We have become too comfortable with death. Whether we see it simply as the idea of unbeing, or the skeletal, hooded figure with his scythe, or Charon beckoning you across the Styx, death has become an unwelcome, yet common, bedfellow. What, in recent years, has become a stranger to us, is now on every screen, in every page, at every door and on every tongue. Incomprehensible charts and figures wash over us as death now moves quicker than birth. Bodies pile high in specially dug mass graves as the Ganges grows swollen with the dead. Even before the plague that…
I’m not an anime fan. Back in the 80s/90s when I was a kid a lot of my fellow school friends would wax lyrical about Japanese animation and Manga. There were a lot of kids animations at the time that were either French or Japanese at the time and I remember always being able to tell the difference. The lip-sync was strange, the animation wasn’t particularly fluid, their visual design and style was much more angular, it all just rang a false note to my Disney-Brainwashed child brain. I’m afraid to say that hasn’t changed much. I’m better able to…
I loved the first season of HBO’s adaptation of Westworld. It was all the things I love about their best shows, it was dark, thought provoking, well written, well acted, with an intellectual rigour that belied its pulpier moments. I loved it so much I wrote an article about how it is a great example of the philosophical concept of ‘The Uncanny’ for Philosophy Now magazine. The second season however… eh. It had its moments, some of the show’s best in fact, but it was also too long and meandered around its plot points without as strong a drive as…
For no other reason than ‘It’s a Pandemic’ I decided to binge a TV show recently. Anyone who knows me will realise how strange this is as I am generally not a big fan of TV shows and certainly not ongoing serials but the one I chose was the British sitcom Red Dwarf, as the first 8 series are available on UK Netflix at the moment and I wasn’t sure I’d seen them all.
Red Dwarf was a staple of BBC scheduling in the 90s when, if there wasn’t a new series on the way they would consistently show repeats/reruns…
In 1992 Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and The Last Man was published. A book of political philosophy that made the case that the relative peace and prosperity in the majority white, English-speaking world indicated an end of mankind’s social and ideological evolution. We had attained a level of social and ideological perfection that would, thereafter, only require trimming at the edges, a sort of democratic maintenance that would allow this prosperity to continue and only improve. Within a decade this belief was proved so hilariously, tragically, clangorously wrong that to look back on it now is frankly…
The trailer for Edgar Wright’s next flick, Last Night in Soho, dropped on Tuesday and it, yet again, shows another shift in tone in the director’s filmography. While it’s tempting to say “It’s another Edgar Wright horror movie” that ignores the trailer’s clear shift in pace to his previous work and, most notably, a shift in visual style.
Much has been said about Wright’s facility with the medium of film. He’s clearly a film fan and is interested in how it can be used to tell his stories. Most fans and critics tend to focus on his signature editing style…
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was released in the spring of 2002 to rave reviews and massive box office returns. A lot of people see its success as a herald of the age of the blockbuster superhero movie that has so dominated mainstream culture of the last decade and while, yes that is true, it also predicted a hell of a lot more than just Disney’s biggest franchise cash cow.
What’s interesting about Spider-Man is where it sits in the cultural timeline. Produced and shot at the turn of the millennium it straddles the line between a pre-millennial optimism and post 9/11…
A few years back the painfully unfunny and irretrievably stupid ‘sitcom’ The Big Bang Theory had an episode that revolved around one of the sociopathic man-children showing Raiders of the Lost Ark to a bemused girlfriend who made the comment “Indiana Jones has no role in the outcome of the story”, pointing out the fact that the hero of the story actually has very little impact on the film’s key plot object’s (some say ‘MacGuffin’) progress through the story. Indiana doesn’t keep possession of the Ark, he doesn’t defeat the villains and he’s a step behind them all the way…
What fascinates me most about the current state of the world is how ill prepared we were for it. Given the massive loss of life (in wealthier countries particularly) the catastrophic economic response (despite what reports might say, GDP is not a metric for individual finances and is a poor reflection on how people are able to afford to live day to day) and the response being politically driven rather than treating it as a public health crisis, one could be forgiven for thinking we had no warning whatsoever about the pandemic. But we did. Whether it was reports from…
Though I am a big fan of the books, I didn’t see the recent adaptation of The Knife of Never Letting Go that was snuck out recently, but by all accounts it was an abysmal failure with little merit to it. So how does a multimillion dollar movie project, with two of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, based on a best selling book franchise get dumped onto streaming services in an almost straight-to-video dismissal? Well it isn’t one reason that’s for sure.
The first problem it had was the source material. The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first book…
Leo Cookman
Peripatetic Writer and Musician. “Time’s Lie” out now from Zero Books.
