Tag: cinema

2012
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ARTS

The Dark Knight: apologia for Dictatorship or Insanity, take your pick

Repost of Dark Knight Review (originally published July 2008) If you haven’t yet seen the film, Dark Knight, please do that first before reading this post, because you will definitely spoil the “tension” of the plot, assuming there is any. For some reason this film is a runaway hit, with critics pissing all over themselves to outpraise each other. From my perspective, despite some excellent cinematography and a stellar performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker, it is really just another Batman movie, but with a troubling dichotomy at its core that is getting scant attention. There are clearly two very conflicted subtexts in the film, one centered on Batman and the other on the Joker. Batman’s supposed internal conflict we are all familiar with — having to take the law into his own hands in order to fight evil — dating back to his first appearance in Detective Comics #37; on the other hand, unlike the ridiculous slapstick Joker that Burton and Nicholson gave us, Ledger pushes his exploration of the Joker’s mercurial psychology into whole new realms of uncharted territory.

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ARTS

Etheria Film Festival

Picked up this fun flyer at Readercon 23 & rather liked the artwork, by Linsday Beach, more than the art on the festival website.   In any case, this looks like a lot of fun!

2011
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ARTS

Solaris Soundtrack Artwork

The haunting soundtrack by Eduard Artemyev for the masterpiece SF film Solaris has been floating around the inter-tubes. I didn’t really care for any of the existing DVD or CD cover artwork, so I c

2010
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ARTS

Pulp Life: A Major Exhibition of Charles Binger Art

The amazing works of Charles Ashford Binger will be shown in the first major exhibition of his works in 45 years! “Charles Binger: A Pulp Life“ will open at the La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Hollywood, CA on January 7th and run through the end of the month. Binger’s interesting career spanned from movie posters and portraits, to ground-breaking science fiction covers in the 1950s, and hard-boiled detective pulps. His style has been characterized as utilizing “impeccable composition, rendered in a painterly style over roughened textures.” I would hasten to add that Binger was able to incorporate elements of cubism, realism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism into his works…often as not by combining them into a single canvas!

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ARTS

Judge Dee Burns Up the Screen

Went to see the new Tsui Hark film “Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame“ [狄仁杰之通天帝国] at one of the downtown shopping centers in Taipei and loved it! Apparently, the only showing in America so far has been at the Toronto Film Festival in September where it was reviewed as a return to fun for Hark.  I certainly thought it was fun myself, harking back to the crazy wuxia themes that played so well in Chinese Ghost Story [倩女幽魂] __and Green Snake [青蛇]. For those of us who also loved the series of novels fashioned on Judge Dee by Van Gulik, this movie seems to distort the character into a much-larger than life action hero.  Nonetheless, the cinematic style and lavish attention to sets create a fantasy epic very much worth seeing.  The underworld scenery and throwaway characters reminded me of the similar backdrops used in Hellboy II and Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End Singapore sets, suggesting that Tsui Hark has made a close study of those design ideas and paid homage to them.

2009
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COSMOS

We need a new racket!

Boys, it says here that GoogleMoon is buying up all the prospecting claims from Tycho all the way over to von Braun. With the kind of muscle those guys are bringing in, our little stake will be wa

2008
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ARTS

Visual Trope: the Alien Encounter

On this snowbound Solstice weekend in New England, I happened to be reading reviews of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake, and pondering the ways in which humans have envisioned our first contact with alien life forms. Without going too heavily into the subject, I pondered the range of human-alien frission typically presented in SF, from the over-hyped assumption of instant warfare, or the however improbable love at first site, to the more nuanced anthropological approaches of Chad Oliver and the intensely portrayed psychological gestalts of Theodore Sturgeon. At that point Sturgeon’s amazing story To Marry Medusa (aka _The Cosmic Rape_) popped into my mind, and in particular the lush red cover image for the 1968 paperback by Paul Lehr. This image, so typical of Lehr (with a mountainous half-organic construction looming in the center, while miniscule beings flit around it like so many fleas,) represents the contact between human and alien minds in the realm of abstraction and metaphor. In that sense it fascinates more than the familiar image of some athletic dork with a ray gun zapping the tentacles off of a bug-eyed wierdo.

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ARTS

Your Brain Is On the Menu

Yes, it is that time again… no, not Presidential Election Day! World Zombie Day, when hordes of shambling, bloody-mouthed fiends stagger through the streets to find you and eat your brain. What

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ARTS

APE 2006, lost but not forgotten

While cleaning up a shelf, I discovered a folder full of freebie cards that I picked up at the Alternate Press Expo (APE) in 2006. It was a fun time that year, with Keef Knight as one of six GoH, and a fine cast of erstwhile comix artists and DIY crafters filling the concourse. There is no point in just stashing these away in a box, so let’s look at some eye candy! First up, Doug Sirois and Steamcrow :

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ARTS

*ollywood, where are you?

Shouldn’t there be a little Bollywood, or as the case may be Tollywood, Kollywood, and Lollywood, in all of us? If not for these bizarrely enterprising cinema juggernauts, we would never have seen t