All posts tagged Film
Corporate Samurai
I downloaded The Wolverine from iTunes a couple of weeks ago. All good fun, even if it did go through the motions a bit, and Hugh Jackman is always watchable […]
Revisiting Battle Royale
In last week’s post Jane Dougherty raised the interesting question as to whether modern Young Adult fantasy sanitises the world for its readers, serving them the illusory comfort of simplistic […]
Visualising Ragged Claws in 3D
The first draft of my next novel and sequel to Thumb, Ragged Claws, is now finished and tucked safely in a drawer for a month. It’s hard not to keep […]
Things to Come (1936)
In 1936 Alexander Korda, flush from his success with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), collaborated with H. G. Wells to turn the writer’s future history The Shape of […]
Elysium (2013)
Beware – mild spoiler alert. It’s a truism that, on the whole, film and TV sf lags behind the written genre by twenty to thirty years. With Elysium we’re firmly […]
Flatland 2: Sphereland
Flatland 2: Sphereland is the sequel to the movie Flatland which I mentioned in a blog post last year. It’s a charming 36 minute animated short based on the original […]
A Field in England (2013)
The English Civil War period has always been a rich source for horror. James I whipped everyone up with his book Daemonologie in 1597 and his subsequent promotion of, and […]
The Japanese Wuthering Heights – Arashi ga Oka (1988)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a really odd book. On the surface it’s the first bodice-ripper – a passionate tale of doomed love set among the Yorkshire Moors. Yet our […]
Aeon Flux – the animated series
I stumbled across Cyberpunk when living in Tokyo. This had both its advantages and disadvantages. Half the time it felt like I was living in a true William Gibson world, […]
White Tiger (2012)
Spoiler Alert – if you haven’t seen the film and plan on doing so, watch it first then read this. This is a very odd Russian symbolist fantasy set during […]
The Singing Ringing Tree
For a certain generation in the UK, The Singing Ringing Tree, an East German take on a Grimm-style fairy tale is indelibly carved on our psyches, giving us all the […]
German Expressionist Flyer
I’ve been working on some art/visualisation pieces for Thumb. As I mentioned before I wanted to capture the feel of the German Expressionist artists and films of the 1920s and […]
Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, (1950)
Last year I wrote about Jean Cocteau’s beautiful re-telling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, La Belle et la Bête (1946). In many ways it was a perfect […]
La Belle et La Bête (1946)
Think Beauty and the Beast and the first images that spring to mind will probably come from the 1991 Disney film and subsequent stage shows. All good stuff and a […]
Road to the Stars
The British Space artist David A. Hardy has just re-released, on DVD, the rare Soviet 1957 film Road to the Stars, directed by Pavel Klushantsev. It’s available from his website, […]
Orlando (1992)
I’m delighted that Sally Potter’s film Orlando, based on the book by Virginia Woolf, is now available on iTunes. Orlando is one of those books that falls into the category […]
The Long Good Friday
This week I learned that the English actor Bob Hoskins is retiring because of Parkinson’s disease. It’s sad news. I’ve always admired his work so I thought I’d talk about […]
Weird and wonderful 3D short films
I love computer animation and ever since I had a BBC B 32K computer in the early 1980s I’ve been trying to teach myself how to make my own short […]
Aelita, Queen of Mars. 1924
Silent Science Fiction movies are understandably dominated by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) which is a truly astounding piece of German Expressionist film. Two years before the Soviet director Yakov Protazanov, […]
The Woman in Black and other malfunctioning boilers.
A few days ago I saw The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe. It was huge fun, especially for someone who used to sneak out of bed as a child […]
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