Superhero TV Cartoon Theme Songs
I think my favourite and least favourite TV theme tunes are currently from superhero cartoons. The best of them is the Teen Titans theme. It’s a terrific show very much in the Japanese style throughout, all the […]

This album grabbed me from the beginning: I have an article in progress on soul music in which I refer to “the peerlessly composed intro to Al Green’s ‘Love And Happiness’”, and that intro is sampled for the first track.
It&#8[…]

Caribbean cover versions with the wrong words
Among the many pleasures in reggae cover versions is that they don’t take a great deal of trouble to get the lyrics correct. This was spurred by listening to yet another Trojan Box Set, this the Reg[…]

Metafiction in Astro Boy
I’ve just read Astro Boy #14, which contains some of the most remarkable and untrammelled breaking of the traditional boundaries, not just of the comic artform but of any narrative form, that I’ve encountered. Fir[…]

Samurai Executioner

Lone Wolf & Cub is one of my all-time favourite comic series, and I’d recommend it very highly, especially to anyone who likes Kurosawa’s samurai movies, as it seems a very close equivalent to them, except with a[…]

Rikyu
This film, which I hadn’t seen before, has gone straight into my personal top ten. It’s the most gorgeous film I’ve ever seen, by a country mile. The leaflet the NFT gave out with this claim it’s too concerned with the a[…]

Alexander Walker’s bequest to the British Museum
The late film critic left a stack of works, the majority prints, to the British Museum, and they are currently displaying a lot of them in the print room (4th floor at the back) until January 200[…]

Greatest superhero comic story ever?

I was just rereading Grant Morrison’s run on the JLA, and there isn’t a superhero story I love more than his final epic. It starts with Luthor and a couple of other deadly JLA foes banding together, d[…]

Hiroshi Teshigahara
I’ve been to see two films by this old Japanese director at the NFT this week. He’s an interesting figure – I only knew Woman Of The Dunes before, but he was also a painter, sculptor, garden designer and director[…]

Le Jour Se Leve
Hmm. I went to see this 1939 French noir at the NFT the other day. They give you a two-page review-article on the film, it being a serious arts cinema, on your way in. It’s all about director Marcel Carne and the film’s ex[…]