So the BBC have launched their slightly abstruse trailer for the Olympics. It being a two minute summary of Wu Cheng’en’s Journey To The West, better known in the west as MONKEY. The animated two minute trail takes a while to get on to th[…]

Can Electronic Cigarettes Beat The Smoking Ban?
“I think people need to be cautious,” warns Dr Roberta Ferrence, director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. “It’s an unknown.”
“The concern is that the product wi[…]

I guess the place to start for SF comics, particularly on a British site, is 2000AD. Its title now makes it sound very unlike SF, but it’s been running future adventure stories for decades. It’s never been consistently great, but it&#8217[…]

The tonal shifts in Mamma Mia are unsettling. The range of acting styles, from mugging through to camp are far broader than any film I have seen in years. The cinematography only occasionally lifts its head above competent and Meryl Streep should nev[…]

I was 16 when the Tim Burton Batman film came out. At the time it was the most-hyped movie I could remember for several years. It was the first major comic-book film to come out for a while, and the first since the new wave of comics – and spec[…]

So far I have spectacularly failed to fulfil my intended investigation into Westlife. To make up for it, last week I took my Mum to see The Feeling play at Somerset House (Mum had wanted to see Duffy, but that had sold out months earlier). The Feelin[…]

Apologies that this is a month late, I only learnt of Nick’s death from cancer earlier this week, although obits did appear in the guardian, independant and mojo as well as on Quietus (although there seems to be something up with the main artic[…]

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American comics were almost entirely childish and pretty insipid after the Senate hearings in the mid-’50s. Unsurprisingly there was a reaction to this, and some cartoonists started putting out alternatives, full of drugs and sex and anti-estab[…]

I’ve often been told that what makes Watchmen “unfilmable” is its complexity: this is surely not true. Generally this argument confuses complexity for detail, which nowadays is bread and butter to a sufficiently obsessive director a[…]