TSP2021: The Storms of Jeremy Thomas

This seems like such a weird movie. It’s a hagiography of a film producer? Who was the son of the person who did the Carry On movies?!

And he has really British cars!? What is this!

This is really well done, but I don’t know nothing about this producer and what movies he’s gotten made. And the more I watch clips from them I’m going “oh, he’s basically doing what his father and uncle were doing — only more artier”. That is, there’s a lot of Totes Serious And Not Funny Movies But With Boobs.

All those movies by directors where you’re going… “well, that was kinda embarrassing”. You know, Bertolucci movies. It seems like that’s his specialty.

OK, I’m a guy who detests documentaries. If you want to tell people something, can’t you just write a blog post? (Yes yes I know.)

But this is like the ideal documentary for me. You don’t get any talking heads (except Tilda Swinton) talking about the subject, and then it’s just this guy filming this other guy and asking him awkward questions.

And he doesn’t ask him “did you think having Art Garfunkel as the lead in a movie was a good idea?” No, instead he asks him to word associate on “mother”.

It’s great!

After watching this movie, I have a vague idea that Jeremy Thomas produced pretty much all the most dire “serious” movies of the 80s and the 90s — think Roeg and Bertolucci — and then did other really dire movies.

Let’s check whether that’s correct, because this documentary doesn’t really get into the details…

Yes! All those movies! I even like some of them, but they’re certainly… a thing…

So, I really enjoyed this documentary, and for every single clip they showed of a Thomas-produced movie, I disliked him a bit more. Fantastic! How on Earth did this get made!?

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas. Mark Cousins. 2021.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

Book Club 2025: Forge of Heaven by C. J. Cherryh

I bought this book in 2005, and it’s been sitting in my “to be read” bookcase ever since. I’m not at all sure why — I’ve read 41 other books by Cherryh — but only four since 2014 (which is when I started tracking what I read).

Oh, yeah… it starts with a 25 page (!) recap of the previous book in the two-part series. I loathe reading recaps, so perhaps I started on that and then went “perhaps I’ll wait a bit”.

This book displays all of Cherryh’s bad writing habits. She loves having people ruminate on what’s going to happen, and usually those ruminations really come to nothing. Then she adds some fake drama on top.

Above, we have a space station administrator who’s been ruminating for several pages on why a space ship from Earth is coming (as usual with Cherryh, he has no information, so all the rumination is pointless), and then his wife calls him to bitch and moan about how their daughter has gotten her hair bleached (!) and how that’s so important (!) that he has to drop all his space station administrationship stuff and tell the daughter off. Or something.

Cherryh is a wheel spinning master — I remember reading a trilogy of hers, and the third book had something like “The space ship took off” as the recap of the second book in the trilogy. And that was a totally adequate summary of that 300 page book — almost nothing happened; just people thinking about what could be happening later, and fake drama like the above.

It’s exhausting, and this time around I couldn’t take more than 90 pages of it before I bailed.

You know? You think you don’t change much as you grow older, but 25 years ago, I would have enjoyed reading this book, most likely. And the book certainly hasn’t changed, so I have — I’ve gotten more impatient, and more crotchety.

Heh, if I’d kept reading for 110 more pages, the story would have begun, allegedly.

The reviews are generally positive, but I’m going to trust this one:

Forge of Heaven (2004) by C. J. Cherryh (buy new, buy used, 3.9 on Goodreads)