Favourite Movie Posters: Number Four

Amazing indeed!

Already Dead - Review

Manhattan, it seems, is the heart of a city teeming with bloodsuckers and zombies. Nothing new there then. Charlie Huston has successfully managed to combine the hard-boiled detective sub-genre with a classic vampire narrative and come out with something that is fresh, well-written and exciting. I loved it.

Our protagonist is Joe Pitt, a vampyre of some years standing and also a private detective of sorts, who is charged with tracking down the whereabouts of a fourteen year old girl. She is the rich-girl daughter of one of the most powerful men in the city and Joe cannot afford to get it wrong. Behind this central storyline Joe is also placed with the task of finding a ‘shambler’ (zombie if you prefer) who is infecting various low-life's in the city. He is helped by his vampyric strength and agility but hampered by the fact that somebody has stolen his stash of blood ……

Like all good noir storylines Already Dead has a repertoire of untrustworthy characters. It is full of back-stabbers and double-crossers. It seems that everybody is on the take or would like to be. The city is a jigsaw puzzle of alliances and vampyre clans with territories (literally marked out on a map) and boundaries that are strictly kept to and enforced. Joe, who doesn't want to be affiliated to any particular clan, has to trip a particularly fine line between the factions in order to survive. Huston doesn’t pull punches with his descriptions of the violence that Joe faces. Nor can the language be seen as anything other than adult in tone and content. But the violence and profanity adds to the realism and the overriding sense of impending doom.

Huston's vampyrism has a scientific explanation. A vyrus is responsible and this has to be regularly ‘fed’ with fresh blood otherwise the vyrus will start to consume the host. It also means that he cannot have sexual contact with another without infecting them also. Luckily (or rather unluckily of course) his girlfriend is HIV positive and shares Joe’s fear of any sexual relations.

I've joined the Joe Pitt saga rather late as Huston has written another four books in the series. But if Already Dead is anything to go by then I will definitely enjoy the rest. The pace is just right and the quality of the narrative is first-rate. Roll on No Dominion.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Favourite Movie Posters: Number Three

Aaaww - what a cute little egg!

Battlestar Galactica –Season 1 Disc One Review

This is a terrible confession – I have never seen BSG. Good, that’s better. Why? I seriously don’t know, except that everything always seems to get in the way. Work, errands, a wife who doesn’t want to watch it, a son who is not bothered either, work, a love of films that always seem like a better proposition, work, fighting for TV time, books, work and falling asleep in front of the TV (a post-40 year old issue) are all valid reasons. But now this is going to change because I am determined to watch them all (along with Buffy, Angel, and a host of non-sci-fi material). I have heard so many friends saying you must watch it, and magazines remonstrating that this is essential viewing that the time is now here. So without further ado I bring you the review of disc one from the British box set. (The mini-series I am not counting here).

33 The opening episode is a corker. Following on beautifully from the mini-series it has a wonderful edge with the crews of the Galactica and the rest of the fleet teetering on the brink of disaster. Their humanity is highlighted by the mistakes they make when tired and battle weary. The Cylons, on the other hand, are clearly machine-like in the way that they keep coming back every 33 minutes. You just know that this clear polarisation is going to underline everything in the show to come. Other interesting binary opposites include military (Cmmdr Adama) versus civilian (President Roslin), strong (Number 6) versus weak (Gaius) and authority (XO Tigh) versus rebellion (Starbuck).  My only gripe comes with the sticker on the clock set for 33 minutes. Does this mean that the clock is only ever set on the hour? Or am I being daft and this isn’t a clock but a stopwatch? Overall a great start.

8/10

Water A solid episode – if not having the ‘edge-of-your-seat’ qualities of the opener. A bomb set by the Cylon sleeper agent  - ‘Boomer’ – destroys the water tanks on board the Galactica.They then have a job trying to locate water on all the available planets/moons in the nearby system. Failure will mean catastrophe for the fleet. I like the way you really start to wonder where the Cylon model 8 stuff is going. Why does Boomer feel so human? What is she ultimately going to do? What about the other number 8 on Caprica and where does Helo fit into all this? Lots of questions more than answers.

7/10

Bastille Day My least favourite episode so far. Need to get water off the moon. Need a workforce to do it. Cue prison ship with revolutionary leader on board who mounts a coup and then takes prisoners. “We do not negotiate with terrorists …. blah, blah.” All a bit predictable and formulaic for my liking. However, this being BSG there were still a couple of stand-out moments, The first was Caprica Six to Gaius talking about Starbuck - “Do you think she’s a natural blond?”. Claws out meeeoooowww. The other was Tigh rejecting Starbucks offer of reconciliation. Lovely.

6/10

Act of Contrition The first of a two-parter this was, for me, the best episode so far. A non-linear narrative begins with flash-forwards of Kara involved in fighting the controls of a  stricken fighter and is joined by a powerful sub-plot involving Kara's guilt in the way that Zak Adama died. The episode immediately cranks up with the death of thirteen pilots in a freak accident. The military are therefore charged with replacing them with new pilots from the rest of the fleet. The responsibility for training the pilots lays with Starbuck who wont pass anybody if they make even the slightest mistake. Cue a great deal of soul-searching – particularly when Commander Adama finds out about that Kara passed Zak for service when he wasn’t ready to fly fighters (which ultimately caused his death). The episode ends, as it begins, with the cliff-hanger involving the fighter falling to the surface of a moon after Starbuck almost single-handedly keeps some Cylon raiders away from her squadron of ‘nuggets’. Cracking stuff.

9/10

Favourite Movie Posters: Number Two

You don’t see too many art deco cinema posters. This just so happens to be one of them!

Most Anticipated Films of 2011 - Cowboys and Aliens

Why?
It has cowboys. It has aliens. It's based on a graphic novel. Isn't that enough reasons?

Who?
Jon Favreu at the helm, Harrison Ford as the bad guy, and Daniel Craig as, well ....... Daniel Craig. Potentially a great combination.

When?
Looks like the likely release date is July 29th.

By the way who else thinks that the teaser poster looks like it could be Freddy Krueger in 'Nightmare on Elm Street 2'?

Favourite Movie Posters: Number One

The fifties posters were just the bees-knees weren't they?