The Incredible Vanishing Girl 2

In which the critic and broadcaster Barry Normal sees
the worst film of the century so far

Back in 2009, at just about this time of year, my so-called 'relationship' with a girl named Jenny was on very thin ice.

We'd met on my birthday, which I share with my good friend Hannah W. I'd been in Cardiff to see a film, and didn't get back to Aberdare until fairly late in the evening. Jenny was in the pub with Hannah when I got there; we started chatting, and found that we had a fair amount in common. She was tall, red-haired, very attractive, intelligent, well-read, a bit kinky (apparently), and totally my type.

She also turned out to be a pathological liar, as I found out over the next nine months or so. After a grand total of four dates and countless lame excuses for standing me up without any warning, I decided right at the start of 2010 that she was history. I was in the pub with an old friend (female) who was also being given the runaround by a guy she was keen on. Jenny texted me while we were discussing our respective situations, asking if I was around. I didn't even waste 10p on texting her back. Instead, I stayed out with my friend, had a few more beers, then went home and wrote New Year, New Start.

I knew Jenny read my blog, because she'd left a couple of comments on previous entries, so I thought I'd extend Paul Simon's idea into the new millennium. As we techies know, there are now at least 55 Ways to Leave Your Lover; the full list includes texting, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Some of the rhymes are a bit forced, but my rewritten version is taking shape slowly.

Amazingly, seven years on from the disastrous original, Discordian Productions have released a sequel – or possibly a reboot, as the studios call them these days. My good friend Barry Normal went to an exclusive preview screening yesterday, and I asked him to write a guest review for this very blog. Here it is:

The Incredible Vanishing Girl 2 is a surreal postmodern rom-com with elements of science fiction, and – like the first outing – somehow manages to deliver much less than the sum of its parts.

It's a strange, complicated, baffling and bizarre rehash of the original story, taking some of the unresolved plot points to new heights of absurdity. The setting remains the same: a small town in the South Wales Valleys, populated by many of the characters who feature in the original. The basic premise is unchanged, too: a single guy in his forties meets a much younger bisexual girl in a pub, and ‒ despite the age difference – they strike up a friendship which could potentially turn into something more serious. The heroine's family background is one of the comic elements on which the story pivots: a broken marriage, adoption, an extended network of stepbrothers and stepsisters – all the standard features of the nuclear family meltdown.

From this straightforward beginning, the 'story' (which seems to have been scribbled on the back of a beermat after a particularly taxing all-day session) degenerates into an unnecessarily complicated knockabout farce.

The heroine meets another girl, and they shack up together. Soon after that, she discovers her girlfriend in bed with a man, and moves out. The hero becomes her sounding board and shoulder to cry on, and everyone expects things to develop between them. They spend a fair bit of time together in the ensuing weeks. He buys her drinks and treats her to a meal now and again, wondering how he's ever going to make his move.

However, just as in the original, disaster strikes. One evening, in the pub for karaoke, she drinks a mysterious cocktail which has an unexpected side-effect: at random intervals, she vanishes from the face of the earth without any prior warning and takes several days to reappear. These inexplicable disappearances are accompanied by a short-range electromagnetic pulse, which fries her phone and renders her totally incommunicado until she can sort out a replacement.

In the meantime, the hero meets another young girl, and they start spending a lot of time together. Many people in the town assume that they are an item, even though she tells him they'll only ever be friends.

By now the heroine has met a guy, and spends all her time on Facebook posting about how loved up she is, and how she can't wait to see him, and all that romantic crap that girls put online to make their 'friends' feel jealous.

But under the surface, all is not well. Her sudden disappearances have added to her mental instability, as nothing in her life is ever straightforward from this point on. She can't decide whether she wants to stay with him, or leave him for someone else. She wants to have a baby with him, but she also wants a new girlfriend. Her friends are starting to lose patience with her, and everyone tells the hero that he's wasting his time with her.

One night, after several beers have lowered her inhibitions, she tells the hero that if she wasn't already involved with someone she'd 'totally fuck him'.

That unexpected revelation comes as a shock to the hero, who has begun to despair of her by now. When he alludes to it a couple of days later, she tells him she was serious, and that she's thinking of leaving her boyfriend. He makes light of it, but secretly wonders if he'll finally get the chance to make a play for her.

After her next disappearance, things have changed again. The heroine tells the hero that they're 'just mates', and that things are back on track with her boyfriend. At the same time, the other girl warns him that the heroine is just using him. (Ironically, the heroine gives him the same warning about the other girl the next time she reappears.)

At this point, I was as confused as the rest of the audience. A fair number of people had already walked out, totally baffled by the haphazard plot, inconsistent and sloppy script, and the huge number of walk-on characters who play no part in the narrative, but merely serve to distract the heroine from her own storyline.

The film ends on a tragi-comic note. Shortly before Christmas, the hero gets a text from the heroine, asking if he'll help her with present shopping. They meet for coffee, plan out the day, and she tells him that it might soon be over with her boyfriend. Apparently she can see the warning signs, and fears that she's going to be dumped over the holidays. Almost in the next breath, she tells him she might be pregnant.

By now, the remaining audience were hooting with derision. This latest twist in an already unbelievable storyline was simply too much to bear.

