Public Perceptions, Private Passions: Gone Girl
Public Perceptions, Private Passions: Gone Girl (2014) Like Peter Weir or David Cronenberg, David Fincher is amongst a short list of directors from whom I consider a new work to be an event. It’s been that way since his hideously undervalued debut, Alien 3. Unlike the two aforementioned, however, I’m not always on Fincher’s wavelength. The man is incapable of making an uninteresting film; it’s just that I don’t always quite get...
The Chronicles of Conan Volume 2: Rogues in the House And Other Stories
The Chronicles of Conan Volume 2: Rogues in the House And Other Stories By the time that issue #9 of Conan the Barbarian came along, writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith had settled into being a very tight team indeed. The difference between The Garden of Fear and that now primitive-seeming debut issue is vast, both in artwork and storytelling. Here Thomas (as he was to become increasingly adept at doing) adapts one...
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three The late, great film critic Roger Ebert began his review of Sam Peckinpah’s 1983 film The Osterman Weekend in the following way: “I do not understand this movie. I sat before the screen, quiet, attentive and alert, and gradually a certain anger began to stir inside me, because the movie was not holding up its side of the bargain. It was making no sense. “I don’t demand that all movies...
The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Isn’t that just an excellent tease of a beginning, beautiful in its simplicity? Well, I think so. It is the introduction to the The Gunslinger, which is the introduction to the long tale of The Dark Tower and is also in turn my introduction to Stephen King’s mighty epic, some 35 years in the making. Well, that’s not...
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
Butterfly Mornings: Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver I’m a great admirer of Barbara Kingsolver’s work and yet only this week got around to her latest novel, Flight Behaviour. As usual, though, it didn’t take much more than a few pages for Barbara to draw me into her fictional world (and why do we fans think of her in first-name terms?). This one is set in the small town of Feathertown in the Appalachians and...
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