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My First Blasphemous Geometry column has gone live over at Futurismic.
It is devoted to the future of book recommendations and I had a lot of fun writing it. It's all very well writing quite precise and analytical criticism but then you don't yet to accuse Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake of having a "cavernous lady-bucket".
There might well be another one next month if I don't cause all of their subscribers to run away screaming.
As long in its gestation period as an African elephant...
As slow as molasses and only half as thick...
The discussion of Iain M. Banks' Matter involving my good self as well as Niall Harrison, Paul Raven and James Bloomer has started to appear. The others are all going to be publishing different bits of the discussion throughout the week.
My review of Ian McDonald's Brasyl has gone live at The ZONE.
It took me a couple of runs at it but once I got into it I was simply blown away. Ian McDonald seems able to systematically up his game. Which is pretty bloody impressive given the sheer quality of River of Gods.
April's Videovista also has a review I wrote of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence (also known as Trystnaden) as it's being re-released on DVD along with Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light.
I was quite surprised at how well my review of the film turned out as I had to take three runs at watching it. The reason why I had to keep returning to it is because it kept causing me to fall asleep due to the fact that the entire film contains no more than 40 lines of dialogue.
However, it was also the film that converted me to Bergman who I have reviewed (somewhat less charitably) before :
As you can see from the length of the piece I wrote about The Silence, it had quite an effect upon me. It also made me think a bit about the nature of reviewing and, perhaps, why it is that The Clute so likes the works of Gene Wolfe and why Paul Kincaid also felt the urge to fill his new book What it is We Do When We Read Science Fiction with no less than four essays about the exact same author.
April's Videovista also has my review of Gavin Hood's rather disappointing Rendition.
Speaking of American Politics, I've recently been enjoying Bill Moyers' Journal, which can be subscribed to as a podcast. A lot of bad things are said about Amercian Journalism but Moyers' coverage easily out-stretches anything I've encountered before in terms of depth of analysis and insight. I actually think it's better at covering American politics than anything on British TV is at covering British politics.
This month's Videovista has just put up my twin reviews of Uwasa No Onna (The Crucified Woman) and Chikamatsu Monogatari (The Crucified Lovers) both directed by the great Japanese director Mizoguchi Kenji, who has a nice piece about him in this month's issue of Sight & Sound.
I'm quite a big fan of this period in Japanese cinema partly because it is so radically different to the neon Manga-ised image of the place that filters through to us in western media and genre art.
There's a lovely stillness and thoughtfulness to Japanese cinema of this period. The relative drabness of the setting along with the reserved, controlled demeanor of many of the actors only serves to emphasise the boiling emotions their charaters are going through.
For further cool post-War Japanese cinema, consider my reviews of some of the films of Yasujiro Ozu :
