films

Drive, the movie, featured disturbing gore, Albert Brooks as a notable villain, and too-long stretches of Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan making cow eyes at each other. It's pretty good but if you backtrack to director Nicolas Winding Refn's "Pusher Trilogy" you can see how the director deliberately, possibly subversively, "went Hollywood." If you want to experience Drive without the sentimental goop, I recommend the Pusher films and also James Sallis' source novel, also titled Drive. (And the book's sequel, Driven.)

Keith Rawson has a good rundown on the Drive book/film differences. Sallis is a writerly writer in the Cormac McCarthy mold who is also a fan of Richard Stark. The Driver character resembles Parker with backstory -- mostly melancholy. Driver is far less zombie-like in the books than Gosling plays him.

One lingering question about Drive, the book, and please email if you have any thoughts. A character is introduced late in the story named "Eric Guzman." There is an earlier character named Standard Guzman (Standard Gabriel in the movie -- Mulligan's creepy husband played by Oscar Isaac.) Who the hell is Eric Guzman supposed to be? Is this Standard back from the dead? A fake name used by mobsters trying to track down Driver? Both? Neither? Very little is said between Driver and another character, "Doc," to explain who "Eric" was and what happened to him. Did Driver "take him out"? The barely-explained reappearance of the Guzman name (and there is a third Guzman mentioned -- Eric's brother Noel, who Doc supposedly fixed up medically) in a novel with a Pulp Fiction-style scrambled chronology throws off the rhythm of the scrambling so the result, for this reader, was confusion as to when events were taking place. Again, would appreciate others' thoughts.

Good English translations of books by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are starting to become available; I recommend their science-fiction-cum-medieval-swashbuckler Hard to Be a God. Star Trek fans will immediately recognize this as a "prime directive" story ("We must not interfere in this primitive society, however dysfunctional") but Hard to Be a God was published in the Soviet Union in '64, two years before Trek's five year mission. Moreover, the observers walking around on this feudal planet, wearing mini-cams disguised as jewelry, are Communist utopians, not Federation would-be-colonialists. The observers see themselves as historians, nothing more. Plotwise, let's just say this particular planet's habit of torturing and killing its intellectuals sorely tests our protagonist's restraint. The antagonist, Don Reba, was originally named Rebia, an anagram for a certain Stalinist henchman; the Strugatskys changed it because it was a little too obvious.
Iain M. Banks wrote a similar tale 35 years later, Inversions, with two competing notions of how to go native. Also recommended.
Not necessarily recommended is the 2013 film version of Hard to Be a God, directed by Aleksei German (who died that year). The film mixes Tarkovskian aesthetics with Ubu Roi-ish perversity in a depiction of a completely degraded anti-culture. It's stylistically fascinating but incoherent; the science fiction aspects are subtle to the point of non-existence. For example, the characters are constantly mugging for the camera disguised as a jewel on the protagonist's forehead (which is never explained), yet he is in half the shots, being filmed by we-know-not-what. The book mentions helicopters whisking our agents around the planet; these are not seen in the movie, which is all horses and mud puddles -- like an extended version of the "Bring Out Your Dead" sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Wrote the following post in 2012 after seeing the film version of John Ajvide Lindqvist's book Let the Right One In. After reading the book I'm not so sure of this. More after the blockquote. [Spoilers]

Let the Right One In [the film] is a perfect loop that spins out more even metafiction than the main story contains.
Several mysteries of the clumsy Father, surrogate Father, or captor seen in the first half are explained in the second.
The Father, we learn, is the boy at the end of the next cycle of serving as keeper/guardian for the ageless vampire girl.
What strikes us initially as the Father's slow-witted ineptitude is in fact burn-out and grief after a lifetime of murdering for her and covering up her crimes. He still loves her, because she once seduced him just as convincingly and decisively as she does the Boy in this film. Yet he longs for death, wants to get caught, and disfigures himself horribly when he sees he is about to be replaced, inevitably, by a younger guardian.
All of this will happen to the Boy, as it happened to unknown other boys before. We are seeing the beginning and the end of his life.
One critic complained about the violence of the revenge in the swimming pool at the end -- was it just a cheap thrill for the audience? Perhaps, but the pleasure is hollowed-out by the scenes of the Boy weeping afterwards. Also the extremity of the event further explains the Boy's willingness to give the girl decades of servitude -- he owes her big time. Prior to this we saw him vacillating over her murders, even losing his taste for his serial killer clipping collection. After this incident, he's hooked for life.
I pondered the gender-bending of the vampire Girl. It explains how/why she offers "guy advice" to the Boy about defending himself from bullies. She asks the Boy to "be me" but also wants to be him.
We see hints of how the power dynamic of this very alike couple will play out over years of the Boy's servitude. The girl bosses the Father around and occasionally offers him a stroke on the cheek. The Boy, feeling his oats after shellacking his first bully, plays games with the girl's weakness of not being able to enter a room uninvited. She must give him a bloody demonstration of where such games will lead.
Most the reviews I skimmed talked about the coming of age/romance aspects of the story but not its exposition of the roots of a lifetime co-dependent relationship.

