The notion of an old school detective story with an occult angle is a fine one, so I was really looking forward to my first viewing of Angel Heart. I’m all in favour of mixed genre yarns, and figured a thriller set in Harlem and New Orleans with jazz and voodoo would be one I’m all over. Only, in practice, it just doesn’t work for me. Why would that be?

The problem starts with Robert de Niro, who plays a character called Louis Ciphre. Now, de Niro’s performance is pretty fine. The issue is his name. Louis Ciphre = Lucifer. Yes, Satan himself takes on the form of a bearded and boiled egg eating Bobby de Niro. Even our hero says it’s a cheesy name, and it takes some cojones to call out the Lord of Darkness on stuff like that. It demeans the Fallen Angel even to hint that he may have a weakness for dodgy puns that you can imagine heavy metal bassists signing in to hotels as on 30th anniversary tours.

It doesn’t help that there isn’t a shadow director Alan Parker (also responsible for the script) doesn’t like, and that he can’t get enough of them in combination with spiral staircases, rotary fans, and any other damned circle he can put in the shot, all the better to signify lurking menace. Well, that’s the intent. In practice, it means everything looks like an overly styled music video, complete with cats slinking in alleys and moody sax. Much as it pains me to say it, as someone who once loved Pink Floyd’s The Wall, you can see why Parker got the job directing the film of the album with his thing for clodhopping symbolism.

What’s interesting is that there could be a much better film made with the same concept, if only it was handled with a lighter touch. Rather than have yer actual Satan being a puppetmaster for the evil that unfolds, wouldn’t it be much more powerful to hint at that possibility without confirming it? As it is, there are times when the direct occult aspects of the story seem heavyhanded, straight out of a fifties EC horror comic. And they’d have probably worked better there, where a short pulp tale with suitably moody artwork might still be regarded as a classic. Spending a fortune telling that story with cameras and actors only makes its inherent ludicrousness clear.

Much of the time – in storytelling generally as well as film in particular – ambiguity is your friend. It’s arguably more powerful to show someone to be devilish than to give them the horns and tails of Beelzebub and remove any doubt. And certainly chimes with contemporary understandings of evil in the world. From that point of view, Elephant and We Need To Talk About Kevin - both responses to the Columbine shooting – are far more haunting than Angel Heart could ever be.

What all this comes down to is that it’s generally better to hint at things than state them outright. Imagine the dilemma of a protagonist believing that Satan is after them, but knowing it sounds ludicrous and that it will get them sectioned if they admit it outright. How much more powerful a situation to play with than having an actor – even one as notable as Bobby D – with a forked beard and some dodgy effects on his eyes to make it unmistakeable that this is the Lord of the Flies leering at you.

Shadows are interesting because of what might be hiding in them. The French film Them made that abundantly clear, relating a night when a couple are terrorised by what turns out to be children – the tension and ultimate revelation made it one of the scariest films I’ve seen in recent years. Dragging things into the light, stating starkly that this is how things are, is a choice to be made with full thought given to the implications. Angel Heart demonstrates what happens when that thinking process isn’t engaged with.

There was a run of films back in the sixties that I loved when I caught them in the seventies as a child. Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Great Race were madcap adventures with casts seemingly in their thousands. An international gang of actors would be gathered for some pretext or other that provided an opportunity to showcase foreign locations that were opening up to cinema goers as the glamorous airline business made it feasible to holiday in places that the previous generation knew only through maps or memories of war.

I’ve not caught any of those films – all of which seemed to feature Terry Thomas to represent all that’s best, or at least funniest, about a certain type of British male – for a long time now. Sprawling family-friendly comedies are as rare these days as men of the Terry Thomas breed. Besides, this is a different world we live in. Americans have ventured out into it, and been kidnapped and worse. Not only that, but a good few of the foreigners are disrespectful of the Stars and Stripes. That’s the sort of thinking that leads to Hostel’s popularity, tapping into American fears that godfearing folk are sure to be tortured if they leave their home soil.

