The Anti-Irish Sentiments of H. P. Lovecraft
‘Criminals and Mongrel Wretches’: The Anti-Irish Sentiments of H. P. Lovecraft From the Chicago ‘Irish American News’, November 2017 Well now, I’m not the better for that! In fact, I’m almost sorry that I came across this correspondence from 1918/20. You see, I’ve been a lifelong devotee of the writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) of New England. When I was a schoolboy in the 60s and 70s he was pretty much...
Happy Death Day (2017)
An Unexpected Pleasure: Happy Death Day (2017) If Dunkirk and Blade Runner 2049 were two of my favourite films from 2017, then Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day is definitely the one that turned out to be the most unexpectedly good. Considering the title and the poster, I walked through the cinema doors anticipating a standard slasher movie, released for the Halloween market; instead I emerged with a big grin and...
The Inklings – Humphrey Carpenter
The Inklings C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends In the absorbing book at hand the author and academic C. S. Lewis is credited as being the main catalyst behind a loose literary Oxford group of writers and teachers in the ’30s and ’40s — the Inklings – whose roughly defined membership included J. R. R. Tolkien; and it seems odd to me now that although I’ve had a lifelong...
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Customized Miracles; Customized Angels: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) If you haven’t seen the 1982 Ridley Scott-directed Blade Runner then you will still find an enormous amount to enjoy about the 2017 outing; but it is only fair to say that this is a sequel in its truest form. It is not content to merely rehash the original – one of the great classics of science-fiction cinema – but rather takes the many themes of that film,...
It (2017)
Everybody Floats: It (2017) Let’s see. Put it this way: You know how, in the movie The Shining, Jack Nicholson’s character doesn’t look as if he’s playing with a full deck even in the opening interview scene? Remember the eyebrows arched like crazy and that feral-looking grin? Like a guy trying his damnedest to look at least half-sane and not doing a very good job of it? In the novel you have this build-up where...
Detroit (2017)
‘It’s a War Zone Out There…’ Detroit (2017) I think that we can safely call Kathryn Bigelow a talented painter, producer and even occasional actress. And we can certainly call her an always interesting and quite brilliant film director. What we can’t call her is a prolific one. To my astonishment and mumbles of ‘where did the years go’? I’ve just discovered that it is a full three decades since she nailed me to the cinema...
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