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The End of the Road
If I see a worse film than 2012 this year it’ll only be because Roland Emmerich rushes out another one… not that it wasn’t well-made on every technical level, but it was of an order of dumb magnificence that pretty much took my breath away. Its narrative intelligence was at the level of a simulator…
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Charlie Brooker Doesn’t Like Hershey’s
From his column on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury’s in today’s Guardian: “As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it’s swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated, over-ripe corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was encased in…
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Oh, Joy
Just as I finish catching up on the second season of the French cops’n’justice drama Engrenages (UK title: Spiral, screened on BBC4 with a credit for co-production), I see from the Canal Plus website that a third season has just wrapped filming in Paris. Season Two was drug trafficking; in Season Three it’s a serial…
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Dracula
In a post titled What I Learned in 2009 I promised I’d tell of my experience adapting Bram Stoker’s classic novel for BBC Wales. Much as I’d like to say that I had a flood of emails urging me to go ahead, I haven’t. But you’re getting it anyway. (Nope, that’s not it in the…
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Nuggets
Early last year I completed a questionnaire circulated by the editors of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I was a member of the BSFA for a while, before I found that my changing tastes and inclinations meant that the British Fantasy Society was probably more for me; on moving over,…
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WTF?
No, don’t get excited. That isn’t the cover of a genuine Eleventh Hour mass-market edition. It’s the Chinese bootleg – at least, I’m assuming it’s a bootleg, unless fractured English and a Showtime logo on the back of the sleeve are the mark of an official release. A couple of days ago I got an…
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Patient John
This kind of explains itself… every couple of weeks the Writers’ Guild e-bulletin compiles a list called What Members Are Getting Up To and every time I get up to something, I forget to tell anyone until it’s too late. The Forgotten Season 1 Episode 11 Patient John – Press Release A MAN’S MONEY-MAKING WAY…
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Movies of the Year
It’s awards voting time again and although in previous years I’ve kept a strict silence over my preferences, I’ve noticed that I seem to be the only one doing it. I suppose it’s hubris to imagine that anyone really cares… so in the interests of humility I’ll tell you what I’ve liked this year. I’ve…
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John Wyndham and Me
I haven’t seen the new adaptation of The Day of the Triffids yet – the parts are lined up on my hard drive, ready for when I’ve fought my way through all the BAFTA screeners in time for the next round of voting – but this review on the Blowing my Thought Wad blog inspired…
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What I Learned in 2009
It’s been in my mind to write a long post along the lines of “what I learned in 2009”, but until I can set some time aside to think-through and process the whole experience of relocating from one country’s industry to work in another, it’ll have to wait. It would be simplistic to say that…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
