Will the last person in America please drop their gun(s)?

You all know, I'm sure, what happened this Wednesday - on Valentine's Day, of all occasions - at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Now yet another school on the tragic "honour" roll of ones which have seen mass shootings. I don't know how to say any of this newly, considering the media and political coverage and my history of anti-gun sentiment. But even though I'm no public figure I'd be ashamed of myself if I kept quiet about it, even if speaking up means risking being seen as trying to capitalise on it (I'm not).

Frankly, America, your biggest killer is your Second Amendment. 24-hour news networks alone can tell you that. It has to go; that's the only way to cease the massacres whose perpetrators seem to insist on trying to outdo all their predecessors. If you respond to "The right to bear arms" with "How about the right to live?" that's reasonable, but it should not take a massacre for you to express such things. Working to curb the level of gun violence in your nation will also help its international image greatly.

I remember in 1999, the day after the Columbine massacre, my Year 6 teachers (as it was a double class) sat us all down for a talk about it. Nineteen years later, I'm sure classrooms worldwide have sadly been prompted this week to have similar discussions, which could be quite difficult for both teachers and students. Some things that shouldn't change do, but not others that should, and America, your gun culture, I firmly believe, is in the latter category.

My thoughts and condolences go out to all the casualties, taken far too soon, and their families and friends.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #75: Orphan Black (2013-2017).

The Canadian science fiction TV drama Orphan Black begins with Sarah Dawkins (the astonishing Tatiana Maslany) scratching a precarious living out as a con artist with her young daughter Kira (Skylar Wexler) making a startling discovery at a train station one night: a woman named Beth Childs, who is totally identical to her, committing suicide. So identical, in fact, that she is a clone. As Sarah comes to grips with this discovery, an investigation into her clone reveals eight more: microbiology student Cosima Niehaus, soccer mum Allison Hendrix, Ukrainian assassin Helena, her German casualty Katja Obinger, Rachel Duncan, a corrupt and vindictive official with the Dyad Institute, and three presumed to have died before the series' events: Danielle Fournier, Arianna Gourdano and Janika Zingler. Now, with the help of her gay artist/prostitute foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris), their foster mother Siobhan Sandler (Maria Doyle Kennedy), Beth's police partner Art Bell (Kevin Hanchard) and Cosima's friend and science colleague Dr. Delphine Cormier (Evelynne Bronchu), Sarah must lift the lid on the cloning programs known as Projects Leda and Castor and put an end to them.

Let me flag this up-front: Orphan Black is sometimes so convoluted it makes even Lost seem straightforward. But nonetheless, for the brainiest kind of SF it is just so cautiously plotted and paced from episode one that if this is your cuppa, it will just keep having you wanting a top-up. Creators and showrunners Graeme Manson (writer) and John Fawcett (director) and the rest of their team keep us toe-to-toe with Sarah from her fateful discovery of Beth's suicide and her quest for answers over the show's five seasons, interweaving this with flashback explorations of the clones and all their personal lives and pasts. Utterly rare is a TV show which improves upon itself with each season, and drops the curtain at the right time, but Orphan Black ticks both those boxes for me.

It's also consistently thought-provoking in its statements about the merits and hazards of cloning. Should it be done? If so, how? Should we have the choice to be cloned were it possible? What would it mean for independence and personal identity? Pleasantly, however, the show always encourages us to give these questions, and more, our own answers. It also takes pride in putting women and LGBT characters in the spotlight (however cliched several are).

But if there's one reason above all to check Orphan Black out, it absolutely must be Tatiana Maslany. With the herculean task of eight radically different roles, Maslany had to film each scene in which she plays numerous parts with the help of dolly-mounted motion control cameras and a body double, but even as they became more demanding over the series, as each one she just makes it look all too easy. I was truly over the moon when she won the 2016 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for season four, and after just a few episodes I'm sure you will know why she did.

Orphan Black is a wildly addictive, clearsighted and suspenseful TV puzzle. Fittingly, you won't be able to say you've seen anything like it.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #74: Heavenly Creatures (1994).

Christchurch, New Zealand was not known to be a city of sensational events. That was until 1954, when two teenage girls committed a crime that shocked the whole country. Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker met at their local all-girls' high school in 1952 and immediately became close friends. So close, in fact, that they created their own imaginary fantastical world called Borovnia and developed what their parents considered an "unsavoury" relationship. After then facing the prospect of a forced separation, they resorted to desperate measures. By "desperate" I mean they took Parker's mother down a forest track and bashed her head in with a brick in a stocking.

