Who are the bad guys in the Spider-man movies? And what does this tell us about the politics of the character?
Spider-Man 1:
Uncle Ben’s Killer (see Spider-Man 3): A petty street crook. BUT He is allowed to kill Uncle Ben because Peter Parker […]

Jindabyne is second or third hand goods. No problem in basing your film on a Raymond Carver story, they are a pretty good little basis for films. But the story in question “So Much Water So Close to Home” was already one of the nine or so[…]

Really.
Do I have to write any words at all?
Surely John Peel’s love for Don Van Vliet says it all. Surely the sunken hearts of every teenager who bought Trout Mask Replica in the belief it was the best album ever, only to realise it was a coll[…]

Man to eat Corgi live on air: “It’s going to be served in a pitta bread with a salad, almost like a kebab on a skewer.” The live eating will be in the Resonance FM studios, which, though slightly cramped, have a long history of foo[…]

Patrice Leconte! Daniel Auteil! Words that have shone out in the wasteland of French film for the last ten years suggesting that I may just tolerate any film they are involved in. Well they have made a misstep. An interesting misstep but a bi-left-fo[…]

Shut Up and Drive – Rihanna
Breakin’ Dishes – Rihanna
Uptown – Pleasure
Burning Up – Madonna
Fiddy Fiddy Fiddy Fiddy – dunproofin.com (Kaisers v 50 Cent)
Knights – Crystal Castles
Tomoko – Hafdís Huld
[…]

aka Things to make you go hmmmmm about “Things The Make You Go Hmmm”.
This is a more than adequate early nineties pop dance track, perhaps a little more suited to the radio than the dance-floor, with a cheap but memorable video and a kill[…]

Most discussion I’ve seen about the upcoming His Dark Materials films has focused on the film-makers’ decision to tone down the anti-religious element. This leads to the question of how they’re going to tackle the scenes in the thir[…]

I got stung! Only the other week I was recalling the era of decoy mp3s. Now listen carefully children – occasionally, back at the turn of the century, the odd illegal download of a new mp3 would be a decoy, or a loop of the intro. Imagine! You wast[…]

In my teens and early twenties I made three sustained attempts to create worlds.
The first two were for AD&D games, the third was for a freeform – i.e. largely ruleless – role-playing campaign. Each of them ran into two basic problems[…]