If you are a regular reader of blogs, you might have noticed the proliferation of “punk” suffixes in recent months. A December 2008 entry on Boing Boing spoke of “atompunk”, a Dutch movement fetishizing the atomic space age of the 1950s and ’60s. The entry was posted at a time when steampunk - a style [...]
Repo: The Genetic Opera
February 23rd, 2009 by Karen · No Comments
Coraline
February 12th, 2009 by Karen · No Comments
Imagine you’ve just moved into an apartment in 150-year-old house - in murky Oregon, all weird angles and Gothic decay. Upstairs lives a limber Russian, Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), who’s training mice to perform a circus, while downstairs are two retired actresses, Miss Sprink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French) for whom life is [...]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
January 1st, 2009 by Karen · 1 Comment
During the holiday hustle and bustle, many moviegoers might wish to take a step back and watch life unfold before their eyes: be it the life of Benjamin Button, or their own lives while watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. At nearly three hours, the film makes a bid for “epic” that has seemingly [...]
CJ7
September 26th, 2008 by Karen · 1 Comment
Cynics have long contended that in Stephen Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the titular alien could be replaced with a dog and the fable would remain intact. In CJ7, schoolboy Dicky jubilantly shouts “an alien dog!” when first setting eyes on his new pal. While it remains a mystery whether CJ7 - with its Ewok [...]
Babylon A.D.
August 31st, 2008 by Sam Hutchison · 2 Comments
Science Fiction movies have always had a big problem: most Science Fiction movies are adapted from Science Fiction books, and this isn’t exactly a good thing. Science fiction novels and graphic novels tend to have very ambitious storylines full of intricate plot. Characters have complex motivations and relationships and frequently, things are not always as [...]
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
August 25th, 2008 by Karen · No Comments
As the world’s eyes turn to China this month for the 2008 Olympic Games, Hollywood offers a distinctly naive and romantic view of the Far East, grafted onto one of its most successful franchises. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor mercifully lets Imhotep - who terrorized Brendan Fraser and Co. twice already - stay [...]
Hancock
August 25th, 2008 by Karen · No Comments
In a summer of no less than five superhero movies, Hancock is the only original screen creation, not taken from the pages of a comic book. Key traits of the lead character might seem familiar, since we are now accustomed to superheroes who drink (Iron Man), rage (Hulk), wise-crack (Hellboy), and remain at odds with [...]
The Dark Knight
July 22nd, 2008 by Lauren Hutchison · No Comments
“The Dark Knight” is the first movie I’ve seen in about 10 years where no one’s cellphone went off during the movie. In a theater of nearly 350 people, the dull din of conversation through the previews was constant, but when the opening credits started to roll, the crowd was eerily hushed. The hype, the [...]
The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow (novel 1), Sea of Wind (novel 2), by Fuyumi Ono
July 15th, 2008 by Lauren Hutchison · No Comments
The Twelve Kingdoms is rather unique - while most anime is based on Japanese comics or graphic novels, the Twelve Kingdoms anime series was based on full-fledged fantasy novels. The Twelve Kingdoms are considered “light novels,” more akin to our own Young Adult genre, and feature Japanese teenagers spirited away to a parallel world resembling [...]
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
July 13th, 2008 by Karen · 1 Comment
Hellboy II: The Golden Army would seem to boast the same director & writer as Hellboy, the 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola’s graphic novels. Yet Guillermo del Toro has since undergone a metamorphosis from respected but relatively unknown genre geek (working on Mimic and Blade II) to widely acclaimed art house auteur on the strength [...]