Before he took us through the realms of Middle-earth to Oscar glory and recreated cinema's seminal inter-species romance, Peter Jackson (then best known for splatter movies like Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles) first gained critical praise with this recreation of what must remain New Zealand's most infamous crime story. His wife and co-screenwriter Fran Walsh had long found the case fascinating and eventually convinced him to bring it to the screen. Jackson claimed to be more interested in why the girls did what they did rather than how, or the crime itself, and so the film opens with the aftermath of the murder before jumping right back to their first meeting at school. Jackson then explores their separate and contrasting home lives (Juliet got along with her parents but their own relationship was fracturing; Pauline spent most of her time in her bedroom writing and loved her father but hated her mother), their burgeoning intimacy and their adventures in Borovnia (where Jackson's Weta Workshop team provided visual effects that were flawless for the low budget and 1994). In a lesser director's hands these strands would make a very jarring combination, but Jackson gets it just right. He and Walsh also were deservedly Oscar-nominated for their screenplay

But probably his best instincts here were in the casting. Before they respectively flew on the Titanic and obsessed over Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, Winslet and Lynskey, in their film debuts, show what star power they had from the start, and their chemistry never falters. Winslet gives what I consider still her finest performance - by turns hilarious, cunningly duplicitous and authoritative - and Lynskey (whom the more experienced Winslet mentored on set) holds her own with just the right balance of tempestuousness and vulnerability, and narrates the story from Pauline's actual diaries in a very appropriate tone. Sarah Peirse also offers solid support as the ill-fated Honora Parker, and keep your eyes peeled for Jackson's cameo as a drunk homeless guy whom Juliet kisses.

Throw a vibrant score and lush, observant cinematography in, and you have not just the fine impetus for Jackson's Hollywood career, but one of the best movies ever made in the Antipodes.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 -2018): an appreciation.

My proudest pursuit and achievement is my university Arts education, which I completed in 2012. Among other things it introduced me to countless remarkable books and films I otherwise may never have even heard of. Quite late in that undertaking, though admittedly thanks only to my alma mater's library, came maybe the discovery which has influenced the strongest: the literary works of Ursula K. Le Guin. Before encountering her works, my favourite author was Tolkien and while I retain a great love for his stories, for me Le Guin's appeal more to my aesthetic and thematic sensibilities now. I consider her the greatest writer of all time.

Born in 1929 as the daughter of writer Theodora Kracaw and anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, Ursula graduated from Columbia University in 1952 before studying in France as a Fulbright Scholar until 1954. She then returned to the US with her husband Charles Le Guin and they had three children: Elizabeth, Caroline and Theodore. She lived in Portland, Oregon from 1958 until passing away on 22 January.

Ursula's first publication attempt came aged just 11 to the magazine Astounding Science Fiction; it was rejected. But after publishing the first of her Orsinian Tales in 1961, the dam burst and she became one of the most acclaimed and profilic writers of our time. 1966's Rocannon's World, her first published novel, started her "Hainish Cycle," which later included 1969's The Left Hand of Darkness and 1974's The Dispossessed (the first of her works I read, and still my favourite). These made her the first person to win Hugo and Nebula Awards (the two literary SF honours) for Best Novel for the same two books.

         

Simultaneously, 1968's A Wizard of Earthsea began her more child-oriented but no less successful Earthsea fantasy series. She continue to produce a steady output of novels and short stories until 1985, when she published her most ambitious and unique work, Always Coming Home. After 1990 her bibliography slowly decreased but by then, she had already written enough masterpieces to put most other great authors to shame. However, in her seventies Le Guin still managed to deliver Lavinia (2007), an exquisitely beautiful feminist retelling of Virgil's Aeneid, and the brilliantly original Annals of the Western Shore (2004-2007) series. In 2003, she deservedly became the first woman appointed a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organisation.

Her many distinctive influences, and how she invoked certain ones for each different story, I think made her a literary trailblazer, certainly for female authors. From Tolkien and Philip K. Dick (who was actually a high school classmate of hers, though they never knew each other) and children's classics like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows, to Norse mythology, Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters and seminal feminist authors like Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf and even Eastern philosophical works like the Tao Te Ching (in her personal life she even embraced Taoist and feminist beliefs), Le Guin's use of these diverse influences helped open the door for women speculative fiction authors like J. K. Rowling and Connie Willis among others and to afford SF and fantasy a greater critical stature than before. She also has inspired numerous male authors like Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie.

Now, alas, the last chapter of Ms. Le Guin's own story has just been completed. Her cause of death remains unknown, although her son Theodore stated she had been in ill health for some time. Her passing deserved considerably more media coverage than it received (hence why I didn't learn of it until last week), although her family's privacy should also be respected. But regardless, her work will forever remain to entertain and educate us as all art should, and it is a towering monument to everything she loved and valued. Vale, Ursula K. Le Guin. We will never see your like again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5xdeGQVvwU