1983 was a pretty fertile year for fictional nuclear apocalypses in Western popular culture. 2019: After the Fall of New York, Endgame, Exterminators of the Year 3000, Stryker, and Le Dernier Combat were released in cinemas, while ABC’s The Day After and Britain’s BBC2 adaptation of 1961 dystopian novel The Old Men at the Zoo, updated to feature a nuclear attack on London, appeared on television…
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return arrived on television screens in the summer of 2017, promising to take fans of the original 1990-1991 ABC series back to the comfort of coffee and cherry pie at the Double-R Diner. What Lynch and Frost delivered was a sometimes bewildering 18-hour film that tested the limits of serialized television storytelling…
In the wake of the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin last week, I took the opportunity to revisit one of the more fascinating products of her life and career: the 1980 television-movie adaptation of her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. Produced by station WNET in New York City, the film is the summation of nearly a decade of technological and artistic experimentation in public television…
For reasons which are not immediately apparent, it is difficult when speaking of the late Mark E. Smith to avoid a descent into cliché. Ironic, given that an aversion to cliché was among Smith’s defining characteristics; yet predictable, given the efforts a sizeable portion of his admirers and media interlocutors consistently made to reducing him to a caricature…
By The Mutants
As the end of the 1970s approached, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the space-age fantasies the West had been nurturing for twenty years led nowhere real, or at least nowhere permanent, and that terrestrials were seeking some kind of emotional repository for the dreams they had been dreaming, as well as a pressure valve for their multiplying tensions…
In 1978, the stars were right. The previous year, the strange confluence of the artistic, political, esoteric, and scientific culture (and counterculture) that had been building up for over a decade was exploded by one George Lucas, who punctured a hole through the zeitgeist big enough to allow all manner of cosmic currents to flood through…
In our contemporary media landscape, where consumers are surrounded by full-to-bursting computer-generated imagery, the wondrous has become drearily everyday. The thousands of hours of artists’ labor and computer programming time involved in creating visual effects often vanishes in the face of overwrought spectacle…
The memories of the love I had for these… things as a kid has largely faded. The memories that matter today all have to do with people: the family that gave me love and supported my interests and hobbies, the friends with whom I played these toys and games, and the shared memories with all of you who’ve commented and written to us in response to our articles…
By J.E. Anckorn and Amy Mugglestone
At 8:35 pm on Boxing Day of 1967, the people of Britain gathered around their television sets to witness the Beatles’ new film project, Magical Mystery Tour. Their first filmed project since the daffy caper Help! (1965) accidentally created the sound of the late ’60s, the project was meant to act as a replacement for the live shows they were no longer performing…
The cinematic corpus of David Cronenberg is probably best known for its expertly uncanny use of body horror, but looming almost as large in the writer-director’s various universes is the presence of faceless, all-powerful organizations…
