Shores of Night

I went to see this film at the  Electric Cinema  yesterday, and it was good. Let me tell you how good. A lot Marvel's films are quite disappointing because they manage to either feel very repetitive or as if something has been lost in the transition to the screen, or because they dally in meaningless debates about the world's reaction to the sudden introduction of super powered beings (while never really amping up the threat level that we see in the comics universe). Guardians manages to dodge that bullet, however. In part that may be because the sandbox James Gunn has to play in is so much bigger than the conventional MCU, there are so many threats and characters he can play with because space is so big in the Marvel universe. With literally thousands of stories and characters to play with Gunn's most daunting task, I think, is finding what will work on screen and what has actual resonance. The wonderful thing is that you can feel his love for the property, and all ...

It's election time in the UK, even though we only had an election two years ago, and the Fixed Term Parliaments Act is meant to make sure that politicians can't manipulate things to their advantage (so you can't call an election in the middle of an economic boom, for example). I think that the decision, this week, to hold a general election shows exactly how much that particular Act is worth... about as much as a piece of soiled tissue paper. I suppose it is an indication of the continuing crisis that engulfs our politics, highlighting the need not for an election but for someone to be brave enough to state the obvious. The political architecture of our country is no longer relevant, it just doesn't work. It's been outdated for decades and nobody has done anything about it apart from try to move more and more power to the Government and try to find more ways to bypass Parliament. The election results in 2010 were a warning sign of this, one that was ignored by We...

Adrian Tchaikovsky's award winning Science Fiction novel is another brick, and another of his arthropod based tales. Set in the far future it is a story book ended by savagery and civilisation and by the essential question of what intelligent life is, and how helpful technology is. Tchaikovsky starts the story out with a chillingly prescient moment in which a situation very similar to the one we're seeing in the real world occurs, with the rejection of knowledge in favour of 'purity' which destroys everything humans have established away from Earth, plunging the species into a new dark age. This results in an act of sabotage that destroys a science experiment in uplifting and sets the story on its course. The interesting thing here is that he avoids the urge to overly exalt technology, instead preferring to show that time takes its toll on everything. The rest of the book is divided into alternating chapters that split the narrative's perspective between the upl...

Today I want to return to the subject of death, that great spectre that so casts its shadow over society.  We seem to be so focused on it as a tragic event that we miss the positive side. I know that seems like a funny thing to say, how could death be positive? But it can and we're going to explore how. 1) A Release from Pain While we all dream of a quick, painless death the reality is that most deaths are long, lingering affairs. Few of us will die at home and the causes of death mean we are more likely to die in pain. Things like dementia cancer and heart attacks are far more likely to be causes of death than simply passing away in our sleep. Most of the time, we will feel pain and death, therefore, is the end of that, a release. 2) Closure One thing I've found is that a death can be a weight off one's shoulders. My Grandmother, as I've said before, suffered from Alzheimer's at the end of her life and the effect on the family was devastating. There is ...

I should say that I approached this film with caution. I love Ghost in the Shell, it's probably my favourite anime both film and series (including Stand Alone complex) and while I was initially excited by the idea of a live action film, I was also very wary. It's not just that Hollywood speaks a different language to the Japanese, it speaks a different language to everyone, but that I was unsure that the soul... ghost, if you will... of the franchise would transfer to a Western interpretation. The concept of the 'ghost whispering to you' seems to be something that's so intrinsic to the Japanese view of the world that I don't think it carries across into a dualistic culture, such as the Christian one that still dominates the West, where flesh and spirit and technology and nature are held to be opposed to each other. Part of my trepidation was also driven by the fact that although the trailer was stunning to watch, it seemed to repeat pieces of the action and to f...