Shadows and ugly new buildings menace people in the new Sirenia Digest released on Sunday, in a new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Untitled 44". Kiernan’s stories for the Digest, which have for most of the publication’s history focused on wonderfully weird Lovecraftian horror and erotica, have increasingly mined…

The Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller travel to a world where most everything, even the people, are blue in the 2008 Doctor Who audio play “The Skull of Sobek”. I still haven’t heard any audios from the Eighth Doctor’s series that are anywhere near as good as his stories in the monthly range but “The Skull of Sobek” is…

I finally finished watching Rose of Versailles this morning, a 40 episode anime series that premièred in 1979. Following the exploits of Oscar, a fictional French noblewoman who dresses like a man to lead Marie Antoinette’s Royal Guard, the source manga by Riyoko Ikeda was a popular work and remains profoundly…

It’s too bad Chiana’s never seen or read Macbeth. Otherwise she might have known the portrait she picks up, which seems to tell the future, isn’t the valuable artefact it seems to be for “to win us to our harm the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence.”…

In 1857 Glasgow, a man was murdered by arsenic which led to the sensationalised trial of Madeleine Smith, his lover. Her trial concluded with the uniquely Scottish verdict “not proven”, a conclusion the viewer may also reach from 1950's Madeleine, an adaptation of the story by director David Lean. Drenched in black…

History remembers Admiral Nelson for his great victories against Napoleon at sea. But, as the popular 1941 film, That Hamilton Woman, shows, he also had an affair with a woman who achieved a great deal of fame in her own right as a society figure and beautiful portrait model. The film, unmistakeably pitched as…

Sometimes you can’t see the mood altering pulsars for the dried food rectangles. Or what Farscape’s American astronaut, John Crichton, calls crackers. In the grand scheme of things, you have to ask yourself, do crackers really matter?

I’ve been watching the new season of Stranger Things for two days and so I’m two episodes in. So far I like it, particularly since the story partly revolves around a shopping mall. I always loved malls when I was a kid, especially indoor malls, like the one depicted on the show. I loved the feeling of a world created…

So to-day is Jon Pertwee’s one hundredth birthday. I knew it was coming so I decided to watch a nice long serial from his era of Doctor Who. I settled on the seven episode serial The Ambassadors of Death which ran from late March to early May in 1970. The third serial from Pertwee’s first season as the Third Doctor,…

Now for another story about youth versus age. Or relatively young versus somewhat older. I’m not sure how old Chiana is on Farscape (the Farscape wiki doesn’t know either) but it’s pretty clear she’s much younger than everyone else, maybe late teens. It’s enough to make for a nice episode about two generations…

So you think just anyone can be Spider-Man? Well, you could be right according to 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a beautifully animated film with engaging voice performances. The screenplay is rigorously formulaic in ways that detract from the story but the visuals and performances more than make up for it.

Happy Independence Day, United States. Though Aladdin has now outgrossed Independence Day to become Will Smith’s biggest hit of all time and the country is 22 trillion dollars in debt. I live in the United States, in southern California, where there was an earthquake this morning I didn’t feel but know it happened…

Nothing will come from nothing. On Farscape, that means you can’t recapture your youth without sucking the life out of a living ship.

How can the average Marxist start putting his philosophy into practice in a Capitalist country? A nervous young man named Total starts with the little things in 1973's Property is No Longer a Theft (La proprietà non è più un furto). A film that’s much more interesting than it is funny or viscerally appealing, its…

As you may have noticed every time you open up NetFlix, and the algorithm has chosen it to court your attention, Neon Genesis Evangelion was released on the streaming service ten days ago. What does that mean to me when I have two copies of the series on DVD and VHS and the remastered version in high-def? The sound is…

If there’s one thing I learned from the 2008 Doctor Who audio play “Max Warp” it’s that its writer, Jonathan Morris, really hates Geoffrey Vantage. Who’s Geoffrey Vantage? A fictional character made up for this 54 minute Eighth Doctor audio play who constantly makes sexist comments about the Doctor’s companion, Lucie,…

Farscape returned with a second season première that was already an improvement on what came before. Tension between Crais, Aeryn, and Crichton is reconfigured with Moya’s warship baby Talyn in the middle.

A troubled young man drifts into a seaside town and almost immediately is offered a cushy position in the local organised crime outfit. In 1959's The Rambling Guitarist, (ギターを持った渡り鳥), Akira “Mighty Guy” Kobayashi stars as the handsome, vulnerable lad with a tough exterior. This is one of the many formulaic yakuza…

Here are some fossils I saw in a science building at San Diego State University to-day. A Phorusrhacos skull and a little Archaeopteryx. Along with the strange feeling of seeing physical evidence of a creature long extinct, seeing fossils up close makes me think about how incredible it is that these things exist at…

A boy named Jiro bonds with a horse he raised from a foal in 1955's The Phantom Horse (幻の馬). The mild melodrama in the foreground is overshadowed by the beautiful Eastmancolor cinematography; the film’s best quality is its footage of rural Japan in the changing seasons.