Comics Should Be Good links to my old Pitchfork essay on THRILL-POWER, a term I use a lot without ever having managed to give a good summary of what I mean by it. (“Earthlet, if you have to ask, you’ll never know”)
This awesome comm[…]

Cassandra’s Dream
If I had seen Cassandra’s Dream in the cinema I would have walked out. As it was I got half an hour in on the DVD and then flung across the room in disgust. (And then cleaned it and hoped no-one at LoveFilm would notice)[…]

From Douglas Wolk’s Twitter account I snatch the link to the Watchmen soundtrack. Fans of the comic will be disappointed – or perhaps pleased – to note that only a handful of Alan Moore’s chapter-leading musical sources make i[…]

I think that my response to putting this at number two will be hordes (two) people telling me how much I don’t get it. Silent Light, by Mexican director (I refuse to call him an auteur) Carlos Reygadas, was critically gushed over this time last[…]

This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
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I have a friend who saw the poster for Max Payne a couple of months in advance and got rather excited. She had worked out from the poster that it was some sort of hard-boiled cop or detective drama and was gritty and violent. As a hard-boiled fiction[…]

(The start of a parallel series to that recently started on crime writing. I’ll repeat something of what I said there: I mostly read literary fiction, so I’m mostly looking for the same kind of qualities I like there in SF. I know my scie[…]

Partly as a way of getting a ‘feel’ of what people (who aren’t necessarily social media wonks) use Twitter for, I’ve conducted a little experiment – I’ve put each of the Top 40 UK singles into a Twitter search engi[…]

Feel for me. I saw Charlie Bartlett and Smart People not just in the same week, not just on the same day, but with a gap of about ten minutes between them. It was the dire double bill to end all dire double bills. And sorry Dennis Quaid, because you […]

Imagine an episode of 24 where you see the same thing happening over and over again from a different viewpoint. Each time you see a new view, you get an extra piece of information, fleshing out the story, telling you what really happened. A bit like […]