The same impetus drives the revenge thriller Taken, in which Liam Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped and ends up in the only hands more feared than those of atheists – Muslims. Sure enough, just like in Victorian penny dreadfuls the dastardly foreigners are out to have their wicked way with the teenage girl. So much for the Peace Corp. It doesn’t even help if daddy is the President, as is the case in the otherwise exemplary David Mamet thriller Spartan – those Arabs just can’t get enough of white flesh.

The lotsa stars format seems to have been embraced by the heist movie more recently, since it provides the chance for a gang to gather and each member to demonstrate their idiosyncrasies. Reservoir Dogs and Usual Suspects are two of the more grown up versions, but then the Ocean’s sequence appeared, influenced by the Rat Pack films – another sixties phenomena, in which Frank Sinatra and his buddies Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr would badda-bing baby, and there was always a knowing wink to defuse the badder-badder aspects.

All of which brings us to Tower Heist, which in its own half-assed way takes these various strands and puts them together. It’s got the ensemble cast, led by Ben Stiller, and featuring Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda and others. And it’s got that light-hearted tone, mixed with perhaps too many plot elements for it to be the smooth ride it aspires to be. The fact that three names were credited with story, only one of whom is credited with co-writing the script suggests that the business of writing the thing was not straightforward either.

What’s interesting is that, just as the sixties films mentioned had something of the Kennedy era about them, so too does Tower Heist bear the imprint of right here, right now. The villain of the piece is a corrupt financier, and his crimes are made personal by him having defrauded the staff of the luxury hotel where he lives of their pensions. Which justifies them banding together to right the wrongs they’ve been done, while at the same time putting a damper on the proceedings because of the credibility of his crime.

It’s good-natured hokum but it rarely sparks, despite some decent performances. The film is more interesting because of its relationship with the zeitgeist than anything else. And there’s more to come, with a screen version of the classic Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker on the way, a…I was going to say ‘ruthless dissection’ of working life at Salomon Brothers, but that phrase pales next to the conduct of Salomon Brothers itself. Too, there’s a movie account of how come things have got as messy as they are, re: global economy. All solid stuff to be developing stories about, but right now perhaps not the time to be using it as the basis of lightweight comedies. Audiences feel the reality too much to laugh.

So used are we to seeing films that are in truth rather conservative, however well they use a few tricks in the filmmaking box, that seeing a fully-fledged cinematic masterpiece is an experience even more uncanny than we might suppose. Its brilliance is not only a demonstration of what can happen when a filmmaker is at the top of their game, but a reminder of just how prosaic most work that ends up on the screen actually is.

In this case, the masterpiece is We Need To Talk About Kevin, a major step up even by the high standards that director Lynne Ramsay has shown in Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. It’s an adaptation of a book that I’ve not read, and is such a thoroughly cinematic experience that I find it hard to imagine what the prose version is like. Surely it can’t have the fluidity that the film has, its apparently effortless ability to conjure feelings and states of mind and questions about motherhood…but that’s being unfair, since Ramsay’s ability to make the screen her canvas is pretty much unsurpassed.

The most obvious point of difference is that this is a film with virtually no dialogue. And what speech there is, is quite often talking used in a way to avoid communication, where the manner of address makes it clear that the speaker has an intent at odds with the meaning of their words. Sure, you can do that on a page. But it’s a whole different thing when it’s happening in real time with gifted actors – and with Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as Kevin’s parents, you’ve got two fine performers.

At the heart of it all is Kevin himself, who even as a baby seems to be engaged in a battle of wills with his mother. He doesn’t just cry in his pram, he shrieks with a voice that’s a barbed weapon, and in one memorable scene his mother pauses by someone operating a pneumatic drill to get respite from the piercing pain her child produces. Is this a difficulty in bonding with her first child, or is Kevin someone any mother would have problems forming a relationship with?

