Joe Millar from the Geek Show’s animation podcast ‘Dreaming Machine’ writes about the under-appreciated art of leaving things alone… Over the past year, I have read the entirety (over 1300 pages!) of Jeff Smith’s brilliant comic book series ‘Bone’ with my son. We both found the comic absolutely enthralling. The story has […]
Adaptations
Root Letter (2022) Japanese Video Game turned evocative directorial debut (Cinema Review)
Two teenagers exchange letters. Both have considerable emotional baggage. The primary setting is the Deep South town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with some time in Tulsa, Oklahoma). Soft and lustrous lighting illuminates the hot and humid surroundings, prompting a dreamy sense of inertia in which contentment and frustration jostle for […]
David Bowie in The Man who fell to Earth – Pop Screen 69
The centrepiece of Pop Screen’s Bowie month could only be one thing: David’s first, extraordinary lead role, as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s trippy science fiction masterpiece. For those unfamiliar with the film, Bowie plays an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to bring water back to his home […]
Bartleby (1970): literature’s greatest enigma gets a fine, clever modernisation (Review)
Herman Melville is most famous for writing one of the American novel’s greatest epics in Moby-Dick, but his second most fascinating work couldn’t be more different in terms of scale. A modest, compact short story about a Wall Street clerk who sends his office into turmoil by politely refusing all […]
Battlefield Earth – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 256
This week’s Cinema Eclectica is devoted entirely to Badaptations – those times when, in between the page and the screen, something vital goes missing. Graham’s choice is 1995’s The Scarlet Letter, in which one of the most introverted and spiritual of 19th-century novels is turned into a Demi Moore bonkbuster. […]