Reading Lindqvist's novel, source of the film, several years later, lowers the above interpretation a few notches. [More spoilers] In the book, the "father" is an alcoholic with a jones for boys, picked up by the vampire late in the alcoholic's life, and the vampire is in fact a boy, missing genitalia since his transformation to bloodsucker instigated by a sadistic vampire aristocrat in centuries past. (The purpose and mechanics of the de-sexing are a bit murky in the book.) Although Lindqvist wrote the script for the film version, the decision was made to downplay the sexual elements. Those changes certainly still leave open the interpretation above -- that in the film, the Father was once a Boy to the vampire, and the story hinges on the acquisition of a new Boy. Nevertheless, this spin was not in the author's mind. I still like my "loop of doom" version but it may have to be reclassified as fan fiction.]

Update: A.V. Club critic Scott Tobias had a take similar to mine:

And then the coda -- which finds Oskar on a train during the daytime, tapping Morse code to Eli, who’s curled up in a box by his side -- feels remarkably bittersweet. Their destinies are now entwined, and they aren’t alone any more, but for how long? Someday, Oskar will also be a middle-aged man, trudging out in the snow with a funnel and a jug, collecting sustenance for his beloved.

Books

Jeff VanderMeer, "Southern Reach" trilogy. VanderMeer wrote an intro to a Thomas Ligotti book where he discussed "working through Lovecraft," implying that big boy writers like Ligotti and VanderMeer had done that. VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" books, especially the first two, grab the reader but these are no "Colour Out of Space" because they substitute indecisiveness for ambiguous atmosphere. Is VanderMeer's version of Tarkovsky's "The Zone" evil, or not? With Lovecraft you know what you are dealing with even if the particulars aren't clear. Pardon the cynicism, but you don't get a three book contract with Farrar Straus and Giroux if you believe what lies below is darkness.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, F. Paul Wilson. As an antidote to VanderMeer's "highbrowing" of horror tropes, check out these two authors. Lindqvist wrote Let the Right One In and became that rare writer allowed to script his own property for the film version. The book is good, as is his Handling the Undead. F. Paul Wilson wrote The Keep and dislikes Michael Mann's movie version (one might disagree). Wilson has two series going, "pure" horror stories and a rollicking run of horror-adventure stories featuring the character Repairman Jack. In 2012, the two sets of books came together in an apocalyptic finale titled Nightworld. Both arcs are recommended -- FPW injects Lovecraftian ambiguity by having humanity's "Ally" be as indifferent to our fates as the beasties boiling up out of pits in the earth.

Movies

Monte Hellman films. Hellman lensed The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind back-to-back in the Utah desert, in his Corman days (mid-1960s). Jack Nicholson acts in both and wrote the Whirlwind script. Both are masterful films, though Shooting is marred by a confused ending (Wikipedia and Danny Peary's Cult Movies disagree on what happened at the end). This is the bleakest, most beautiful country you will see, populated by hard people doing hard tasks for no apparent reason. Two Lane Blacktop's themes of alienation were well in place in these "lost" films. Even earlier in his Corman period, Hellman handled second-unit chores for Creature from the Haunted Sea, a wild and crazy time capsule starring Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne as a ridiculous secret agent. Hellman's contributions include a gorgeously-shot sequence where the gun moll sings a "lounge"-type song on the deck of a yacht, with the sea heaving dreamily all around her, and incongruously slips the movie's title into the lyrics.