Adam Mars-Jones

On a trip out to Box Hill in Surrey on his eighteenth birthday in summer 1975, plump, insecure Colin trips over the cool, sophisticated biker Ray. Something prompts him to answer Ray's rhetorical "What am I going to do with you?" with "Anything you like," and before Colin knows quite what is happening, he's on the back of Ray's Norton, setting out on an unexpected new career as a sex-slave in the suburban hinterland of Hampton Court palace.

Although the relationship between Ray and Colin is clearly very unequal and exploitative, and it doesn't end happily, when it ends it does, counterintuitively, leave Colin more at ease with who he is and what he wants out of life. He is in a position to build a new, happy life for himself. This in contrast to Colin's father, whose similarly dependent relationship with Colin's mother drives him into a spiral of mental breakdown.

Fun because of all the nice period detail about bikers and sex in the seventies, before everyone got hung up on motorcycle safety and AIDS, but the plot felt a bit facile.… (mere)

I thought I'd read this back in 2011 when it came out, but I picked it up off the shelf recently and noticed a bookmark half way through. I love Ozu and I like the idea of throwing off the weight of accepted criticism and taking a "layman" approach to analysing one of his best films. Why would I have given up on such a short book about a subject I find fascinating?

I suspect it's because Mars-Jones' forensic dissection of every single shot in the film eventually begins to suck all the life out of it. This approach offers occasional insights but a lot of the time it's the text equivalent of an Arnold Schwarzenegger DVD commentary: "Here's Noriko. She comes into the house. She's upset but she's hiding it. She avoids her father's eyes and goes upstairs..." and on and on. You can almost see him checking the word count, sighing, and adding one more paragraph about hankies.

It's not all bad, and it provides some interesting background on the conditions in which the film was made and the general history of Japanese cinema. I think I'll stick with the critics in future though.… (mere)

The second instalment of John Cromer's life story picks up where the first left off, with our youthful white British suburban Hindu starting his A-Level studies. Unfortunately, this continuation of the school career is very much more of the same thing covered at length in the first volume and it gets a bit dull.

Things liven up considerably when Cromer goes off to India on a spiritual quest, then upon returning heads to Downs College, Cambridge where life proves to be neither easy nor stereotypical and being a wheel chair user makes one prone to being kidnapped, exploited and dropped down stairs...

We're left on a bit of a physical and emotional cliff-hanger and who knows when a Volume 3 might appear to tell us where John and his adapted Mini might go next?… (mere)