That question is one that would go through his mother’s mind however Kevin grew up. But there’s a more pressing reason that the mother-son bond is questioned: he grows up to slaughter his father and sister, and run amok in the high school where he’s a student. Only, put in the sequence the last few paragraphs have it, there seems to be a linear sequence to all this. The power of the film is that it gets all this and more across through resolutely non-linear means, while being easily comprehensible at all times.

Opening with hordes of young people at the Tomatina festival, where the revellers are knee-deep in tomato pulp in Spain, the viewer soon realises that a lot of the film is about seeing red. It’s there on the walls of Swinton’s house, splashed there by people who know her as the mother of a high school killer. It oozes from the ketchup sandwiches that Kevin relishes. And he scrawls it on the maps that line his mother’s room.

Sound is a key aspect in the film’s construction. Environmental noises permeate, and link from one sequence to another, creating a rhythm and with it a kind of logic that leads the viewer’s attention from Tilda as a new mother bewildered by her truculent baby, an older Kevin interacting with his young sister, being read Robin Hood by his mother when he’s ill and they’re experiencing their only moment of communion. Each is a jigsaw piece, but rather than be frustrated by an intellectual puzzle the experience is of emotional immersion, being transported by the flow of it all as the story slowly forms around the mystery of this child and the terrible crimes he commits.

Filmmaking of this calibre is rare, and this is an extraordinary film that rewards repeated viewings. Before this project, Lynne Ramsay devoted a lot of time to a version of The Lovely Bones that, on the evidence of what she’s done here, would have surpassed the trite Peter Jackson version which he was able to get made because of the clout that Lord of the Rings money gives him. Hopefully, Lynne Ramsay will be in a position to assert herself about future films without such abuse of power.

Metaphor is an important part of how films work. We might not be in hock to the mob ourselves, but we know what it feels like to experience stress from financial pressures, and so we can empathise all too easily when a protagonist does things we’d never do in response to their plight. We feel like blasting someone with a gat – the character in the film actually takes that extra step and blows the mofo away. If only our own problems were resolved so easily.

That’s one use of metaphor. Others pop up all over the place. Zombies as stand-ins for consumers. Aliens as migrants. You get the idea. But it can be taken further, which is what writer-director-producer Andrew Niccol has done with In Time, that like his previous sf outing Gattaca takes a somewhat cerebral approach to a story built around a simple premise – in this case, that time serves the same function as money in the world of the film.

Essentially, to get past the age of 25, you have to earn extra time. You get it for work you do, and pay it out for things you want or need. Sound familiar? Our hero comes across a jaundiced centenarian – still looking youthful – who gives him all his remaining years before choosing intentional death rather than continue a life he considers pointless. That’s the start of things, but just as Spider-Man needs the death of his uncle to kickstart him into heroism, our protagonist here suffers the death of his mother, who dies because the bus has increased the cost of a ticket to 2 hours and she has less than that before she plans to hook up with her son to get more time.

The steely look of the film encourages a detached response, as does the emphasis on wordplay. For the first half hour in particular, phrases predicated on time are prevalent, hooking you into the mindset not just of the characters but helping you realise just how much our own lives are bound up with time. Consider the implications of ‘taking forever’, ’seconds to spare’, ‘time to give’.

If that somewhat heady approach is one that sits well with you, fine. It won’t work for everyone. And effective though the metaphor of money as time is, it’s not entered into conviction by all the actors. The leads are fine, but there’s a dodgy bunch led by a bad guy who’s supposed to be intimidating, whose performance says otherwise. To what extent that’s because of the degree of abstraction involved in the core concept, rather than poor casting, I’m unsure.

That said, would you expect visceral performances in an essentially Kafka-esque story? Arguably it’s unfair to expect the same story to deliver intellectually satisfying notions and get people excited by fight scenes. Only, audiences have been spoiled by the likes of Adjustment Bureau, which made an emotionally engaging thriller from a ridiculous premise, and the spiritually-centred Source Code.

The real issue here is whether you like the films of Andrew Niccol. There absolutely should be room in the market for filmmakers like him, who have an imagination that doesn’t begin and end with product placement deals and Happy Meal tie-ins. And it’s great that he’s doing somewhat challenging material, that in its own polite sophisticated way is sending out the same message as the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters.

