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best of 2013 – TV
Here’s my unedited selection of picks of the top TV from my ‘Best of 2013‘ post on the Forbidden Planet International blog. This is the category I found the hardest to cut down – television is producing some of the best dramas currently. Hannibal Developed by Bryan Fuller I came to this sceptical as I didn’t think new life could be breathed into the franchise based on the Thomas Harris books, but Hannibal defied all my expectations and offered me some of the most memorable television in 2013. Apart from the intense central performances by Hugh Dancy as Special Agent Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and…
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Best of 2013 – films
Here’s my unedited selection of films from my ‘Best of 2013‘ post on the Forbidden Planet International blog. Of course, this is just what I enjoyed, and your mileage might vary… Cheap Thrills Directed by E.L. Katz, and written by Trent Haaga & David Chirchirillo This dark film with streaks of black comedy is an astonishing debut from E.L. Katz, which basically consists of four people in a room for the majority of the piece. It’s a riveting drama about how the wealthy can manipulate the disadvantaged for their jaded entertainment. There are outstanding performances from the entire cast, and combined with effective direction and strong writing makes this one…
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Best of 2013 – comics
Today my ‘Best of 2013‘ post on the Forbidden Planet International blog went up. In it I pick three pieces of entertainment in various media that I enjoyed throughout last year. After I was asked to do this exercise I went a bit into overdrive and started thinking about loads of categories and works I’d liked over the year. I then assembled a much longer list, and when I re-read the original email I realised I’d have to cut it down extensively. So, over the coming days I’m going to post my unedited list in the various categories: comics, film, TV, music, and games. Today it’s comics: Lighter Than My…
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it just takes a nudge
I had a rather low moment on Saturday. As I’ve mentioned the weather has been dreadful and Ireland has been battered by a series of storms (with yet another one arriving – on the 175th anniversary of Oíche na Gaoithe Móire, the ‘Night of the Big Wind‘, which was so ferocious it got its own title). A person can easily get overwhelmed by the bad news and start to observe obsessively the activities of flood plains – as if any one has any control over it! I’ve been managing to keep a lid on this, but late on Saturday evening the fuse in our house blew. A terrible time for…
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control, an illusion
Life is unpredictable. Just when you think you’ve got a grip on how to endure its fickle moods it decides to remind you what a beast it can be. Often, it just has to gesture to Nature to pull up alongside you in its blundering tank, and direct it right across your path. This rather picturesque scene is not a lake, but one of the main access roads to my house – thoroughly flooded. A code red storm tore through Ireland just after Christmas, and dumped a tremendous amount of rain upon already saturated land. Nature, being its usual contrary self, then offered up a little temporary sunshine and preened…
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two birds, one imaginary
While sifting through my photos from last year I’ve been discovering ones that I had forgotten about or didn’t have time to upload. Each image takes me back to the moment I clicked on the camera’s button. I took this image of a jackdaw in April last year. It was sitting on top of hoarding, dramatic against a beautiful sky. I got the one shot, as it flew off immediately afterwards. Jackdaws tend to be the more overlooked of the corvids, with the menacing hooded crows, scruffy rooks, and chattering magpies being the most outgoing in Ireland. Yet, I like the Jackdaw’s sleek attire and observant blue eyes. Sometimes the…
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next year's words
To celebrate 2014 I created this image. The words are from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding‘, from his Four Quartets. For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. I’ve draped the words over an old photo I took years ago in my local woods (it’s an animal skull, don’t worry). Every midnight sees the death of one day and the birth of another, and in that moment of transition there exists the eternal potential to change and reshape our lives. Every action completed, or word spoken has ended, and we can do and say as we will with every dawn. The difficult part…
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favourite images of 2013
I take a lot of photos throughout the year, using both my mobile phone and compact camera. So, instead of writing a blog post about what I’ve done or achieved during 2013 (most of which has been reported here already), I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite photographs from 2013. It also inspired me go through my collections and upload ones that had been languishing on my hard drive. Perhaps my favourite image of the year is this one from my trip to the Louvre in Paris this autumn. It’s in the gallery of Greek/Roman statues, which contains outstanding examples of sculpture. Here, I love the light, the statue…
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Festive bloom
Happy Holidays – no matter how you celebrate them! I hope you, and yours, bloom with health and happiness.
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the state of comics today
If I start talking about comics for any length of time I tend to get quite animated about it. That’s because – for me – it’s an exciting medium that I believe is going through one of its most vibrant periods at the moment. At events and on panels I’ve heard people talk about falling sales of comics, and harken back to a golden era where comics sold in their millions: why yes they did, during a pre-Internet, pre-video game, pre-DVD/Blu-ray period. It’s unfair to compare the sales of comics in the 1950s – when radio was King, and television was a upstart prince – to the sales made for…
