Film and literature are very different media. Even the laziest of observers will confirm that yes, books tend to be small, oblong and papery whereas cinemas are larger, less portable and serve popcorn. But those are just the surface differences, each art form has its own strengths and weaknesses, especially when it comes to the messy enterprise of story telling.

Books, in direct contrast to their compact size, can tell sprawling stories of emotional depth and complexity. Films require a certain economy of narrative but handle the grand sweep of action and spectacle with natural aplomb. Arguably, books unlock the reader’s imagination, challenging them to fill in the details of a fictional world, while cinema is more prescriptive, locking down those infinite possibilities to a consistent, artistic vision. Neither is the ultimate expression, each merely offers a different aperture to view the story.

And so we turn to John Hillcoat’s The Road, a grim, intimate and mostly successful attempt to bring Cormac McCarthy’s novel to the screen, or as script writer Joe Penhall puts it, ‘transmute the state from ice to water, or water to gas’ while leaving the audience in no doubt it’s the same base element. Penhall asserts that the novel is ‘delivered directly to the blood stream’ and the film attempts the same trick. It can’t rely on McCarthy’s stripped down, bleakly evocative prose but it can offer breathtaking vistas of rotting cityscapes and a dying world, broken and bowed by an unspecified apocalypse.

Viggo Mortesson’s perfectly calibrated performance draws us into this world, wielding sparse, fractured dialogue to devastating effect. Life on the road is sketched out in visceral detail in a series of scenes that unfold as slowly and deliberately as a storm front. By playing to the medium’s strengths in this way, concentrating on visual storytelling and well paced narrative beats, the celluloid Road captures the essence of its literary cousin and delivers a wounding yet strangely uplifting cinematic experience.

The golden age of British television is well and truly over. Anything with even the tiniest, weakest spark of creativity and originality has long since been extinguished – drowned in the murky swamp water of what passes for modern television listings. It’s a simple mathematical formula, so straight forward that even the current specimens of pond life masquerading as TV executives can understand it without getting their crayons out to write it down.

Reality television and lifestyle shows cost next to nothing to make and pull in millions in ratings. All you need to do is commission another vacuous mess starring either a washed up celebrity or ordinary members of the public with ‘special’ talents (ie. being more irritating than scabies) and then sit back and watch the cash roll in. Why hire actors with screen presence and charisma? Why avail yourself of directors with vision or writers with a story to tell? You’re not going to make any more money off of it so why bother?

It’s not a problem unique to the UK, American television (historically laughably weak compared to its British counterpart) also suffers from the same blight. The difference is they have the money to support both the tat and the sublime ideas that come along every once in a while and make the whole thing worthwhile. And that’s why they’re currently wiping the floor with us when it comes to quality drama. If you haven’t seen these series then I suggest you stop reading the blog right now and go out and buy some box sets. They are, in order of jaw-dropping-disbelief-if-you-haven’t-seeniness, the following:

The West Wing, Firefly, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Dollhouse (actually anything by Joss Whedon – Buffy, Dr Horrible, even Angel in later series), The Sopranos, Arrested Development … I could go on but this has already turned into a rant and I haven’t even got to the point yet.

*Deep cleansing breath*

The fact is that even with the current British system, good shows do slip through occasionally, normally sitcoms like Outnumbered or Pulling – modest shows that hide their radical hearts behind genre tropes – wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are also some shows with massive ambition and creativity that are successful despite it all and against the odds – but that’s just basically Dr Who (and I’ll devote a whole series of podcast to that soon).

Finally there are aberrations, new shows from channels that are ironically also the main culprits when it comes to pumping excrement into the schedules – the BBC3s and ITV2s of this world, full to the brim with Top 100 shows and programmes about other programmes hosted by foetuses in designer clothing. The worst of these is E4, which is like T4 but all the time and just as unwatchable.

However every now and then E4 will have a go at original programming and surprise itself. Skins is awesome. The Inbetweeners is laugh out loud funny.

