Category: Reviews
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I received The Witcher for christmas 2 years ago from my Australian friend and his Polish girlfriend, who live in Amsterdam. At the time my laptop couldn’t handle it so I put it aside, but since I completed the dark ritual of invoking the elder gods, I seem to have developed strange new powers of…
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In two months I’ve managed to fly through the series of books called The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. I’m up to book 9 already, and it’s been a ball. This series of books is about a Wizard called Harry Dresden, in modern day Chicago, who advertises himself in the yellow pages and takes on…
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I visited Denmark for a week last week, and amongst other places I visited was the National Museum of Photography, which was hosting an exhibition entitled Unintended Sculptures by the Danish photographer Henrik Saxgren. I was drawn to it by this picture on the poster, which is from Iceland. The exhibition is essentially a series…
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I use a Japanese social networking site called Mixi, that is a kind of blogging/photo uploading/community/facebook style site all rolled into one, minus (mostly) the spam weirdness of facebook, with a lot more privacy settings and slightly more obtrusive advertising. Recently I have been roped into playing a farming game with my friends, called Sunshine…
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Writing about Torchwood made me think of a conversation I had with a colleague about the show. She is your classic role-playing nerd, computer geek and all round otaku. When I mentioned – somewhat breathlessly – to her that I had watched 5 episodes of amazing Torchwoody goodness, she immediately launched into a tirade on…
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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…
Compromise and Conceit 