Shelfbound

<<Heavy spoilers for The Adjustment Bureau follow. Minor spoilers for Doctor Who as well>> The Adjustment Bureau has been sticking in my mind since I watched it a few days ago. It wasn’t life altering but I really enjoyed it. In conversation last night Nick pointed out that it was tonally odd to him and I think he’s right; that’s what [...]

Lights up. Center stage is a large, four-poster bed with mounds of pillows and drapery, basically a bed straight out of pre-war Gone With The Wind, covered by a white bedsheet. A man and woman, as SOOKIE and BILL, stand on the bed facing each other. SOOKIE holds a ketchup squeeze bottle upside down in [...]

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King is a weird old book and the film adaptation, written by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Kasdan, is fucking nuts. This was the first novel King wrote after being knocked all to shit by a van and it has about a thousand different themes shoved into it at [...]

Sir Ian McKellen invites you to join him as he makes faces at the camera! Bonus Jimmy McNulty Smirk! Richard III ends with McNulty and Gandalf fighting each other with tank-mounted machine guns. This is what Branagh’s Hamlet was missing. You can find more smirking here.

This week’s Off Panel is a continuation of last week’s edition, which was a discussion of Smitty and Dixon’s desert island books and music. Today we continue the conversation with movies and, of course, graphic novels. To me, my panelists! DVDs Dixon: I’m going to limit myself to movies here, rather than use TV shows. [...]

Skins is the best show about what it means to be in high school since Buffy the Vampire Slayer graduated. Aired on Britain’s E4 channel since 2007, the show follows, over two series, a group of friends dealing with growing up, growing apart, and getting their A levels. It features a lot of drinking, drug [...]

Star Trek: Countdown Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman and Mike Johnson & Tim Jones Illustrated by David Messina & Giovanna Niro If you haven’t seen Star Trek you probably don’t want to read this review.  If you have seen Star Trek you probably don’t want to read this comic book. Star Trek: Countdown‘s [...]

According to nerd legend, this should have been one of the bad ones. You may have heard the theory: the even-numbered Star Trek movies are good, the odd-numbered ones are bad. It’s something Trek fans began to count on, like the sun rising, until the last Next Generation film, Nemesis, which was the 10th film [...]

Dixon: If Carnet de Voyage isn’t written by Craig Thompson do we care? Smitty: Interesting question. I’m not sure we (the royal “we”) do care; it isn’t as if Carnet blew the skirt up on the sales charts. But what you’re asking me, I think, is if it would be published and critiqued if Joe [...]

We’ve all seen it. An otherwise great movie rolls right up to the end and suddenly fumbles the landing. To me, the most famous example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; a taut, well-shot, genuinely creepy movie that totally falls apart in the last ten minutes with a long speech full of psychobabble. As the [...]