The Sky Crawlers

“The time that we kill keeps us alive.” Jeremy Levett is here to explain why we should all be watching Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers (2008) Mamoru Oshii says that the most important part of a film is the visuals, after which comes storyline, with characters least important. He is not alone in this – such an approach can be seen in, oh, almost every CG-reliant film since the re-re-re-mastered ...

The Tate starts to Grate.

In the summer of 1982 I went up to London all on my own for the first time on a sort of pilgrimage to see the Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Tate Gallery, and very grown-up and artistic I felt too.  I made many more visits to the Tate in the years that followed, as a sixth-former and then as an art student, but then work, changing interests, and a move to Devon intervened, and I'd not been back ...

New Who

Back at Eastertide when we started watching the latest series of Dr Who I did a little write-up of it on my other blog, so now that it's finished I thought it might be worth revisiting and seeing if the two-and-a-half grudging cheers I gave the first episode were justified.  As I explained in that piece, I'm not really a Dr Who fan.  I enjoyed the ones I watched back when Tom ...

Of Krakens and Chrysalids

The first grown-up science fiction writer I read was H G Wells; the second was John Wyndham.  The reason for that was simple; like Wells, Wyndham was respectable. There were no lurid paintings of bug-eyed monsters or space-princesses in boilerplate bikinis on the jackets of his novels; they were sober, orange-and-white Penguins, which sat comfortably on my parents' bookshelves alongside ...

A Musical Interlude - The Bad Shepherds

The Bad Shepherds are based in Chagford, quite close to the Bee, and are the brainchild of Adrian Edmondson, who will be familiar to anyone over forty from The Young Ones.  They specialise in folk cover versions of punk classics by the Clash, the Undertones etc, and also do a very nice rendition of Kraftwerk's The Model which makes you realise that it was actually a folk song all along.  Here, ...

Russell Crowe, Russell Crowe, Ridin' Through The Glen...

By Jeremy Levett, Our Man in the Odeon with a Bucket of Popcorn. While I’m by no means a Robin Hood aficionado, there’s a fairly simple checklist of Robinish Hoodish tropes that I might reasonably expect to see in any iteration of the long-running collaborative fanfic that centres around England’s most commonly mistaken-for-real folk hero. Let’s see how well Ridley Scott’s 2010 offering ticks the ...

In the Lands of the North...

I've written elsewhere of the brilliance of Postgate & Firmin, and of Noggin the Nog in particular, but that was before I worked out how to embed videos, so I hope you enjoy this clip from the first episode.  Sadly it cuts off in the middle of a sentence, but if you want to know what happens next, or just hear more of Oliver Postgate's voice and Vernon Elliot's ...