Night Film

Review: Night Film Thanks to painsomnia, I have spent many darkened hours this week listening to this novel, expertly and deliciously read by Jake Weber. What an odd, previous gift to receive from physical pain.
 
Deadly, sovereign, perfect
 

Dario Argento's Suspiria
 
screams and bright red birds, and astounding hints of hope, as the sun can, in an instant, christen the blackest sea
 

Dario Argento's Tenebrae
 
the edge of the end

The premise was good, the suspense was right on point but after awhile it was getting too long and the suspense died down a little bit. Great book, very long. I liked the characters, the relationship between the three main characters was interesting but I felt there could have been more to them. At the end I do recommend this book.

DNF at 27%. What the hell is this? What went so absolutely wrong with this book? Multiple things, actually.

Have any of you seen Snow White and The Huntsman, the movie? It was pretty awful. Every damn character keeps talking about Snow White being the best thing since forever, her personality, her beauty, her aura just so flawless she inspires endless love and devotion in everyone. Even non-human characters. Yet you look at Kristen Stewart, playing Snow White, and she is just standing there, slightly confused, with her mouth a bit open, looking like a totally mundane human who doesn't even understand what is going on.
This book is that. Exact same feeling. Let me elaborate, because this review is unhinged at this point and I can't let you go home feeling that way.

Night Film is about mystery around an elusive movie director called Stanislas Cordova. His movies are visceral and disturbing, a force of nature. They are independently made, because he was just too weird for conventional cinema. His fans have secret communities with illegal screenings underground (sometimes literally). He lives on this secluded compound, where he works and he never engages with the public.
Then his 24-year-old daughter commits suicide.
A journalist, who used to be obsessed with finding out Cordova's secrets and got his career ruined for it, starts to try and unravel the mystery of what happened to Ashley Cordova.

Sounds super spooktastic. Sounds like it would be magnetic, you would get obsessed with Cordova and his family, like the people in universe got obsessed with his movies.
Yeah, no, think again. I know I am supposed to be confused and excited. To see more, to learn more, to get more of the clues. Yet this is incredibly boring and flavourless. The writing holds absolutely sub zero pressure on you. Sure, not all books like this need to be scary. But to be not only not scary, but THIS BORING? That's a crime.
The characters, McGrath, his UWU quirky sidekick Nora and hot, strung out, so indie Sidekick No. 2 Hopper go from place to place. They sneak into a mental hospital! Yet it all reads like an absolute slog. You never feel the danger. It never feels risky. Never feels like something could happen to them.
The prose is so colourless. Sure, we know what kind of stockings Nora wears, but none of the words build any form of momentum. We get the name of the store from which she got her sopping bags REPEATEDLY, but we are not getting any closer to even just opening up the central mystery.

I think one big issue with it is the fact it's never confidently anything. It's not existential enough, never scary enough, never gorey, spooky, atmospheric. It's just in this state of... nothing really. Characters all talk in this samey voice of no real emotion. They say what they saw and what they felt, but it's hollow. I am being told things without being convinced or infected by their ideas and any passion behind them.
Then again, the characters did really all sound the same, main and side ones alike. We get told about their quirks through their looks and surroundings, yet they all come off sounding like the author. I'm sure she is lovely and all, but she sure as hell doesn't know how to give her characters different vocabulary or ways of expressing themselves, from the 19-year-old manic pixie to the retired apple farmer. Indistinct, like the rest of this book.

The book contains a lot of newspaper clippings and such. Could be fun, wasn't.

So all in all, I just don't want to get myself into a reading slump with something that so fundamentally fails one of the big things about its genre.

I was not sure how to review this. I think if you ignore its literary pretensions, the over-use of italics, the rambling, cheesy ending, and the poor editing and proofreading, what you are left with is quite an entertaining (if bonkers) novel. Prepare yourself for a rollercoaster ride where you will question your grip on reality as you encounter documentary evidence relating to the mysterious film director Cordova and his family. It can be eerie at times and I thought the way that Pessl blended fiction with reality was quite clever at times. I also liked the use of the mocked-up webpages and other documentary evidence. It definitely could have done with more work on the writing, however.

I picked this up at a Heathrow bookstore hoping for a good holiday read and it didn't disappoint! I'm a bit weary of the ‘experimental fiction' format, but this book, with its iphone app, illustrations and browser screenshots, has actually turned out to be surprisingly smooth. All that extra material adds up to a truly immersive experience actually, and if you treat the iphone app as an approximation of google for the world of the book, it turns out all the more believable for it.

There's just so much good stuff here — crime, black magic, romance, loveable characters and loveable villains. It's a solid tome but I passed its halfway point on my short 2.5h flight, so as banal as it sounds, it is a real page-turner. The ending unspools with one twist after another, each trying to reclaim the narrative for a different genre (at some point it gets very meta, which was awesome). It's all tied up neatly at the end though.

