

In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.

Anne Billson, 2012

Chapter 1: Films for People Who Don't Like Films

I don't normally like to read too much about a film before watching it, but I made an exception for The Reader, since I was having trouble working out what kind of movie it was. The Graduate with a lurking concentration camp motif? A Stanley & Iris-style study of illiteracy with a dash of The Night Porter?

But the more I read about it, the less it appealed, because I can't imagine how this film could surprise or enlighten or delight me in any way whatsoever. And now I've got it confused with Revolutionary Road, which I haven't seen either, and not just because both titles begin with R. Revolutionary Road, like The Reader, features Kate Winslet getting naked, is adapted from an acclaimed novel, and is directed by someone who made his name in British Theatre. One such film is happenstance; two practically constitutes a genre, and I think I've finally worked out what that genre is. It's Films For People Who Don't Really Like Films.

People who don't view cinema as a viable artform are only drawn to films which have been slapped with a cultural seal of approval: critically approved source material, or directors who have made their names in more venerable artforms, such as literature or theatre. They wouldn't dream of going to see thrillers starring Jason Statham, or comedies starring Will Ferrell, or horror movies starring no-one they've ever heard of, though I would argue there's likely to be more true cinematic feeling in such movies' little fingers than in the entire bloated corpus of Atonement or Proof or Possession (and I'm not talking about the one where Isabelle Adjani has sex with a tentacled monster). Let's face it, film-makers who try to reproduce the virtues of literature or theatre or fine art without understanding that film is an entirely different medium, with its own peculiar virtues, only ever succeed in coming up with ponderous, meretricious, upmarket kitsch.

I'm not saying such films are wholly without their pleasures, if not necessarily the ones their makers intended. For instance, I couldn't tear my eyes away from Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours. And perhaps Kate getting naked will in itself enough to make The Reader and Revolutionary Road worth the haul. (And yes, I will get round to watching them at some point, and wouldn't it be great if they did surprise me and force me to eat my words?)

I'm with the Surrealists on this one, which I discovered by chance (and not, I assure you, because I was seeking intellectual justification for my sins) while flicking through Ado Kyrou's Le surrealisme au cinema. Kyrou writes (pardon my clunky translation) Let us look at commercial cinema through new eyes, because it's there that one finds the most unexpected riches. I'm all for that. The films I'm most looking forward to seeing are not worthy Oscar bait like Milk or Doubt, though Sean Penn's fake nose and Meryl Streep looking stern in a black bonnet may well afford the odd unexpected thrill, and I've already ascertained that Frost/Nixon is worth watching purely on the strength of one or two of Frank Langella's more complicated facial expressions.

But what I really want to see is Stephen Rea embedded in Mena Suvari's windscreen for half the running-time of Stuck. I want to see Tony Leung, the most beautiful actor in the world, as a Chinese warlord in John Woo's Red Cliff, and Lee Byung-hun, second most beautiful actor in the world, poncing around in cool scar make-up and tight black trousers in Kim Ji-woon's wacky Leone homage, The Good, The Bad, The Weird. I want to see My Bloody Valentine in 3-D, and Outlander, starring Jim Caviezel as an alien who teams up with the Vikings. And right at the top of my dance-card, I'm afraid, is Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which I just have to see on the basis of that stupid title alone. I'm sure some of these films will be rubbish, but equally sure that even the worst will yield moments of cinematic joy entirely absent from the likes of Revolutionary Road. If you want intellectual justification for Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I could probably rustle it up, but do we really need it? This is Cinema.

Chapter 2: When Actors Play Real People

Actors playing real people is like actors speaking in funny foreign accents, or playing autistic savants or paraplegics - an in-your-face signifier that they're Acting with a capital A, instead of just swanning around being themselves. There's a whole bunch of Real People Performances jostling for position right now, because we're well into awards season. Nine of the past 12 Oscars for Best Actor and Actress have gone to portrayals of Real People. In the eyes of the easily impressed, playing a made-up character just doesn't have the same cachet.

Michael Sheen squaring off against Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon? It's the Battle of the Impersonations! Apart from one terrific if slightly on-the-nose late-night phone call from one antagonist to the other, entirely dreamt up by playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan, I kept thinking I might as well have been