Tintin can wait. It’s got Spielberg behind it, and there’s no danger of it disappearing from our screens any time soon. If you want to see a film that will stretch your thinking and leave you wondering, rather than full of gee-whizz, then In Time is absolutely worth investing some of your time in.

Every now and then I pop into the local cinema and catch a couple of films, rather than just the one. That gives rise to some interesting double bills, and in the case of today’s reflection on an issue I perhaps wouldn’t have picked up on were it not for seeing two movies back to back that otherwise have no place together. One was the George Clooney directed political drama The Ides of March, the second was robot-fighting kiddy feature Real Steel.

It has to be said I wasn’t expecting much from Real Steel. Just some metal-fisted hokum to act as light relief after Clooney was done with parading ethical issues. The surprise was how good the film looks. Seriously. Much of the photography is gorgeous, and between that and the art direction, which gives the futuristic film a touch of an old carnie feel, there’s a bit of a Ray Bradbury tinge to the proceedings. And hey, why not? I can imagine Bradbury writing a story about a father and son bonding through their love of a beaten-up old boxing robot. Sure, the story is entirely predictable, but it’s very well executed by director Shawn Levy, and I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for some good family viewing.

What connects it with The Ides of March is theme. Real Steel sees a son connecting with his father as the principle narrative, having been let down by him in his life to date. And they do so through a shared passion for robots. Dad was a boxer who turned to controlling robot boxers when the real sport fell out of favour, and he was no more successful there than he had been in the ring himself. You won’t be surprised to hear – first – that they surprise the robot boxing fraternity by working with an antique, and – second – winning the day by getting their ‘bot to shadow the father’s own boxing moves.

The bit that becomes interesting in light of Clooney’s robot-free yarn is that though the kid and dad undoubtedly win the fight against the badass robot, the result technically goes the other way thanks to the politics of the sport. Meaning, that father and dad get their reconciliation (the point of the whole thing), but are cheated of victory in the strict sense.

So, what happens is essentially dad and son win because of their love, which outweighs the fact that the world is corrupt. And there’s a similar dynamic going on in The Ides of March, with the protagonist a man of undoubted integrity at the start of the story, who is working to progress Democratic governor Clooney’s presidential chances. Only, the thing here is that our man does side with the forces of corruption and compromise, assisting his own and Clooney’s professional prospects, but at who knows what personal cost.

Interesting stuff. And what connects the films is the theme of loss of innocence. In Real Steel, it’s there but doesn’t really affect father and son. It’s an indication of the world the kid is growing up in, that has already defeated his father in so many ways, and driven him to cynicism and complicity. The Ides of March features an adult protagonist who does sell out, and knows that’s exactly what he’s done regardless of how he chooses to describe what he’s done to others.

In a nutshell, that’s the difference between adult and child protagonists. It would be a very harsh writer who chose to script a story about a child knowingly succumbing to the forces of darkness in the world. But that’s exactly the sort of material that makes for rich material for adult audiences where they’re seeing people who are likewise grown up, since we will all have some stab of recognition for the moment that a choice is made that introduces grey into a world that we may have kept black and white for years.

If you’re interested in finding out how brilliant people get to be brilliant, how do you do so? One route I’ve discovered useful, given my interest in writing, is to go to talks by writers doing publicity tours. All kinds of good stuff comes out, and you get the chance to ask questions as well. Which is what I’ve been doing tonight…

I went to see thriller writer Michael Connelly, author of heaps of crime books that have sold in bucketloads internationally. Now, I haven’t actually read any Connelly at this point, but it strikes me that if you’re going to learn from people familiarity with their work is no obstacle if what you’re interested in is the structure of how they do what they do. That was very much the case: a good chunk of the questions came from people fascinated by this or that character he’d written about, which is fair enough. My eyes and ears were open to other matters, and had I been a devotee I might have been too fascinated by the content to notice the things I did come away with.

