Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. My rating: **** Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins This is the seminal foundational text in terms of academic studies of fandom. Even if it was published in 1992 before the explosion of internet fandom and a more …
My rating: *** Imdb link This film is a collection of science fiction clichés. The style is pure Matrix and the writers have gone the whole hog and recognised the long black coats of the heroes of The Matrix as priestly soutanes, calling their wearers Clerics. It is the job of the Clerics – Fahrenheit …
My rating: * Imdb link It is very hard to know what this low budget science fiction film is actually about. It involves two engineers who develop a backyard time travel device in their spare time. Through using the machine their time travelling doubles develop a life of their own (I think!) and something, but …
My rating: *** Imdb link This is an entertaining time travel thriller where a butterfly accidentally trodden on by a time traveller in prehistoric times leads to catastrophic results for the present. It is a race against time, re-evolution, monstrous plants and dinosaur-like animals for our scientist heroes to get back to the past and …
My rating: *** Season 4 episode 7: ‘It’s the great pumpkin, Sam Winchester’ Well, while I am on a roll, I thought I might as well continue with this discussion of God, angels and demons and the supernatural and so on and so forth. Perhaps a more lengthy piece on the emergence of a neo-gnostic …
My rating: *** Spoiler alert My post on episode one Episode 2 of Apparitions is perhaps a little less convincing than the first one but what is interesting about it is how it manages to foreground contemporary cultural clichés about good and evil. There are some fairly absurd plot twists concerning the Chief Exorcist of …
My rating: **** Imdb link Recently I had an interesting discussion with a couple of friends about the complete disappearance of the twentieth century futurist vision, a vision which perhaps reached its culmination in the 1980s. 2001 is a reminder of that vision. The camera lingers languorously over the beautifully designed sets and models. The …
My rating: **** Imdb link This film is the result of a collaboration between writer Neil Gaiman, artist Dave McKean and the Jim Henson Company. It is about a British teenager whose parents run a circus. Her mother falls ill in Brighton and she enters into a parallel dream-like world which is made up of …
My rating: * Spoiler Alert The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman My review This book is well written and the story really hooks you in, but I really disliked the philosophy Pullman is pushing. This philosophy seems to be a kind of Nietzschean materialist version of gnosticism (phew!). His is a universe which allows only …
My rating: *** The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman My review I found this book a bit disappointing after the first one. It has taken me a while to analyse why. I think it is a combination of a number of things. First of all I’m not quite convinced by Pullman’s cosmology. Somehow it isn’t …
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