Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Reviews
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On the recommendation of a friend I watched this 5 episode arc of Torchwood, and I was stunned by its brilliance. Torchwood is some kind of Dr. Who spin-off, which means that by rights I should hate it (I’m not a big fan of the good Doctor). It is about a UFO investigation unit based…
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Ichi is a remake of the now-famous Japanese story Zatoichi, about a blind swordsman who wanders about slaughtering people. The last version of this that I saw was by Beat Takeshi (whose Dolls I quite recommend), and it was okay until it went completely weird at the end. I also saw an excellent version with…
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My partner has discovered something of a fascination with Korean actors recently, so we have been through a bit of a spree of Korean movies (i.e. 3), two of which were gangster movies by the same director. This movie, A Bittersweet Life, stars the same stunning actor as The Good, The Bad, The Wierd, in…
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I’m not a theatre buff but it seems I’ve been seeing a little more than usual! Last week I went to see a pair of plays based on the works of two Japanese authors. The link suggests that these plays were based on the work of Yukio Mishima, famous gay fascist author who committed suicide;…
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Terminator: Salvation was a fun movie but, as I observed in my review, the director had changed the nature of the resistance subtly so that they were more militaristic and much, much more heavily armed. This militarisation is a two-fold thing, and in both of its aspects it annoys me. I think there has been…
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Obviously I had to watch this Terminator movie, because it stars Christian Bale and, well, it’s a Terminator movie. It was fun, but it definitely didn’t have the intensity of purpose or the cleanliness of plot of the first two. The plot is messy, and has holes you can drive a truck through. But it…
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I saw this last week, and I liked it. It’s a Swedish Vampire movie set in 60s Sweden, so it has a simple and old-fashioned feeling to it, with that sense of slight poverty that movies set in that time tend to have. Like most Vampire movies it is a love story, but this one…
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I am not a big fan of Pixar productions, for the prime and simple reason that, like most western cartoons, and particularly like their Masters at Disney, they are overbearingly misogynist. Well, not as much as Disney itself, which I contend employs a misogynator, a special staff member whose job is running around the creative…
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I am reading The Watchmen, which was given to me by one of my players/DMs (we alternate) who, even though he works in IT, is so old-skool he doesn’t even have a blog. At least, not one he’s shown me. This isn’t the reason I can’t quite get into The Watchmen though. The reason is…
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Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I don’t like theatre much, though I do go to see a play on the odd occasion (approximately every 2 years). Generally theatre is like bad television, in my opinion, only confronting. However, when it’s good, theatre is just great. So it was with the play Shunkin,…
Compromise and Conceit 