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The Living Dead at the Manchester Festival
One of the most heroic spectacles I ever witnessed on a public stage was that of Stephen Laws conducting an interview with Jorge Grau about his life and films. That’s Jorge Grau, director of the cannibal zombie classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue… kind of apposite because this was at the annual Festival…
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Is it just me?
A theatre not too far from where I live – it would be mean of me to name it – sends out a quarterly newsletter which includes a regular ad for pre-show dining at a nearby restaurant. The ad always includes this proud image: Now, I know there’s an art to photographing food in a…
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Soundscapes and Wide Screens
In a Blog post responding to Lost, In Transition, Carlo C draws attention to something that I hadn’t been aware of before; that in the Lost soundtrack, in addition to the forest whispers sometimes heard by the characters, there’s also ‘hidden audio’ that carries a certain amount of story freight. Or maybe the illusion of…
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Those Cancelled Golden Globes
“Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try to keep that prom alive.”
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Wallace and Kong
A post header which sounds like it has to refer to the most ambitious Aardman stop-motion film ever… A sequence in one of the Disc One extras on the 2005 movie boxed set shows that Peter Jackson owns a copy of the Edgar Wallace material. It’s used as the prop for the script that Jack…
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Lost, in Transition
You know where I came across the pilot episode of Lost? The one with the graphic plane crash and everything? It was part of the in-flight entertainment on a Virgin Atlantic service to the US. I mean, it didn’t bother me, but, you know… Apparently eight episodes of the new season were shot before the…
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Of Robots and Heroes
While we’re talking about the old-time stuff, and recuts and mashups, and harking back to this earlier post… I still have my Super-8 print of the 1942 Lewis Wilson/Douglas Croft Batman serial, which was only available as six 200 foot silent spools… back in my student days I cut them all together, put a mag…
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Monster Munch (2)
Although prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace has a ‘conceived by’ co-credit on the 1933 film, Merian C Cooper later denied that Wallace had any hand in the finished product. “Edgar Wallace didn’t write any of Kong,” he said, “not one bloody word.” Wallace died before production began, but in his diary mentioned completing a…
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Monster Munch
The 3-disc extended edition of Peter Jackson’s King Kong can be had for around a fiver from all kinds of places at the moment – Amazon, some of the supermarkets – which makes it a pretty good bargain. I saw it on the big screen but had no urge to pick up the DVD until…
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BUGS
I had a note this morning from Dave Young, architect of my website, to let me know that Play.com are offering all four seasons of the mid-90s action thriller series BUGS at £7.99 a pop in their New Year Sale. (I mention the website business not because it’s relevant, but because it’s cheaper to hand…