Time and again it becomes apparent that you can’t divorce what someone does from the life they’ve lead. There is no way that Connelly would be writing what he writes, and approaching it the way he does, without his particular background. He worked as a journalist in Los Angeles, and was troubled by a reality of the job: the city had so many murders that they vied for the front page. Only the most ‘interesting’ ones – with a celebrity angle, or an especially gruesome aspect – would be singled out for coverage.

There’s a moral stance within that perspective which informs Connelly’s worldview. It’s at the heart of his interest in the stories he writes, and I got real insight into how he develops his books through his description of how he put together his latest novel. I asked a question that built on that revelation, which made things all the more fascinating, and the following is my take on how to approach writing in the same fashion as Connelly.

The key element of what Connelly does is to use a striking image as an organising principle for a story. His newest book, The Drop, takes its structural inspiration from the twin helix formation of DNA, which can be found – for instance – in a drop of blood. That’s one of the meanings of the title, and it has two more: the drop a body takes from the roof of a famous hotel that his hero investigates, and the LAPD acronym DROP which relates to the hero’s forthcoming retirement.

So, what we have in this instance is two stories which circle around one another but never meet, which struck Connelly as being more representative of reality than stories which do coincide. His choice many years ago that protagonist Harry Bosch would age in real time is also important, since it accounts for the fact that he is facing the end of his career after a long sequence of books. And each of them features repeated thematic aspects, concerning the growing role of technology, the nature of evil, and Bosch’s relationship with Los Angeles.

That’s one example. Another is a forthcoming book that coincides with a 20th anniversary, and to explore that Connelly has gone back to 1992 and his vivid recollection of a riot that he witnessed as a journalist. Etched in his mind is the memory of a bottle of Southern Comfort being thrown towards him, in such detail that he can recall the writing on the label. That specific visual will feature at the climax of the story, as other key images have shaped the structure of other books Connelly has written.

Even if you’re not planning to write a novel, the idea of having an image as an organising principle to work towards is one that can usefully be explored. Ken Campbell used a candelabra as the inspiration for the structure of a one man show. The influence of that image may not be apparent to the audience, but if it helps a creator shape the material they’re working with then it is invaluable.

In Connelly’s case, he has such faith in that process he does not need to plot out the story in detail, allowing himself to be surprised by what comes up. But then, why wouldn’t he be? One way to describe what he does is that he experiences a trance through focusing on a detail, allowing the whole to emerge in its own special way. Hmm. That reminds me…

A long time back, I interviewed comics creator Dave Sim, who said something very similar:

Sim As Neil Gaiman put it, it’s as if you’re building a bridge, but you’re not building a bridge sequentially, the way you have to do it in the physical world. The moment you start building it on this side, it starts growing from the other side. And you just start trying to predict where all the curlicues and whatnot are going to be, and all of a sudden one of them shows up, and you’ve got a chunk of the bridge about 30 feet out in mid-air that’s about 15 feet higher than you thought it was supposed to be.

AR And you don’t know how the hell it’s going to work.

Sim You don’t let that trouble you. You just start building the rest of it, and eventually some dramatic curve comes in and you go ‘Oh, alright, it’s going to rise up in some way and hook up with this side. And I can see now looking at all this stuff that’s getting built on the other side in my unconscious mind that yeah, this could be quite attractive when it’s done. You know, it could be quite symmetrical.’

There’s a long tradition in jazz of adapting popular tunes for line-ups featuring trumpet and sax and whatnot rather than whatever instrumentation they originally had. Miles Davis did covers of the likes of Bye Bye Blackbird, giving himself and his band a chance to do a new take on a ballad of the day, or one which had become a jazz standard. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is John Coltrane and his dazzling reinvention of My Favorite Things, taking the apparently unpromising raw material of a Julie Andrews song from Sound of Music and transforming it magically.

