The Sinister Serials of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr.
Nov22

The Sinister Serials of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr.

The Sinister Serials of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr.   This is quite simply the most wonderful wallow through an almost-forgotten period of cinema history. For the obvious reason of age I have only a dim memory of the serial as a cinematic form. That was from attending the Odeon Cinema Club in Ayr, Scotland every Saturday morning –price 6d– where amongst screaming children (I of course was never one...

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Interstellar (2014)
Nov19

Interstellar (2014)

Sound & Fury, Signifying Little: Interstellar (2014)   Oddly enough, I only picked up John Steinbeck’s masterful 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath recently. For the first time in years. Now there’s a book.  I hadn’t read it since I was a teenager, but what I found was that it is possibly as relevant today as it was when it was written.  You’ve got your characters living in the dustbowl depression before heading off to what they...

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The Chronicles of Conan – Volume 4 – The Song of Red Sonja And Other Stories
Nov13

The Chronicles of Conan – Volume 4 – The Song of Red Sonja And Other Stories

The Chronicles of Conan Volume 4 The Song of Red Sonja And Other Stories   At the end of my review of the third volume in Dark Horse’s gorgeous reprintings of the ’seventies Marvel Conan tales, I mentioned that at that point deadlines were becoming rather a problem.  It appears that artist Barry Windsor-Smith had turned somewhat fanatical in adding ever-more detail to his panels.  As a result, issue #22 was a reprint of the debut...

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The X-Files – Season One
Nov05

The X-Files – Season One

The X-Files Season One     I’m currently catching up with a couple of ‘90s shows that I inexplicably missed at the time.  It’s odd, because they are both very much my kind of thing:  one is David Lynch’s cult show Twin Peaks; the other is the item at hand, The X-Files, created by Chris Carter. Of course, I would occasionally see an episode here or there but this is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity (thanks, Anne!) to...

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Mathematical Cipher: The Indian Clerk
Nov05

Mathematical Cipher: The Indian Clerk

Mathematical Cipher: The Indian Clerk   For the first fifty or so pages of David Leavitt’s 2007 novel The Indian Clerk I found myself thinking that this would make a decent Merchant-Ivory film; and that’s a good thing, because I’m a big admirer of those movies.  A hundred pages later I was thinking that it would probably be one of their more boring ones; and by the time that I put this 500 page slab of a book down I wondered why...

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