Cake (2014)
Cake (2014) “I think that we need some closure…” I winced –actually winced and there’s not something that everybody admits to in real life—when the head of a chronic pain support group utters these words at the beginning of Daniel Barnz’s Cake. It’s one of those irritating statements that must have originated in America, probably on The Oprah Winfrey Show. That opinion is probably inaccurate and unfair of me, but there you...
Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) It’s my own fault, really: when I saw that many Oscars being waved in its direction I should have guessed that Birdman was going to turn out to be a self-important load of old monkey-spunk; but for heaven’s sake don’t tell the critics that. In the mid- to late-seventies, around the time that I was discovering just what exactly cinema was capable of achieving, I also had my...
American Sniper (2014)
Messiah Complex: American Sniper (2014) Being a long-time fan of Clint Eastwood as both actor and director — in particular his work of the last 20 years or so– I had intended to see American Sniper in the week that it was released. For whatever reasons, I didn’t. Now I’m sorry, because I know more about the eponymous title character than I did before – which was nothing, in fact. It was hard not to take notice of...
Cthulhu 2000 A Lovecraftian Anthology
Cthulhu 2000 A Lovecraftian Anthology Edited by Jim Turner With Illustrations by Bob Eggleton Arkham House Publishers, Inc. An Occasional Look at Lovecraftian Anthologies: 4 Part Two If you had to pick out just a few of the homages to Lovecraft that you feel would have made even the Master himself feel uneasy, then the tenth short story in this collection would definitely be near the head of the queue. Even after...
Moon of Skulls
Moon of Skulls The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2 Edited by Paul Herman Introduction by Mark Finn The first volume in this series– which presents in chronological order all of the weird fiction of the Texan master– contained twelve short stories and a group of poems that documented the writer’s progress from his initial, halting efforts very quickly on to damned-near pure perfection. Indeed, until I...
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