Tag: Film
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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 re-reading and tinkering, but I know from experience that if you’re not careful you end up reading what’s in your head, not what’s in the […]
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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 Things to Come (1933) into a movie, ending up with what is probably the first attempt to make a serious SF film. What emerged is […]
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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 back in mid-90s Cyberpunk territory. Elite super-rich live in their Tory/Republican paradise on the orbital structure Elysium, while the proles endure short miserable lives in […]
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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 novel by Edwin Abbott, and one of the book’s own sequels Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe, written in 1965 by the […]
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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 attendance at, witch trials. Keith Thomas’s classic study Religion and the Decline of Magic argued that in the 16th and 17th centuries the shift to […]
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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 ideas about the story, and the tragic duo of Cathy and Heathcliff, often come from the myths that that have built up around the novel, […]
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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, especially when walking through Shinjuku at night or hanging out in some grungy bar where cyber geeks rubbed shoulders with the Yakuza. Unfortunately it only […]
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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 Second World War, and based very loosely on Moby Dick. After a battle on the Eastern Front a tank driver is found with 90% […]
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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 screaming habdabs for years. Many of us still wake up crying in the middle of the night over fading visions of large plastic goldfish, grizzly […]
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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 1930s. The movement grew out of a desire to overturn the established order of nineteenth century Europe, whose triumphalist and Imperial certainties had been completely […]
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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 movie for the age, giving war-weary French audiences an hour or two’s respite in fantasy while re-asserting French tradition and culture through the art of […]
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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 few rollicking tunes to boot. However the best version, to my mind, is the earlier French film La Belle et La Bête, made in 1946 by […]
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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, The Astroart of David Hardy for £9.50. The documentary begins with the work of the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolovsky, credited as the Russian father of rocketry, […]
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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 of ‘literature therefore not science fiction’ that’s invented by snobs every time a science fiction/fantasy book by a renowned writer pops into view. Kingsley Amis […]
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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 what I think is his best film, and possibly the best British gangster movie ever made: The Long Good Friday (1980). American audiences will probably […]
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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 films. What surprised me is that computer animation doesn’t seem to be any quicker than traditional hand-drawn methods. You would think it should be. Whereas […]
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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, made Aelita, Queen of Mars, based on the novel of the same name by the writer Alexei Tolstoi. While not on the same level as […]
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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 to watch Hammer Horror films when BBC2 did a run of them late on Friday night in the early ’70s. It is very recognisable as […]