It was a hugely satisfying read for which I have only one complaint, and that is: for a novel this cinematic — not only concerned with film making and story telling, but also obviously destined for the big screen — it paints its (obviously token) minority characters with the thickest possible brush. Those parts made me cringe so, so painfully. There's one episode in particular which is the Jar Jar Binks of Night Film, when the protagonists run into a clan of Chinese restaurateurs, then catch a ride with a Jamaican cab driver. None of those characters is given any depth and they all seem to be taken out of conservative comedy, in that instead of amusing you, they leave you annoyed — at the author. If this was supposed to be a statement on the stereotypical treatment of ethnic minorities in films (I really doubt it was), it backfired by taking some depth out of the whole story.

This book completely played me!! And I absolutely loved it! I spent most of the book in the same state of disorientation and puzzlement that McGrath was feeling himself. Then the book turns our world upside down rendering everything we thought we knew irrelevant. And when I was starting to accept this new reality, the book PLAYED ME AGAIN!!
Beckman could not have explained better in page 531: “His endings are seismic jolts to the psyche. Parting shots that keep you awake wondering for days, for the rest of your life.”

I love the story and the mood of this but it could use to be 200 pages shorter and then 100 pages longer still to give it a proper ending.
First off - the story takes a lot of twists and turns and anytime they're in a new locatio ntalking to a new character there is a massive infodump that doesn't matter wahtsoever. I don't need pages on classical music and pianos just because a character happens to be into it. Ditto with black magic. Just give me what's important to the story!

As for the ending , if it ended a few pages before I'd be content. But the specific moment it cut off felt cheap. I like open endings but this is an ending where the character I've been following for 600+ pages will get resolution, it is only I that is left out. Feels very constructed to me. He should join me in my confusion.

Well this was a disappointment. It started out quite convincing, building up an atmosphere and mystery, but then it somehow went downhill from there. Quite steady downhill. The story telling was as if Pessl rather had written a movie script. The problem being that the movie in her mind was a horror/mystery/detective thriller that seemed to follow all the predictable rules of the trade. Having one clue lead to another, have characters voluntarily deliver large helpful monologues, and somehow have everything seemingly be tied up neatly in the end. And on the way you got a lot of reader hand-holding by reminding them of facts they had read about 50 pages earlier, just in case someone forgot.

24 year old Ashely Cordova, the enigmatic and talented daughter of reclusive horror filmmaker Stanislas Cordova, is found dead by apparent suicide.

Enter disgraced journalist Scott McGrath. Several years back he calls out the director as a predator and then on national television says “Someone needs to terminate this guy with extreme prejudice.” Apparently not a good move as far as your career goes, especially when it's based on some innuendo from the supposed chauffeur to the director. (Really? This guy was a respected and hard hitting journalist?)

Being a disgraced journalist must pay well. Seemingly unemployed, McGrath lives in a tony New York brownstone and when his white whale reappears in his life he's got the cash to pay interns, bribe informants and jet off to where he pleases. Naturally he's got a beautiful ex-wife and finds two 20-something proteges, including a beautiful coat-check girl, willing to follow him on his investigative journey from sex clubs, mental hospitals, backwoods shacks, tattoo parlours and witchcraft shops. We're in Dan Brown territory here and at times it's just trying too hard. We're told that to see a Cordova film is to “leave your old self behind, walk through hell, and be reborn.”

Marisha Pessl does a fine job of wrapping up the story and turning it into something else. A different examination altogether. But this bit of metafiction would have been better served up as a novella instead of this full blown tome.

I really wish I could do a half-star. This book was far better than ‘The Never List,' but I can't quite give it a three-star rating.

It has a decent premise: Investigative reporter ruined by bizarre-o, reclusive director of thrillers years ago now thinks he has a chance to redeem himself through investigation of suicide of the daughter of said director. There are parts of this book that are crazy and fun and weird. But, speaking as one who loves horror more than investigative crime thrillers–all the thrill and creep were lacking. Mostly because Scott didn't make any of it believable (that would be Mr Reporter). And Scott is also a bitter, sexist butthead through most of the book. Whatevs. That's fine. But I couldn't totally buy his character. And whilst I really, really wanted to be into the relationship he has with his two erstwhile assistants, Hopper and Nora, I couldn't believe his relationships with either of them. Everything was too forced. Nora was just a manic pixie dream girl. Yawn. And Hopper was just to tragically hip. These weren't real people. And, frankly, precocious child who refers to parent by parent's first name–been done before and more believably. The investigation was also a bit flimsy, I thought; but I don't read many crime thrillers, so what do I know?

