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Film Review: 3:10 to Yuma, by James Mangold | Comments (1) | Below is a summary — View the full post » When was the last time you saw a proper, old school western in the cinema? One that wasn’t revisionist or post-modern, told from the perspective of the Native Americans or Jesse James’s hat? Ever since Dances with Wolves it seems that to just make a film set in the old west with bad guys against good guys and plenty of shooting, fighting and cussing is a faux pas on a level with turning up at a dinner party in your dressing gown.
Atonement is magnificent filmmaking, a work that doesn’t once hesitate or compromise in telling a story that’s both haunting and vital.
Book Review: A Case of Conscience, by James Blish | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » The original novella followed Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit biologist assigned as one of a party of four earthmen to the planet of Lithia, with the mission of deciding whether it can be usefully exploited by Earth. At the start of the story, Ruiz-Sanchez is thrown into turmoil by the realisation that Lithia is uncannily like the biblical Eden, with its dominant species living free of crime, violence or even any notion of sin.
Film Review: Eagle versus Shark, by Taiki Waititi | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » The eagle and shark of the title are in fact Jarrod and Lily, who meet at Jarrod’s ‘dress as your favourite animal’ party, bond over video games, and then have cringe-inducing sex. Lily is desperate to find love, but Jarrad is a man on a mission - he’s training to fight his high-school nemesis, and he just doesn’t have time for romance.
Book Review: The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells | Comments (2) | Below is a summary — View the full post » It’s a work of two halves, and the first isn’t particularly great. It follows the arrival of a mysterious stranger in the small English village of Iping, the reaction of growing suspicion towards him, and finally his unveiling as - you guessed it - an invisible man.
Film Review: The Bourne Ultimatum, by Paul Greengrass | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » What separates Bourne isn’t that he can get the girls or how he drinks his martini, but the fact that he could kill you with a rolled-up newspaper in two seconds flat…
Book Review: The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut | Comments (0) | Below is a summary — View the full post » David reviews The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, a Gollancz SF Masterworks novel.
Having previously only read Slaughterhouse 5 and Breakfast of Champions, I couldn’t help but wonder where the science-fiction label sometimes thrown at Vonnegut had come from. Granted there were nods to sci-fi in both books, but that was it, and I figured it was the usual case of a lazy industry trying to pigeon-hole someone who was too damn good to be slotted into any easy category. In retrospect, I was probably right. Vonnegut’s work, even as early as his second published novel, was unique. But now that I have read The Sirens of Titan, the classification makes a little more sense. It is science-fiction enough, at least, for Gollancz to justifiably stick it under their SF Masterworks banner–though if by Vonnegut’s standards it is straight genre fiction, it is still primarily and unquestionably Vonnegut.