That notion of taking what someone else has done and doing your own version of it has a long history in the arts. I can look back at some of my early work and the efforts to ape someone who knew what they were doing show through. And that’s fine. It’s a stage you go through on the way to finding your own voice, and having the confidence to use that and not attempt ventriloquism. Some creators who’ve demonstrated their chops continue to drink from the well of those who went before. One such is Alan Moore, much of whose career rests on a Coltrane-like ability to imbue what was apparently pop culture detritus with substance.

Such reinvention is what Moore did with Miracleman, itself a British knock-off of the American superhero model, which he offered back to the world in a form that transcended its source material. He repeated the trick to brilliant effect in Swamp Thing, taking a rather silly bog dweller and using the character as a vehicle for powerful and poignant horror stories where the genre elements were fused with a socio-political sensibility unusual in the medium.

Most of all, Moore did that reinvention with Watchmen which — remember — was intended to be done with a bunch of characters from defunct publishers Charlton. No need to go into the historic significance of the 12 issue series that redefined what was possible in the medium. Well, at least to those who hadn’t been keeping their eyes out for the similarly inventive but less self-conscious steps that the likes of Howard Chaykin was making with American Flagg, and Frank Miller with Dark Knight. And all of them, Moore included, were building on the work of innovators including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, George Herriman, Steve Gerber, and many many others.

Watchmen being the one that got the most press, it’s been Moore who has got the most press since those days. Which is why we know the ups and downs of his relations with publishers and collaborators, his feelings about the state of the industry, and why you really shouldn’t make films of his work. And now, without his blessing — not that such needs to be granted, any more than Moore himself asked for permission to use out-of-copyright characters from 19th century fantastic fiction to create his League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen – DC has commissioned stories set in the same world as Watchmen.

These stories don’t exist, but the messageboards are ablaze with people decrying them, and calling for them to be stopped in their tracks. It’s all very…predictable. Moore occupies a place in the firmament that means he’s accepted unquestioningly. In some respects, he’s become the Bob Marley for smarter teens — a poster child whose wild hair and wilder ideas (and epic consumption of cannabis) mark him out as a counterculture hero.

Thing being, we won’t know what this new work will be like until it’s out there. And you don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to. I might be tempted by some of it, since Darwyn Cooke is one of the creators supposedly involved and I am a big fan of his work. But I don’t expect the quality of most of it to be up to much, any more than I suppose that whoever follows Ed Brubaker on Captain America will deliver the goods that Brubaker has consistently done.

As for the rest of it; the bluster about Watchmen’s canonical status, and Moore’s sainthood…it’s irrelevant. I’m sympathetic to Moore about some of the travails he’s experienced, while feeling that taking legal advice would be a better remedy for some of the situations he’s been through than expecting others to abide by an ethical code that is important to him but not binding for others. And however good or bad the Watchmen spin-offs turn out to be, the original will always be there. If ‘original’ has any meaning, that is, in a world where the definitive take on a work might not be first out of the gate…

You’ve heard the one about how the internet has changed everything. How digital distribution spells the deathknell of traditional business, and how fortune favours…well, either the bold in the sense of brave, meaning pioneers committed to new art forms and new means of profiting from them; or bold as brass pirates who are making work available without troubling to get any money back to the people who came up with it.

In the latter category we have Grooveshark, who…well, the clue’s in the name frankly. They make music available to anyone who’d like to listen to it. Never mind if its originators want their work accessible to all online with no say in the matter. Niceties like that don’t seem to concern Grooveshark, whose run-in with Robert Fripp, who owns the rights to all the music of King Crimson, are chronicled here. They’ve spluttered, done some handwaving around undefined technical issues, but King Crimson material continues to be available from them however often they’re requested to remove it. Whatever you make of the prog rockers, it would be churlish to deny them the right to profit from their music, and have it made available in ways that suit them and not intermediaries who make a return on it.

