Last time, I talked about how your accent will guarantee if you’re a good guy or a bad guy in Star Wars. This week it’s a little closer to my heart: Game of Thrones. I love GOT. I really love it. I’ve spent entire days talking about it and nothing but it. My best friends…
It’s not always a nice thing to talk about. It sort of falls between the “politics” and “religion” no-go areas of polite Thanksgiving conversation with your in-laws. But behind some of your favourite shows and movies lies an uncomfortable truth: they can be pretty racist. Well, let me backtrack here. Perhaps I mean a different…
In this series so far, we’ve covered some pretty special stuff. Videogames have often had a strained and unsuccessful relationship with their television contemporaries. Whether it’s an attempt to depict a popular game, warts and all (or with all kinds of stigmatisation and baggage attached), or if it’s just a game that they invented to…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, practicing how long you can close your eyes and cover your ears, or if there is the slim chance that you are my parents, you know that Grand Theft Auto Five was released a few weeks ago. I personally am aware…
Women are represented pretty poorly in the media. Their roles are neglected in every genre of film from comedy to action, downgraded to sexual prizes won by the male lead, or the nagging “straight-man” foil to a charismatic Adam Sandler-alike. Screenplays either completely gloss over any attempts to create depth, or get praised for having…
In Night of The Living Dead, a mysterious encounter at a cemetery triggers a chain of events that would rock the cinematic world. George Romero’s first (and one of his most fondly remembered) foray into the universe of the walking dead was a shocking and gritty encounter with zombies (then called “ghouls”) that divided families…
The great thing about the 90s is that computers were still magic. They were a one-stop shop of power, a wand of wisdom which, when waved, could shut down governments and destroy society. Teenagers had the power over the adults, perhaps a typical Generation X fantasy, combined with a newfound fascination with technology and pure,…
In a recent article, io9 talked about the supposed “rules” they have for alternative universes in fiction. It got me thinking about alternate universes in a big way; I’ve never been one to shy away from such things, in fact I think I prefer a little magical realism, or a slight slanting of the world…
In the last edition of this, we saw how Dungeons and Dragons was co-opted (sometimes incredibly forcefully) into the machinations of light entertainment that is the sitcom. But while D&D remains a narrative excuse to get a group of characters with disparate personalities (with hilarious consequences!) into a room together to do some improv, other…
Jurassic Park 4 was recently confirmed by Universal studios, and let me just say one thing: AAAAH OH MY GOD YES. After languishing in “development hell” for over a decade, which is such a crazy term for what is essentially two executives saying “we couldn’t make a good enough movie”, it looks like we’re finally…
TV is not particularly well known for depicting things accurately. Any computer that the whiz-kid hacker puts his finger-less gloves to will invariably make all kinds of beeps and flicking noises. The grouchy old doctor/police officer will be a complete asshole to his colleagues, but will always end up being right, and totally validated in…
Football pads. A trench-coat. Possibly a sheriff’s hat. If you’re planning on surviving the apocalypse – and let’s face it; you’re optimistic about it – you’re going to want to ask yourself: “What am I going to wear in this new hell-scape? When all of humanity is gone, how are you going to represent yourself?…
At the turn of the century – which is always a cool thing to say – before we had the grumpiest of cats and long before anybody was twerking on anybody else (topical references: check, and one for luck: Gangnam Style, British television went through an interesting phase. Over the course of a few years,…
My girlfriend is an outdoors person. She’s an adept tree-climber, in her life she has ridden everything from horses to tractors everywhere from Zimbabwe to Washington DC. I, on the other hand, spent my formative teenage years streaming Battlestar Galactica. When we started dating almost three years ago, two things were likely to happen: 1) Her…
I’ve been doing a little bit of sightseeing in the beautiful countryside of Wales; an oft-overlooked, much-mocked country (think New Zealand to Australia or Canada to the US) . But it actually has some amazing landscapes, and a fantastic history to boot. The BBC certainly think so too, and it is in a grand country manor that I find some artifacts from…