Popcorn

Popcorn is a darkly funny, tense thriller from the guy who made Blackadder great (I know it's mentioned in most of the other reviews but...). At least it is in the middle.

A review in three parts:

Beginning: The first two chapters of Popcorn involve police interviews with two of the main characters, the morning after the as-yet-unmentioned 'incident'. This ruins the ending because it assures you that these two characters will not die.

Middle: The good bit of the book as Bruce gets held hostage. Tense and thrilling but it could probably be longer. And it wasn't as violent as other people wanred.

End: The ending was terrible. After all the book built up, the penultimate chapter ends "All hell broke lose" or something to that effect. Then everybody sues each other.

Popcorn is one of the shortest Ben Elton books, and if he had just made it a bit longer, he could have written a better ending and a better death for a certain characther who had their death reduced to a line.

Popcorn - A Wonderful Satire (11/12 people found this helpful)

'Popcorn' first published in 1996 has to be one of Ben Elton's best novels so far; and it manages to blend suspense, action and a really exciting plot into one book. The main plot is basically about a Hollywood director, who on the night of the infamous 'Oscars' is taken hostage along with his ex-wife, daughter, agent and girlfriend. The people that take him hostage are collectively known as 'The Mall Murderers' and they claim that the reason they've been driven to kill is because they have been heavily influed by the gore and violence of Bruce's film 'Ordinary Americans'.

Ben Elton's structures the narrative in a very clever way indeed - because part of the story is made up of prose, whilst some sections are written like a film script; thus giving the impression how close film and art come to real life, which is a clever device and turns the book into a satirical thriller, that basically asks the question: 'Does art imitate life, or vise versa?'. Its a subject handled with unique style and commitment and 'Popcorn' would be a book I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys crime thrillers, humour (because some sections are laugh out loud funny) or a light piece of fiction.

A book you really can't put down (3/4 people found this helpful)

I went out in my lunch break to buy something to read on the train that evening and from when I started the daily commute to 3am I didn't put it down once.

Extremely thought provoking, funny, well written and a great, clever read. It looks at the blame culture in our society and takes it to the extreme, showing that if you're guilty, you can still be innocent, you just have to find someone or something to blame it on.

Elton takes on Hollywood - and wins (13/13 people found this helpful)

If your experience of Ben Elton the novelist is through "Past Mortem", "Dead Famous", "Inconceivable " and others, you may be forgiven for thinking that he is a very British novelist, concerned with british themes, concerns, and media phenomena. "Popcorn" blows that idea out of the water. Its set exclusively in the USA, mostly in Hollywood, and its sharp, streetwise, shocking and funny.

I tend to think of Ben Elton as an issue-concerned novelist , and the issue at the heart of "Popcorn" is gratuitous violence in films, and whether it breeds violent behaviour in the audience for such films. The main character, Bruce Delamitri, is the director of a film called "Ordinary Americans" who seems a certainty for the oscar for best director. The events unfold throughout the day of the actual Oscar presentation, and the hours following it.

I took longer to get into "Popcorn" than into his other whodunits - "Past Mortem" and "Dead Famous". This isn't because its not as good - in some ways its better - but because it's a very different novel to the other two. Predictably, Elton depicts a Hollywood full of neurotic, shallow, self obsessed people whom nobody would ever want to pass the time of day with if they were not famous. Yet the world and the characters which he depicts are compelling not in spite of their awfulness, but because of it. The pace of the narrative accelerates to a remarkable climax, remarkable in as much as you continue reading even though you don't really care what happens to any of the protagonists. Except possibly the murderers.

One thing you can't help doing is matching up the fictional celebrities to their real life counterparts. If I was, lets say, Quentin Tarantino, I'd be pretty angry with this book, and I'd love to know what his reaction was to it.

SOMEONE TO TAKE THE BLAME (6/10 people found this helpful)

This novel was first published in 1996. Whether there has been any updating of the text beyond one reference to the 21st century in this new paperback edition I simply have no idea.

Ben Elton is a caricaturist and satirist. He was scriptwriter for the Blackadder series, he used to do a standup comic routine on television that I thought brilliant, and he has several other novels to his name that will give you some idea of what to expect from this one. As with all the best satirists, the humour comes from his sharp eye for the way people behave and think and from his willingness to be near the bone and explicit about issues that are normally thought to require some delicacy. This particular book is hung around the theme of extreme violence, and I'm quite sure that Quentin Tarantino was its inspiration, but any resemblance between the film-director hero and Tarantino himself is really neither here nor there, and the book is not really concerned either with resolving the question whether violence on the media does or doesn't cause violence in real life - we are no nearer an answer to that on the last page than we are on the first. What it is about is the mentality that refuses to accept personal responsibility in the traditional sense.

The setting is America and the satire is a particularly English kind of satire, but Popcorn is not about comparing cultures. There are references to certain notorious American trials where the author is left rubbing his eyes with disbelief at the outcome, but I dare say he would have thought the same about the trial of Jeremy Thorpe back at home as he does about the O J Simpson and Lorana Bobbitt cases. Ben Elton's politics are a matter of public record, and they are leftish in much the way my own are. It is not a left-wing stance that finds much time or sympathy for any view that can shuffle off plain guilt on to an individual's background or circumstances, relevant though those may be by way of understanding some aspects of the matter. Elton also throws up his hands in seeming despair at what he sees as a triumph for sheer illogicality and irrelevance in the way issues of criminal guilt are in practice decided on a basis of ethnicity or gender-politics. And whatever influence the media may or may not have in creating or contributing to a culture of violence, he seems in no doubt that the forces of law have to, or at least choose to, trim their sails to way the media will present issues and the way the public will be swayed by such presentation.

Popcorn is, as I say, satire and caricature, not straight reportage or academic analysis. It focuses its spotlight on absurdity, unreasonableness, perversity and a sheer childish immaturity in people's attitudes. The two psychotic villains of the piece are partly depicted as human beings, but partly also as talking heads - mouthpieces for stating an argument. Nobody at all in the book comes out of it particularly well, and Ben Elton takes some sideswipes, in his usual way, at various incidental targets like goody-goody attitudes and the more brainless kinds of patriotism, while not sparing liberal maundering of the 'we are all partly guilty' variety. The money culture comes under heavy fire as you might expect too, and some of the most painful insights relate to that, although the epilogue, with everyone suing everyone else, is extremely funny in a sad sort of way. As for the ostensible theme of the real or supposed effect of media violence on the way people behave, he settles for a simple summation of that in the mouth of the female murderer - it can hardly help.

I have no problem with giving this novel five stars. The author is outstandingly bright and lively-minded, with real independence and originality. Where he stands in some great stately tradition of satirists and social critics - Juvenal, Voltaire, Swift and similar turgid giants - I neither know nor care. I'm pleased to see the tradition of English satire still flourishing, and I stay hopeful that the final Armageddon, which is really a battle between sense on the one hand and cant, doctrine, piety and herd-mentalities on the other, may not actually be lost.

Ben Elton

Reader Reviews:

Brilliant and shocking. In the middle. (0/0 people found this helpful)

Popcorn - A Wonderful Satire (11/12 people found this helpful)

A book you really can't put down (3/4 people found this helpful)

Elton takes on Hollywood - and wins (13/13 people found this helpful)

SOMEONE TO TAKE THE BLAME (6/10 people found this helpful)

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