That said, I enjoyed the mythology she began to create around the director, Cordova, and his family. Sadly, I think the potential for creepiness with these people goes largely unfulfilled. I also think she gave them all a little too much power, even if black magic was involved. I felt like there were some unfortunate things left unresolved. As far as the mythology created for Cordova's daughter, though–I don't believe most of it. I don't believe any of these characters would be as obsessed as they are in the novel (excepting maybe Hopper, who, of course–yawn–was in love with her in their youth). That too seems forced. If Pessl has treated her characters' obsession with Ashley Cordova's death as some sort of critique with celebrity obsession, maybe I could have bought it. But she didn't.

I'm also a bit tired of people using BDSM or transpeople as creepy plot points. It's boring and offensive. Especially when it seems like a writer knows little about either. At the very least, it's usually not believable.

So, all that said, it wasn't UNenjoyable. I read it quickly. The prose isn't very elegant, but it's not the crappiest thing I've ever read. Their are too many pointless italics, but everyone has mentioned that already.

I think, though, one of the biggest problems I had was the fact that every one of Cordova's movies was...TRITE. I think I've already seen most of those plots. The only interesting thing about his movies was the mythology built up AROUND those movies. But I don't believe those movies would have the respected cult following they had. They'd be flimsy Red Box rentals that you waste $1.50 on. At best, they'd be underground horror classics.

All that said, I still had fun reading it. It was all right, but not worth the hype.

Okay, I was a huge fan of Ms. Pessl's first book, and was so excited about the prospect of a new book that I placed my order on January 1, 2011, when I first heard about it. In the time between then and now, I received a large number of emails from amazon.com, telling me that the date was pushed back and pushed back and pushed back (and, occasionally, pushed forward). But, I calmly waited, sure that it would be worth the wait.

And, now, Night Film has come out, and it's only sort of worth the wait. There was much about this book to like, and I know from reading other reviews that others have written about a lot of it.

But, I wanted to talk a bit about what disappointed me. I did love the way the book began, with the pastiche of web sites and the Times article as an introduction about the world that we were about to enter. I was glad, by the way, that I bought a hard copy, since I can only imagine the difficulty in navigating an e-book.

And, from those first pages, I thought we were being set up to dig into the works of Cordova, and that some of what was alluded to in the early dialogue and description would infuse the plot. As I read, and had to abide by most of the characters' needing to “talk to someone” or “get something off their chest”, I let it pass, despite the fact that it did not ring true. I mean, if one of these people were real, a real person, they'd more than likely say nothing or be cryptic or run away or whatever. But, I understand that sometimes such moving parts are necessary to move the plot forward. It's just that I expected more from Ms. Pessl, given how wonderful the first book was.

As the book continued, and the unlikely group came together to investigate (trying not to give too much away, here), I felt as though this was far too random to be true. Sure, there are perhaps other reasons it would happen, and so I assumed that would later be revealed. Still, it was a disappointment that there wasn't more to this.

And, most importantly, for the bulk of the book, aside from some glancing comments about Cordova and his philosophy and life (and, of course, the big ‘set piece' toward the end), there really wasn't much about those “films” that were mentioned initially. I felt this to be a great let down. I felt as though the entire book, a twist on a murder/mystery, could have been set anywhere with any “patriarch” and family, and that the tease about the films wasn't exploited nearly enough.

All in all, while I found the book to be somewhat entertaining, it was a let-down. Which is not to say that I didn't like it; I think that my expectations, both as a result of her first book and the first part of this one, were perhaps too high.

SO MANY FEELS... It took me a few days to process this one.

You know those books where you figure out that the blurb on the back of the book is completely wrong/misleading after you finish? Yeah... that's one of my biggest pet peeves. It IS possible to actually tell what the book is about on the cover without giving away anything. Case in point: NIGHT FILM - It's vague. But it's right. It tells you just enough to make you interested but doesn't lie to you. Go editor!! Thank you!

You go into Night Film knowing that Ashley Cordova, daughter of a reclusive cult horror film director has died, and journalist Scott McGrath investigates her death based on a vendetta with Stanislas Cordova. And that's really all you need... it sounds like it might get creepy and it does.

The first couple of nights after I started reading this I had the most deliciously creepy dreams. The plot builds somewhat ominously and slowly to create the perfect mood of curiosity with slight dread. The actual events... sorry I just can't tell you because you will enjoy the book immensely if you only know what's on the cover and go read it for yourself.

Don't be scared of the length. I enjoyed the slow but not too slow building plot. It created a lot of time for character development all around and several climaxes that keep it moving. And a lot of foreboding.

The best thing about this book are all of the case files and reports included. You feel like you are actually watching an old cult horror film yourself - the ones where the newspaper clippings, pictures, etc. spin out and almost slap you in the face. It's just delicious. (For this reason, I would recommend reading a real live in-person copy of this book.)

There are so many details in the story that I'm sure I could read it again and pick up on even more little nuances (which I will definitely be doing). And this book definitely does not settle for your cookie cutter ending. The whole thing is just perfect in my opinion.

I would recommend this for umm... EVERYONE.. especially if you love a suspenseful mystery that makes you think with a genius madman? thrown in.