And now there’s Misfits, a show which you can guarantee started with an executive walking into his editors office and saying something like “Alright, hear me out, it’s X-Men for the Skins generation.”

And that’s exactly what it is but despite all that it’s pretty damn good. The characters are interesting, it’s actually fairly funny and the concept is great – young offenders get hit by lightning and get superpowers themed around their deepest desires. A disgraced athlete with the ability to turn back time, an awkward recluse who can turn invisible – that sort of thing. The powers are well handled, the actors range from fine to quietly impressive and the whole concept is milked for every last joke, twist and scare it can provide. I’d take a hundred episodes of it over anything Big Brother, X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing have ever produced.

It’s hugely derivative of course (Marvel’s Runaways, the aforementioned Skins, Buffy, it even nicks some stylistic and thematic tricks from quality BBC fare like Life on Mars and Being Human) and it’s not always as funny or as clever as it thinks it is but what it does have is a rough, brash confidence that allows the viewer to overlook these failings and concentrate on what it does well. Which is deliver twisted, memorable stories a cut above most things currently on British TV.

Consider this the first Stairwell recommendation of the new year.

#3

Adventureland (film) Emboldened by rum/ a fairground akward and strange/ he steals love’s first kiss  Sports Night (tv) New York in winter/ I feel the heat in your words/ but you talk of sport  Spicy Jerk Chicken with mango salsa on pepper and chilli bread (sandwich) Saturated fat/ absent like snow in july/ it melts on the tongue  Strawberry Swing (music video) I lay on the floor/ the world erupts around me/ in fire and smudged chalk  (500) Days of Summer (film) In the wrong order/ love cools with passing seasons/ a boy meets a girl  American Dad (tv) Like family guy/ but in this one the fish talks/ that’s progress for you  Pow! (iphone app) Adan West is gone/ but his flying fists live on/ blam crash bang thunk pow  Arkham Asylum (ps3 game) Digital Gothlam/ the dark knight detective stalks/ down linear paths  Inglourious Basterds (film) Tarintino hacks/ this film into bloody chunks/ some don’t really work  Hamlet 2 (film) Shakespeare this is not/ but rock me sexy jesus/ is hilarious  Jordan (celebrity) Spring’s brief blush has passed/ flesh droops in autumnal hues/ forget fame and live

Over the last week I have had figuratively tens of emails about my regular column – The Haiku Review.  There are, it turns out, hundreds of rules a haiku must honour before it is worthy of that title. A hundred tiny hoops for the poor tyke to jump through, contorting its syllables into grotesque shapes to facilitate safe passage. Does it have a season word or kigo? Does it have two distinct phrases? A caesura? Concrete images? An ‘A-ha’ moment? Seriously, google it, it’s insane.

And my first reaction to this onslaught was to simply ignore it completely. For me haiku is about capturing a moment or a feeling with absolute precision. That’s why it’s so perfect for reviews, you can show how something made you feel- surely a brilliant resource when everything else about critical appreciation is so subjective and open to debate? I like this description from dreamsmith.org:

People often link Haiku with Zen. ‘The Haiku Moment’ is a moment of Zen-like awareness. We all have them from time to time. We suddenly see the world with great clarity. We see details that we don’t normally notice. And if we’re lucky, we note some special significance in the ‘insignificant’ details we usually ignore. The moment passes, but we’re left with something special. We then capture that moment in a short poem, preserving it and (we hope) its special message.

Perfect. So why complicate matters with a load of ancient rules? Surely all they can possibly hope to achieve is to crush the spontaneity of the creative spirit on which ‘the haiku moment’ relies? Especially when contemporary English haiku are a bastardisation of a Japanese art form and the rules in question largely contradict each other anyway. Also, it just seems like too much damn work.

But then I thought – rules are good sometimes, if nothing else it gives me something to break when I feel like it. So with that in mind I have come up with a set of 13 rules that I am going to stick to from this day forward (probably). They may not be definitive, they may not result in perfect haiku but they are mine and I like them.

