Here’s the last photo I took of Comic Con 2017. A few people were still lined up under those white tents for Hall H even though the last Hall H panel had ended already. It is a nice shaded spot, anyway. It was around 4:30pm—I don’t usually leave so late on Sunday but I felt like lingering this year, I really didn’t…
I haven’t been taking many cosplay photos this year. Too many sites are doing a more exhaustive job of catching every interesting and halfway interesting costume than I can. So far I’ve only stopped two people to ask if I could take their picture.
This crab was on the rocks watching everything outside the Indigo Ballroom yesterday where it turned out there was a panel I wanted to see, a Doctor Who panel, which I’ll be posting more about when I have time. For now, here’s Peter Davison, Sophie Aldred, and Colin Baker responding to the casting of Jodie Whittaker…
This was outside Comic Con yesterday. I don’t know what it’s for but it seemed to say something about dedication.
As difficult and strange as cultural change can be, it tends to manifest very close to home, if not in the home, as in the case of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1950 film The Munekata Sisters (宗方姉妹). Two sisters, an older and a younger, have different personalities, one shaped more by pre-World War II Japan and the other shaped more…
Well, it’s time once again to play the Game of Thrones. Sunday’s premiere got season seven off to kind of a meek start. As usual for a first episode of the season, a lot of time was spent refreshing the viewer on the previous season but even for that it seemed like it waffled quite a bit.
David Lynch’s ability to blur the line between comedy and horror was on admirable and fascinating display last night on the new Twin Peaks. Moving to a meditation on abuse and disjointed affection, last night’s episode, “Laura is the One”, continued the show’s exploration of the basic problem arising between innocent…
It’s Jodie Whittaker, aka the Thirteenth Doctor, seen here where I first saw her in the first season of Broadchurch. Her casting was announced to-day after the Wimbledon Men’s Final (I thought it was funny they chose to do it after Wimbledon Men’s Final) with this kind of cheesy video:
It’s hard to take the talking potatoes seriously. I listened to Heroes of Sontar last night, a 2011 Doctor Who audio play that features Sontarans, an alien warrior race first introduced in the Third Doctor era but which manifest on the show now only in the form of Strax, who’s played for laughs. Heroes of Sontar’s…
I finished reading this last night, the autobiography of a 17th century seaman called Edward Coxere (pronounced “Coxery”). It has humour and tension but clearly comes from a time when the novel as an artform was still in its infancy. It has the free-roaming quality of a picaresque as Coxere simply reports one episode…
The connexion between making money and survival, for you and your loved ones, as always been fertile ground for drama in stories set in the U.S. 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming dramatises the political struggle between a working class whose sense of morality has been warped by the money-making imperative and a new…
Great crimes, tragedies, and suffering occur alongside the silly, mundane, and lovely. This can be difficult to illustrate in a film but Sadao Yamanaka accomplished it in his great 1936 film Kochiyama Soshun, one of the director’s only three surviving films. The influence he exerted on Japan’s better known great…
It’s harder to applaud a man’s decision not to kill when the movie he’s in so stacks the deck in favour of killing. In 1958's Rusty Knife (錆びたナイフ), former gangster Tachibana (Yujiro Ishihara) has to fight the urge to kill again even when he learns the yakuza syndicate who seem invulnerable to prosecution gang raped…
Look at those colours and angles. Diane (Laura Dern) is a dragon on that couch.
Let’s just embrace synthesiser with lots of fuzz, let’s not call it an 80s nostalgia thing, let’s just have it because it’s good. That’s one of my main thoughts after finishing the first season of Stranger Things yesterday, a show I found to be uneven but with some very good qualities.
Last night I read “Fairy Tale of Wood Street”, one of the best Caitlin R. Kiernan stories I’ve read, featured in the new Sirenia Digest. The story of two lovers who go to see a movie, it’s very simple on the surface but tells something much bigger with a kind of magical restraint. There’s a sweetness to the…
So you want a better life. Why not go to war? It’ll very likely improve both you and your spouse, or at least that’s the message in Alexander Korda’s 1945 wartime propaganda film Perfect Strangers (Vacation from Marriage in the U.S.), a message all the more insidious for the fact that it’s a pretty good movie with…
I do a lot of research for my comic. Sometimes I think I’d like to put together some annotations just to show how much of it I’m not making up but generally I’m too busy working on the comic itself. Most of my research focuses on seafaring in the 17th century and in particular the English Royal Navy and if you ever…
When it was announced that George Lucas was selling Star Wars to Disney, I was optimistic. I liked the idea that Disney wanted to put out a lot more Star Wars film and television than Lucas tended to—I figured, sure, Disney would make mistakes but more material means more chances to learn from mistakes. But it’s hard…
Two outlaws, two men of the west, are best friends until one of them switches sides to work for the law. Now one hunts the other. This could describe several Sam Peckinpah films but to-day I’m talking about 1969's The Wild Bunch, a decent Western that wrestles with the difference between following a personal moral…