OK, so sharks continue to thrive in digital waters. Sad, but no surprise. On a positive note, there are promising developments in the new online ecology too. The ability of the internet to connect projects with audiences means that supporters can be identified and tapped into via crowdsourcing, getting fans to fund work upfront. One healthy example is the film Sound It Out, a documentary directed by Jeanie Findlay about the last record shop in Teesside. The film was made in 2010 thanks to support generated on the website indiegogo, and ongoing promotion coordinated by producer of marketing and distribution Sally Hodgson has kept interest in the project alive, to ensure that the film gets screened.

For supporters of such initiatives, there’s a buzz to be had from direct participation in making something happen. And there are payoffs tailored to audience tastes, so that the more you donate to get the project off the ground, the more bespoke your thank you will be, whether it’s in the form of vinyl earrings unique to the campaign, or an opportunity to screen the film in your own home and have a signed DVD and EP to go with the experience.

There’s an incredible number of people out there touting for support for their pet projects, and Alex de Campi is playing the system in an interesting way. The writer and filmmaker is looking for backers for Ashes, the sequel to her graphic novel Smoke. What makes her approach unique is that she’s offering deals including reprint and film rights direct to purchasers, cutting out a tier of intermediaries she’s seen little benefit from in the past and allowing her to forge relations directly with those who want access to her work.

If Ashes sees life, it’ll be a vindication of a fascinating way of doing business: getting readers to be patrons for the creation of work that would not otherwise exist, and connecting it with publishers and people interested in making a film version of the story. At a stroke, that puts Alex at the centre of deals that creators are all-too-often omitted from, as part of longstanding attitudes by many on the business side to those who come up with the ideas in the first place. Watch this space.

The typical attitude of the beancounters in the music business is ‘keep the talent from the money’. The consequences can be grim, with artists kept drugged by managers as they sign contracts they’re clearly in no state to understand, with repercussions lasting for decades. Leonard Cohen is one case in point, fleeced of his money and forced at the age of 70 to tour again to replenish his coffers to ensure he can retire with dignity. Stories like that will continue to happen. But the potential of projects like Sound It Out and Ashes means that creators can have a much bigger influence in the way their work gets into the world.

It’s taken me quite a while to catch up with two of America’s biggest heroes. Years after everyone else was praising the series, I’m still only into the second season of House. Masterful stuff, Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the wiseass doctor making him one of tv’s most compelling leading men. I’ve been on board with Jack Reacher a while longer. Lee Child has been chronicling the adventures of the maverick ex-military cop for some years now, and I’m currently thrilling to the latest — and 16th — book in the series, The Affair.

Greg House is a partially crippled doctor with a genius for diagnosing difficult conditions, his focus on uncovering the truth and challenging lies responsible equally for his professional brilliance and his personal and interpersonal difficulties. Jack Reacher is a wall of muscle with a surprisingly cultured worldview and a resolute commitment to justice — not in the abstract but in seeing it through, whatever the cost to himself.

For all their differences, the two men are as one in being maverick loners. No great surprise there — it’s an archetype that goes back to the oldest stories. What stands out for me is that both men win through because of their remorseless belief in — and application of — logic. Not something you’d think would make for contemporary heroes, but both Reacher and House achieve their extraordinary results, saving lives regardless of what it means for them personally, through the laser application of impressive mental capabilities.

Now, there’s no shortage of smart heroes. But typically we’re told that someone is smart, and get to see its impact. What we don’t normally experience is the thought processes of the intellectually adept protagonist. And that’s exactly what we get with the doctor and the vigilante. Each is characterised by precise mental rigour that we as audience can track when they’re doing what makes them special.

Logic on its own is not always captivating. If it was, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell would feature as comic book heroes. But logic allied to principle is inspirational. It enables us to see how that principle is attained in life, rather than merely being held up as something to cherish. For House, the notion that people lie is ingrained. It informs the foundation of his questioning, guides him through the layers of lies that people tell each other and, more toxic still, themselves. Reveal the truth, and healing can take place. But House himself is the wounded healer, a true shaman — a key episode late in Season One reveals that he has died and been reborn — and as such walks (hobbles) outside the bounds of society, which needs his brilliance, but cannot bear his x-ray insight.

