Tag Archives: movies

COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (1 July 2024)

Posted on July 1, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Today’s reminder that comics can be awesome is a tribute to licensed properties. While the reliance on importing IPs across media can carry the stench of creative bankrupcy, some films and shows seem perfectly suited for an expansion into comic … Continue reading →

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More thoughts on 21st-century spy shows: Cold War edition

Posted on May 23, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

When I wrote about the TV series Slow Horses, last month, I mentioned how one of the departures from the source novels was that the show didn’t take advantage of the potential of sleeper agents to act as metaphors for … Continue reading →

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Spotlight on Lucky Luke, 1958-1967 – part 2

Posted on May 9, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

As mentioned last week, I’ve been rereading the first decade of René Goscinny’s run on the Belgian series Lucky Luke, illustrated by Morris, and trying to figure out what made those comics work (and why they resonated so much with … Continue reading →

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Some thoughts on Alex Garland’s Civil War

Posted on April 24, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Just some loose thoughts on the Civil War film… No, not the MCU one, I’m talking about the one set in a dystopia where secessionist states are fighting against the US president. Matt Zoller Seitz has summed up the initial … Continue reading →

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Some thoughts on 21st-century spy shows

Posted on April 17, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Secret agents and international intrigue have really come back with a vengeance in the past decade or so. The War on Terror and, later, the renewed tension between the West and Russia seem to have stimulated the public’s appetite for … Continue reading →

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Catching up with crime movies

Posted on March 28, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

I had a blast putting together Gotham Calling’s list of top Cold War movies, as I got to dig into cinema history and unearth a slew of gems from the mid-to-late 20th century that approached geopolitics through diverse (and sometimes … Continue reading →

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Just a few loose thoughts on interplanetary wars

Posted on March 14, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Last week I went to see Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve’s epic about Afghanistan on an alien planet, which overcomes *some* of my reservations about the previous film. While the screen is once again filled with masses of anonymous blind … Continue reading →

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 12

Posted on February 15, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

We’ve arrived at the end of Gotham Calling’s long-running Cold War cinema retrospective… And if you think depictions of the conflict were winding down in the final years, you’re in for a surprise. This is probably the bloodiest – and … Continue reading →

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 11

Posted on February 1, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

We are now entering the final stage of Gotham Calling’s mega-list of Cold War cinema… and we are firmly in Reaganite territory, including an obsession with foreign intervention along with a vigorous resurgence of nuclear panic. 101. Threads (UK, 1984) … Continue reading →

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 10

Posted on January 18, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

The previous post in Gotham Calling’s tour of Cold War cinema had plenty of films about the conflict’s expansion to the Third World. Today’s installment extends the same motif, but it also gradually engages with one of the consequences of … Continue reading →

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