The two of them go shopping, retreat to the pub to wrap the presents, and then decide to have something to eat. She catches the bus home to drop all her stuff off, and promises to meet him as soon as she's changed and sorted her hair out.

At which point she vanishes for the final time. He texts her in vain for the next couple of hours, realises she's gone for good this time, and goes home.

The closing credits are accompanied by the Beatles' hit 'Hello Goodbye', which seems a strange choice in the circumstances. Personally, I think the producers missed a trick by not using Soft Cell's 'Say Hello Wave Goodbye'.

There's a teasing tag sequence at the very end of the movie, too. About a week into the new year, he receives a text from an unknown number asking if he fancies going to the pub. I really hope that this potential sequel isn't given the green light, for everyone's sake.

If there's been a bigger Xmas turkey released in the last decade, it's passed me by. I'll give it 1 out of 10 for sheer audacity, simply because I can't award it a zero rating.

A Few Weeks in the Matrix

In which The Author goes back to the Source

I recently landed the biggest proofreading job so far. Gollancz are reissuing William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels – Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – together with his collection of short stories Burning Chrome. Guess who got the gig to do all four?

It's been exciting for me, because they want these to be the definitive editions, and so I've been entrusted to bash a degree of consistency into the books. It's understandable, I suppose, because they came out at different times, and were presumably copy-edited by different people. I've been making long lists of charactes, product manufacturers (real and fictional), locations (real and fictional), and futuristic slang words, technical terms and foreign words, in order to apply the changes across the board.

It's been a fairly long time since I read Neuromancer, and I've never tackled the sequels before. As a result, I hadn't noticed just what a heavy influence Mr Gibson has been on the mainstream of science fiction over the past twenty years or so. I suppose the most obvious nod to his books was one of my favourite films of all times, The Matrix.

While the idea of plugging into a 'virtual reality' system anticipates Neuromancer by a few years – I've traced it back as far as Christopher Priest's novel A Dream of Wessex – it was the Wachowski Brothers who really brought the idea to a mass audience. While Mr Gibson uses the term 'the matrix' (with a lower case m) to describe the cyberspace world his characters explore, I think his vision of the internet owes more to the embarrassing graphics of Lawnmower Man than to our everyday experiences of surfing the Net. However, the character of the Finn, an AI construct who acts as an intermediary between the human protagonists and the sentient programs inhabiting the matrix, was a direct steal as the Oracle. (In Mona Lisa Overdrive the Finn even refers to himself as 'an oracle.') While the films owe a conceptual debt to Mr Gibson's books, the two media are worlds apart.

No, what I've got in mind is the subtle way in which Mr Gibson's ideas have spread into popular SF films and TV programmes over the years. Take Minority Report, for example. That's another great film based on a very short story by one of the Grand Masters of the genre, Philip K. Dick. You might not have noticed it unless you were looking, but the rundown areas of Washington DC are referred to at one point as 'the sprawl'. That's straight out of Neuromancer – as are the little mechanical spiders which the police use to search the building in which John Anderton is hiding.

Those same little spiders turned up again in the second episode of the revived Doctor Who, of all places. And it's though Doctor Who, perhaps surprisingly, that many of Mr Gibson's ideas have made it onto the small screen. In the two-parter 'Silence in the Library'/Forests of the Dead', Steven Moffat introduced the idea of an electronic interface which could record a person's consciousness for a short time. At the end of the second episode, all the characters who've been killed by the Vashta Nerada, and River Song, who sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, are reunited in a virtual world. That's a nod to Neuromancer, where the stored consciousness of a dead hacker known as the Dixie Flatline helps our hero crack the biggest encryption job of all time. In 'Time Heist', in the most recent series, one of the characters is an augmented human, who can plug hardware into a socket behind his ear. That's straight out of the Sprawl books as well.

Although they're some three decades old, and Mr Gibson has left the Sprawl behind to write more complex but less technologically biased books, his legacy in modern SF is huge and widespread. Read the books for yourself when they're reissued, and see how many winks to his ideas you can spot next time you're watching a film or enjoying the Doctor's latest adventures.

Several years ago, I became famous in the pub for remembering huge amounts of trivia which I could recall at a moment's notice. I used to tease my pals that I was going to start charging them for storing facts in my brain. That, of course, is the basic plot of 'Johnny Mnemonic' – later made into a rather disappointing but very stylish film with Keanu Reeves. And that's the reason I'm writing this today. The first story in Burning Chrome is, of course, 'Johnny Mnemonic'. Even though I had the book in front of me when I was working on the proof, the Voyager edition isn't without its production errors.

So, like Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded, I had to go back to the Source. If you've read my blog 'OmniScience' from a few years ago, you'll know that I was regularly reading this cutting-edge magazine of science fact, fiction and fantasy around the time that I was studying for my O levels, back in the very early 1980s.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I can now reveal the Source, as it was was revealed to me when I was about fifteen, and didn't have a fucking clue what was going on in the story at the time. Thirty-five years on, I still can't quite believe that I'm working on the reissue. When I wrote to Gollancz and told them I'd been a SF fan for most of my life, I don't think they believed me. Well, here's the proof (no pun intended!)