Author: Dom

Mad Max was sort of . . . mad

Insane, actually.

This is part four in the Mad Max series, with Tom Hardy taking over the lead from Mel Gibson who last appeared as Max in Beyond Thunderdome (1985, believe it or not).

Nothing much has changed; Max is still the solitary road warrior, still haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter, still surviving in a post-apocalyptic world where the human race has turned against itself in a battle for oil and water: the only commodities that have any worth.

It’s pretty grim stuff, and the great thing about it is that throughout the non-stop battles between cars and trucks (and I think we must have spent at least 70% of the film chasing around the desert), you were never left with the slightest notion that there was any real hope. The human race was heading for a slow exctinction, and nothing was going to change that.

So everything was just about surviving as long as you could before you were murdered for your car, or you died of hunger and thirst.

FURY ROAD (Image courtesy of IndieWire)

The action scenes were some of the very best I’ve seen. Savagely uncompromising and exhausting to watch.

Tom Hardy does a creditable job in the lead role. He does the moody, silent, slightly unhinged thing very well, so I think I would have been a lot more surprised if he’d made a mess of it.

Charlize Theron? Well, I’m always disappointed when I hear she’s been cast in any movie, and then I’m massively shocked at what a great actress she is. This is no exception. Not her greatest play, but a good performance nonetheless.

This is a great film, and if you’re into action flicks with a human touch then it’s well worth seeing. I’m going to give it eight out of ten, and I might actually go see it again.

What’s in a title?

No two ways about it, book titles are important. They always have been and that won’t change any time soon. I’ve forgotten the names of my friends, the university I attended, and my own birthday, but I have never forgotten my favourite book titles:

The Forever War
The Hydrogen Sonata

And though I’m not a huge fan of Fifty Shades of Grey, I love the title for being both poetic, evocative and memorable. (Admittedly, that was before discovering that the male lead was called Grey, then it somehow seemed a little less clever.)

In ancient times when people bought books from shops, the book’s title had to capture someone with little more than a passing glance, and the title had to fit on the spine because only the best sellers could be seen face on. Each book competing with thousands of others just to be noticed. Now, most buyers use Amazon where a book will be competing with hundreds of thousands of others just to be found. And so the book title has taken on an even greater significance, along with the keywords and tags that you can attach to the book to help guide potential readers towards it. I’ve seen some clever tricks used to elicit the attention of the Amazon search engine: dropping the name of a similar, more popular book in the keywords, using another author’s name or book title in the tags. The thing about Amazon is that it’s not really a bookshop you pop into for a quick browse during your lunch break; chances are that if you are on the Amazon site looking for a book then you have a pretty good idea what you’re looking for, even if you don’t have a specific title in mind. In this case, a simple, straightforward title that leaves nothing to chance might be your best option:

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The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories

Okay, that’s a little extreme, and yes, I’ve been looking for excuse to drop that cover on the blog for quite some time, but it does illustrate a point: that title is no-nonsense and the cover design tells you immediately that you’re looking at a pastiche/parody of fifties erotica. You’re not expecting a literary tour-de-force (though it might be), but you might be in for a decent read and a bit of a laugh.

In my own writing, I don’t usually have a title until the first draft is completed. I usually pick an idea, or a notion or an image from the book and settle on that. Now, I’m wondering if I should have a title before that, perhaps before I’ve even started writing on the book. The title is the draw, and if I don’t have a good title from the outset then do I have a marketable book later on?