Director and producer Koji Wakamatsu has died. Wakamatsu had just been named filmmaker of the year at the 2012 Busan Film Festival. Wildgrounds has an interview, which Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats helped translate, Keyframe has an obituary and Subway Cinema had a brief overview of Wakamatsu’s career paralleling a 2008 retrospective in Los Angeles. “Divisive, exploitative, [...]
I am Ape. Nothing Ape is strange to me.–Publius Terentius Afer (sort of) For what is there beautiful in man,-what, I pray you, worthy of admiration, or comely–unless that which, some poet has maintained, he possesses in common with the ape? –Arnobius I’m surrounded by a stack of comics and one illustrated novel all set [...]
Ing K. and Manit Sriwanchpoom’s Shakespeare Must Die, a Thai version of Macbeth, has been banned in Thailand: “This little art project dared to paint the Thai political crisis with a broad brush and with the story of Macbeth, the creators are re-telling one of the most important stories about the striving for power, the [...]
Criterion’s excellent three reasons for its Godzilla (1954) DVD and Blu-Ray.
On the anniversary of Shirley Jackson’s birthday, here are a piece on The Haunting of Hill House at DarkEcho and a 1951 radio play of her “The Lottery” on NBC Short Story.
At the excellent Bookview Cafe, Ursula K. LeGuin writes a fairytale of unemployment. My favorite line? “The Works Fairies are not functioning at present.”
At TCM’s Movie Morlocks, David Kalat writes a passionate defense of silly Godzilla movies and how Godzilla vs. Megalon conquired the world in “The Importance of Being Godzilla (Part 1).”
ReadMOre’s Mark Tiedemann has an in depth conversation with writer Ursula K. Le Guin about The Dispossessed.
A thorough and well-illustrated look at Soviet science fiction, from the 1920s through the 1980s. (via SF Signal)
SFSignal has Handshake Magazine’s cinematic history of the future. The timecode in the upper right hand corner.
Horror movies are celebrating their hundredth year in 2010, with the anniversary of the 1910 Edison Lab’s production of Frankenstein. Bloody Disgusting catalogs “some of the biggest…genre snubs in Oscar history, in Part Four of B-D’s ’100 Years in Horror’ series.”
The Vault of Horror has an excellent piece examining Italian zombie movies and their subversion of Catholicism.
Connected is a Danish postapocalyptic short film. It’s kinda like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, at least it’s an allegory about greed. (thanks, DimSumWesterns!)
Adi Tantimedh doesn’t like AMC’s remake of The Prisoner. Not at all: “Let’s get this out of the way: The Prisoner remake is shit. Pointless, generic shit.” “Shit,” being the operative word here. (via PWBeat, who have more discussion in their comments).
Henry Jenkins writes up a handy list of some comics he’s enjoyed recently, divvied into stories of everyday life, superheroes, science fiction/fantasy/horror, and some unclassifiable items.
Matsumoto Hitoshi has not made an art film, but it sure looks like one.
Number Six will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered, but in the 1970s, he was roughed, laid out, sketched, penciled, inked, scanned and collected. Scans of Jack Kirby’s The Prisoner at the Madness. (TwoMorrows has some analysis).
Prince Caspian, a lesser-known entry in the Narnia series, is a book with not much substance. The recent movie actually streamlines the story, eliminating flashbacks and so forth. What fills the running time back up? Why, war of course.
Horror stories make people uncomfortable or scared in many ways. The most basic has always been fear of death and/or physical destruction. For example, I don’t want my body torn to shreds by zombies, so I’ll be scared if it happens to a character I empathize with. In another sense, taboos are what’s being broken [...]
I call it a bait and switch. The first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass, was an adventure fantasy that was fast-paced and written in an incredibly smooth style. Intrigue, danger, children in peril, armoured polar bears, witch clans at war with each other, and above all, a girl named [...]
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