TimC

Doesn't age? Try watching Titanic and The Departed back to back. Practically two different people. And yeah, once you see Shutter Island, you'll notice that his acting style has matured a little even since The Departed. He looks a bit older too.

He might have been better in The Departed than previous flicks (outperforming Matt Damon isn't exactly the highest challenge of thespianism), but he's still no Tony Leung. He wasn't too bad in The Quick and the Dead, to be fair.

An oldie that's just had a cracking new DVD release - Obayashi's 'House', which is quite as brainfelchingly weird as you might have heard. It occupies the middleground between early Argento, late Lynch, and middle-period Rentaghost, only with Japanese schoolgirls. Genuinely bizarre, and disconcertingly scary.

Happy news, but 'critically-beloved'? Really?

A highly recommend piece of art. If you haven't seen this do so. It's a wonderful film to add to your collection, whether you're a horror fan or not.

While I appreciate your opinion, I have to say that Angel Heart is one of the most arsequakingly awful films I've ever seen. Even by Alan Parker's standards, it's a low. It's so cheesily bad, in a specifically late-80s way, that it verges on the so-bad-it's-good category, but settles on the just plain bad.

To be fair, I've not seen it for a good many years, but it still sticks in the mind like a dog turd to the shoe. I recall one late, supposedly dramatic, shot of de Niro lunging at the camera with a long scary fingernail that still cracks me up.

It's probably not quite as bad as The Crow, though.

Sting's a little too old for the role now. There's a host of other actors around who could nail it.

He's the same age as JC (c18 months older, but that's not so important in yr late 50s). Not sure he'd have the acting chops, though - his previous performances have mostly involved looking either pretty or menacing. That's twice the range than Keanu, granted.

I can't see Hollywood going for a lead who'd remind most of the target audience of their dad, though. Probably have to be 40 at most. So, again, Paul Bettany. Go see 'Gangster No. 1' if you need convincing. And, going by his recent work, he's certainly not averse to potentially cheesy horror flicks.

Do you have your kitchen designed by Giger, too?

Sadly not, though it is often visited by the slithering night beasts who also wreak havoc upon our subterranean herb garden. And there was a lingering pestilential stink of decay from beneath the floorboards a few years ago. (Words of experience - If you've got rats in the cellars (or in the walls), use traps, not poison. While their innards melt from the warfarin, the little fuckers like to curl up next to a heating pipe somewhere inaccessible.)

Not quite the done thing I believe, to say such an interesting thing and not provide a link, or title!.

Sorry, that'll be the irritated insomnia. It's Songs of the Black Würm Gism. Includes such delights as a cover by Alan Moore, stories from Grant Morrison and David Britton, and a quantity of anatomically-detailed octopus porn.

I do not like this precise combination of mild insomnia, late-night reading of postmodern pornographic Lovecraftiana, and the wife developing a cold and consequently snoring like some nameless squamous beast.

Some of the recent US comics have the same problem - there was one that relied entirely on mashing together elements of 'Tooth and Claw', 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' and (shudder) 'Timelash' (plus, if memory serves, a Time Agent or two). Lovely art from Paul Grist, but it really was an awful pile of fanwank.

TimC - clearly you're unaware of Maxwell the Magic Cat.

I am aware of Maxwell, though I've not read much of it. Moore himself says AWP is the first comic he's written and drawn himself - presumably he's drawing a distinction between an actual comic (it's an 8-page insert in the mag) and a newspaper strip.

One of the comic stores here actually got a copy of Dodgem Logic. And, well, it's different, so it gets credit for that....but it's really not that great. The internet probably did destroy any need for an "underground press". Had this been done in the '80s or '90s, it'd probably be something more special.

...

I don't think Moore actually had much to do with this, outside of editorial I guess. He wrote the introductory piece, but I believe that's it. Gebbie seems to have been more involved.

Issue 2 has a lengthy article by Moore on the history of anarchism, and a comic which he both wrote and drew (apparently a first). It's called 'Astounding Weird Penises', and reads like a cross between the Beano and Tales of the Leather Nun. Good character design, and a gag about the Higgs Boson.

Some of the other articles are bloody awful, granted, but it is largely written by and for the youth. If I was 15, I'd probably think it was the best thing since White Lightning.

If the rumours I'm hearing out of WB offices are true, they'll be completely junking the previous film and going for something that hews a lot closer in tone to the book.

If we've got to have another one, can we at least get Paul Bettany in the lead this time?

At the tender age of 45 going on 20, I have grown my first beard. It would look cool, if HALF OF IT WEREN'T FUCKING GRAY!

You may also find that the white hairs grow at at least twice the rate of the properly coloured hairs, and are somehow more resistant to the trimmer.

I have learnt to accept my salt-and-pepper beard. I feel it distracts from the increasing span of my unhaired forehead, which now extends into what, if I have to be frank, would normally be considered the top of my head (I may, of course, be deluding myself). Still, better front upwards than top outwards.

But what I really don't like is that I have a small bald patch on my jaw.

Wasn't the Megaptera one of the sorts of actors in very silly costumes huge bugs out of The Web Planet? I think they were the moth ones...

They were the Menoptera.

Christ, I didn't even have to look that up...

Now this, The Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational And Utterly Mindboggling Comic Relief Comic, is nearly impossible to find.