Reacher’s compass is different. He is guided by morality. To do what is just. And in the course of righting wrongs the former military cop employs a world class mind to see him through difficulties. One of the great pleasures of the books is to be in Reacher’s head as he calculates how to take out a group of enemies. He is frequently outnumbered, never outclassed. The decisions he makes are outlined with clarity, uncontaminated by emotion. He knows exactly how to relieve you of a weapon, to break your arm, to kill you without breaking sweat, and will do whichever expends the least energy to achieve the most rational result in pursuit of his objective.

Neither Reacher nor House are men you want to be around for long. Sure, they’ll put matters right for you. But being around men whose cause is just, like paladins of old, is not comfortable. It shows up your own weaknesses, and that’s not easy to live with. Which is one of the reasons that heroes like this never settle. Reacher is forever on the move, in search of the next adventure. House is physically static, but his mental agility unsettles those around him. And always, unable to switch it off even if they wanted to, minds that notice and compare and assess and conclude, while the rest of us stumble semi-conscious through a world that we don’t understand, and fear in the fuzz of our incomprehension.

There are sentences that make you double-take when you encounter them. Assaults on all that you know and hold dear. One such happened recently with the news that the speed of light maybe, just maybe, has been transcended and that baffled scientists want their peers to help them understand what’s going on. That was a paradigm shifter, for sure. And then I checked out IndieWire, and read something that rocked my world even more: “Under Phil Noyce’s sure direction, Jolie delivered in Salt, even though the plot was less inspired than Wanted.”

Have you seen Wanted? Now, if the writer is alluding to it being fantastical nonsense of a high order, and assumes that the reason for such nonsense is inspiration, rather than desparation, an out of control art department, and a director doing his damnedest to build on a slender and unconvincing premise as outlined in a flaky Mark Millar comic…then that sentence makes sense. Otherwise — and I cannot stress how fervent I am about this — the claim is utterly redundant. And it becomes more so when you watch Salt.

In some respects, Salt is an old school epsionage thriller, what with it being rooted in Cold War tensions. And it may have been nothing more than that were it not for two things. One being skilful plotting on the part of writer Kurt Wimmer — the script is taut, presents its surprises skilfully, and allies action to the development of plot and character. The other is Angela Jolie.

Let me explain. The script was originally written with a male protagonist in mind. And you can easily see it working with any number of male leads flexing their pecs and narrowing their eyes as the story unfolds. Having Jolie play the lead is a stroke of some kind of low grade genius. And I’m presuming the idea was hers, since she is rare in the industry in not having the usual phalanx of nodding heads to kowtow to her every whim.

Jolie is a sharp cookie with a singular talent and intelligence, and Salt is one of her more interesting choices. Simply, it enables her to play a female action hero unencumbered by the bullshit that would inevitably have accompanied that choice were a script to be written with that in mind. Sure, she has a relationship complication, but it’s dealt with when her husband is killed in front of her, adding further fuel to her desire for revenge. And she certainly doesn’t have any kids for cutesy moments, or have cloying moments where she admires a friend’s choice to give birth.

In the absence of all that, Jolie is free to deliver a performance that’s based as most male leads are on someone going out to do what they need to do. Which in this case means an awful lot of running and hitting and coming up with smart ways of dodging the people after her using improvised weaponry and quick thinking. Not only that, but there are points when it seems feasible that she really is running with the bad guys — Angelina Jolie, a Soviet sleeper agent? What has the world come to?

Rest assured Jolie is no such thing, and the end result is a cool thriller with old school dynamics directed with muscular efficiency by Philip Noyce, and a refreshing new twist brought to it all by the presence of its lead. At a time when the lesson most people have learned from the success of the Bourne movies is to have thrillers with amnesiac protagonists, be thankful there’s one where another conclusion has been drawn, in making an unexpected choice about the gender of its hero. Amazing, isn’t it, that such an issue should be noteworthy in 2011. But that really is the case. Roll on Salt 2…