Here they are:

1. Seventeen syllables written in three lines divided into 5-7-5.
2. Write what can be said in one breath.
3. Use a season word (kigo) or seasonal reference.
4. Use a caesura (break) at the end of either the first or second line, but not at both.
5. Have two images that are only associative when illuminated by the third image.
6. Limited use of personal pronouns.
7. Use of sentence fragments.
8. Attempt to have levels of meaning in the haiku. On the surface it is a set of simple images; underneath a philosophy or lesson of life.
9. Use of puns and word plays.
10. Write of the impossible in an ordinary way.
11. Telling it as it is in the real world around us.
12. Use no punctuation for ambiguity.
13. Capitalize the first word only.

Also, from now on, comments on The Haiku Review should only be phrased in Haiku format following these rules. And feel free to add your own reviews of films, books, comics, music, art, people, food etc.

A new era blooms
horizons scudded with clouds
a blinking cursor

Reviews listed from best to worst.

#2

Laura’s Chocolate & Beef Stew (bespoke foodstuff) By all the laws of/ God and man it shouldn’t work/ but somehow it does  Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog (web comic) If you haven’t seen/ this yet then you can’t be my/ friend until you do Jamie’s Italian (restaurant) He may act like an/ idiot but the boy sure/ knows how to cook pork  Brick (film) The Maltese Falcon/ meets 10 Things I Hate About/ You but with more laughs  District 9 (film) Has a great bit in/ it where someone is killed by/ a jet-propelled pig  Bejeweled Blitz Beta (facebook app) We should all live life/ to the full. But first I’ll have/ one more go on this  Cyanide & Happiness (web comic) Badly drawn and in/ questionable taste but when/ it’s good you’ll laugh hard  Old People Karaoke (pastime) Sing us your heart’s song/ memories fade to echoes/ melodies linger  The Final Destination 3D (film) Shit in 3D is/ still shit. Oh look another/ evisceration  The Boondock Saints (film) I am Troy Duffy/ I’m the new Tarantino/ Actually I’m not  

Reviews don’t really mean anything, do they? We’re all wired so differently that a film or a song or a risotto is going to have a wildly different effect on me than it’s going to have on you. And yet we love to quantify, categorise and clarify. We live to put stuff in boxes and then mark them good or bad with thick black unequivocal lines. The Haiku Review is different. It recognises that reviewing stuff is pretty much meaningless and as such it only spends 17 syllables doing it. It doesn’t differentiate between media and it’s structured from best to worst, enabling you my lucky readers to make direct comparisons between, say, my new shoes and stand-up comedian Jimmy Carr. Be here every Friday for more Ancient Japanese-themed review fun.

#1

Weddings (traditional ceremony) Today you joined hands/ and ran headlong into your/ future. Never stop  Y: The Last Man (comic) It makes me weep that/ something so funny and smart/ exists in this world  Greenbelt (festival) We shall do well here/ people seem genuinely/ happy together  Chocolate Chai Tea (drink) It tastes like a bar/ of chocolate exploded in/ a spice factory  Hoopla Impro Workshop (workshop) Your entertainment/ for the evening is coming/ out of your own head  Leeds (city) It is cold up here/ fearless girls bare their flesh and/ don’t even goose bump  inFamous (game ps3) Like Grand Theft Auto/ but I can shoot lightning and/ throw cars around. Nice!  Alton Towers (theme park) Sensations that are/ otherwise reserved for those/ ending their own lives Funny People (film) Long, self-indulgent/ movie that is nonetheless/ revelatory  The Host (book) Clumsy, obvious/ broad-brushed and naive and yet/ fitfully brilliant  Pizza Express (restaurant) Tasty, generic/ food served in disturbingly/ identical rooms  The Time Traveler’s Wife (film) Although you have a/ kind of warmth. It is mostly/ reflected glory  G-Force (film) Shit in 3D is/ still shit. It’s just shit with a/ greater depth of field