No it isn't, I know exactly where my copy is.

Heh heh heh.

I haven't read Grant's run on Batman, and I still think his Batman And Robin is a corker.

Likewise - I've started catching up with the Batman run in trades, but haven't read RIP yet, nor Final Crisis. Don't read any other Bat books either. Actually, this last issue was the first where I did feel like I was missing something.

Another comic which I've been really enjoying is the second run of Phonogram. The indie-night Rashomon concept worked very well, and the last issue is a little corker. Given some of the earlier issues, it's good to finish with a completely angst-free story, which (literally) couples wonderfully with the first issue. (I'm slightly puzzled by the CBR review which refers to Penny's 'terrible fate' though - don't know whether that's advanced irony, or some weird puritanism.)

The lack of a canon means that, say, A Fix With Sontarans, or Damaged Goods, or Spare Parts (or, if you want to push this line of thinking as far as it can go, some teenager's sweaty-palmed fanfic about the Doctor and Captain Jack going at it full-bore over the TARDIS console) have no greater or lesser claim to be "real" than does The End Of Time.

Good lord, man. It's POSTMODERNISM GONE MAD!

Or, as Baudrillard would have said: 'Paul McGann did not take place'.

The reference is temporarily lost on me, I'm afraid (is it a Spaced thing? Sounds familiar...).

'Queer as Folk'. To be fair, the writer of that (who, I understand, went on to other things) has said it wasn't necessarily his view...

Totally agree with you on the daftness and anality of a lot of Whoers. My personal view is that the televised adventures are what they are (even, with a heavy heart, that one McGann thing - but not 'A Fix with Sontarans', 'Dimensions in Time', etc), and all else is apocrypha. I do love some of the spin-off stories, like the early DWW/DWM strips and some New Adventures (not least of which is the aforementioned writer's 'Damaged Goods'), but there's no unearthly reason why the writers of the series proper should treat them as anything other than a potential source of ideas.

As for in-series continuity errors - if you're smart enough to spot them, you're smart enough to resolve them. That's half the fun of being a Whoer.

It's one of those things which is so self-evidently Correct that every fan of Doctor Who should be forced to read it - under threat of violence if necessary - and be reminded of it whenever they're tempted to say things like "the 8th Doctor doesn't count" (sorry, TimC, but it's a stupid thing to say, and deep down, you know that every time you say it ).

Tish. Not only is it not stupid, but rather a cunning metatextual quote from one of the defining telly series of the 1990s (you know, that decade when there wasn't any Doctor Who going on), it gets funnier each time someone complains.

My original gripe still stands: given the amount of time he had left, and his lack of debilitation, and the fact that he had access to the entire universe's medical science past, present and future, he couldn't have gotten treatment anywhere? Couldn't have infiltrated the Sisterhood of Karn and nicked some elixir of life? Etc.

The Sisterhood of Karn had been wiped out in the Time War, of course. Time Lord science might have been able to halt the regeneration process, but he'd just closed off that avenue again. Oh, bitter irony, etc.

Or maybe he realised that he actually did have to die and become new, as explored at some length in the previous few hours.

Or there's the far-out explanation that the Doctor just had to regenerate because the actor David Tennant had already served his notice.

Do they say in the episode what dosage of radiation he gets in the chamber?

Actually, yes - "All 500,000 rads about to flood that thing."

So that's 5000 Grays, all over. From t'wiki-

Very severe (5.5–8 Gy of radiation) exposure is followed by the onset of nausea and vomiting in less than 30 minutes followed by the appearance of dizziness, disorientation, and low blood pressure in addition to the symptoms of lower levels of exposure. Severe exposure is fatal about 50% of the time.

So, yes, he'd be fucked.

On the other hand, he did manage to shrug off a massive dose of Röntgen radiation in 'Smith and Jones', so Time Lord physiological response to radiation damage is obviously a bit different to human. It seems to depend mostly on story requirements, which is how it should be.

It's just occurred to me that the tenth Doctor had plenty of time to fart-arse around at the conclusion of The End Of Time, but not enough time to [ Spoiler : go and get his radiation poisoning treated ].

No, the regeneration process had already started, as soon as he leaves the booth and makes his cuts and grazes disappear. It's just that it's happening very very slowly...

Similar thing happened to the third Doctor, at least if the DWATPOTS novelisation is to be believed.

NBM is (or was, they might have changed their name since) an imprint that was noted for publishing porn comics, mostly translated reprints of European stuff. I think they were the last people who did American translations of Guido Crepax's stuff, and they have (or had) a lot of Milo Manara in print at one point as well. Sorry I wasn't clear about that, Spain.

They're still going as NBM - http://www.nbmpub.com/ - they recently published a new edition of Crepax's 'Story of O', which I got the wife for xmas.

And I've started watching 'Sons of Anarchy', following the ravings here. Seems very camp and kitschy so far (is it meant to be?) and really rather shonky. Does it evolve much?

Cn I just mention The White Noise as well? I know they were mentioned in that clip, but as only two of them had day jobs at the radiophonic workshop, they don't really dwell on it. They did a wonderful album called An Electric Storm. I'd suggest that Red seeks that out if he hasn't heard it.

The record also provides the soundtrack for the raising-the-devil sequence in the utterly fab 'Dracula AD 1972'.