Everybody joins in with Spartacus!

Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus remains a proper epic of a film - three hours of cinematic glory, full of desperate rebellion and fleeting love and blatant homoeroticism.  

It has been rightly celebrated for some of the great moments in 50s cinema - the 'I'm, Spartacus' moment, which is the natural emotional culmination of the failed slave rebellion; the movement of the armies like faceless ants; the sheer cruelty of the endless crucifixions.

But my favourite part of the whole thing happens incredibly quickly, almost without explanation, and no obvious foreshadowing. It's the sequence when the title character, having endured a lifetime of slavery and degradation, sees the love of his life being spirited away forever, and realises he has just had enough of this shit, and suddenly rebels against the masters.

And he doesn't have to ask for help - his fellow slaves just pile straight into the fight without hesitation, fighting and dying for their freedom. They are not asked for help, they don't make plans, and there are no heroic speeches before the action kicks off, they just all instantly pile in and beat the living shit out of the slavers.

Some of them notably sit it out at first, but then quickly join in to smash the gates, and join the big man's army, all the way to their mutual end.

Watching the film again, there is so much in the glances the gladiatorial slaves give each other, the silent understanding that this is bullshit. And when they get the chance, they're all in, because if they had all stood back and let Spartacus impotently rage on his own, they would never have got another chance.

It's a beautiful piece of cinema, often replicated - Braveheart cheerfully rips off vast parts of the earlier film, including the moment where William Wallace snaps and rebels, and is instantly joined by his clanfolk - but it remains universal. Because we're all in it together sometimes, and might have to join in the fight without being asked.

Too much volume in my Star Wars

Even though they all take place in a galaxy far, far away, one of the great appeals of the Star Wars movies has always been the use of real world locations. Places like Tunisia were are vital as Kenny Baker or Ben Burtt to the overall success of the series, grounding it in the real, making it all feel lived in.

Most of those locations were exotic areas of our planet, but you only needed a touch of freaky technology or creatures to make it feel truly out of this world. The real snow used for Hoth made the giant robot camels much more palatable, and it really felt like the giant redwoods of northern California went on forever around the moon of Endor.

Getting off the soundstage that had mostly been used for science fiction in the past made Star Wars stand out, just as much as the lightsabers and roaring spaceships did.

Some of the more modern Star Wars films and movies still follow this lesson, and use locations well, even if they are not always aware of what they have got. I still find it very funny how there was a shot in Rogue One that was used early on in the hype cycle - featuring sinister stormtroopers wading through the water of a tropical paradise - and the weird disappointment when there wasn't so many shots like that in the finished film, because the filmmakers just didn't think to get more, and were apparently more focused on the weird and dull business with a space claw machine sequence instead.

The prequels got some grief for the overuse of greenscreen silliness, but still made use of some fine locations for the palaces of Naboo, and back on those endless sands of Tatooine. But in recent years it's been all about the Volume, the VFX technology that provides magnificent backdrops for all the space adventuring.

And it's such a huge effort for something that is not needed, because that first great lesson of film-making from Star Wars that often gets ignored is that you use what you've got in the wild, and make it otherworldly by slapping a power convertor onto a tree trunk or something, or have some strange creature's skeleton blowing in the sand. The shamefully lost art of matte work literally painted over the seams, and that was all that was needed.

There's just a lot of suspension of disbelief in watching Star Wars - being able to hear explosions in the vacuum of space is just the start of it - but it's a lot easier to take Boba Fett seriously when he is in an actual physical space.

For someone who does truly enjoy a lot of Star Wars movies, I spend a lot of time complaining bout them, but I assure it, it's only because I cafe. I can usually find the good parts in any of the movies

(the TV shows are a different story, and the animation stuff has always felt completely dispensable to me,) and sometimes all it takes is a glimpse of the real world being shot up with lasers to keep me happy.

Absolutely the same old thing

The Absolute comics produced by DC over the past couple of years have been a total sales success. The big comic companies keep trying to do stripped-down version of their most iconic characters to get a bigger audience, and sometimes they do actually resonate with a wide readership.

The Absolutes have got that audience by making their characters as badass as humanly possible, which is always an excellent short-term solution, even if there needs to be more more depth than the usual ultra-metal imagery if you're going to get anywhere. 

I can understand the appeal, and some of it is genuinely inspired - the part in the Martian Manhunter story that has you looking through the page is something I have never seen in a comic before, and ripping Wonder Woman away from the tedium of Paradise Island and shoving her straight into hell is an inspired touch.

But I'm just not getting onboard this comic book juggernaut. I wasn't inspired to check them out initially mainly because many of the creators involved had already done plenty of Superman and Batman comics, and I really felt I'd read everything someone like Scott Snyder had to say about the Dark Knight. 

So I read the trade paperbacks from the library and they are okay. Some really nice art, some interesting storytelling and an absolute dedication to that badass ideal, and it's all a bit familiar, really.

There is definitely some multiversal burnout - here's another version of all those characters, to go with the trillion others we've seen thrown around in the past decade. But I'm also just totally over the endless twists on the legend, cliffhanger endings that rely on someone showing up in a new guise or role, and it's only shocking because it's something familiar given a new coat of paint.

It's a brand new world where Jimmy Olsen is the Gotham Police Commissioner, or Steve Trevor is really the goddess Athena. There's always a twist on the idea of Robin, and wait until you see what spin they're putting on Lex Luthor this time.

It's easy shock tactics to shuffle things around like this, but it's not really anything new, and that newness is always what I crave in my super comics. I wish all the Absolute comics good fortune in the wars to come, but I don't think I'm ever going to fight for them.

The gloves of a vampire

Like everyone else in the world, I consume so much media that it's amazing that anything sticks in the brain. And sometimes it's just the stupidest and tiniest little detail that remains.

I watched every episode of the most recent Interview With A Vampire TV show because there was a good six months of my life where it was my favourite book of all time (I was, of course, 16 years old), and it was well made and acted and everything. But there wasn't a lot that stuck in my mind, except for the part where the great Eric Bogosian sneers at the idea of wearing gloves to handle a delicate and ancient journal, because he argues that any benefit from using the gloves is outweighed by the loss of sensation and the greater possibility that you might accidentally tear the pages.

And then I read a comic book all about the history of the cocktail, and that's full of historical data, but a week later, the only thing I remember - and something I'll be pulling out at parties for the rest of my pitiful life - is the origin of the word 'cocktail', and what it has to do with sticking objects up a horse's arse.

There's only so much space in my head, so I am, of course, only remembering the best parts.

Coming around to the softer delights of John Bolton

Tastes in comic art can radically change with age, and I didn't really appreciate the highly stylised work of Jack Kirby and Mick McMahon until I was all grown up. 

This was usually just a matter of maturing taste, but I have come to love some artists that I didn't like when I was younger because of the way I was introduced to their work, like John Bolton's art on the back-ups in the Classic X-Men comics in the late 80s. 

These short stories - which filled in some background details of prime X-Men continuity-  were usually written by Claremont and featured a tonne of Bolton's art, which was a subtler line than the usual x-fare, and certainly far less dynamic line than the Cockrum/Byrne/Austin art that filled the classic parts of the comic.

He was obviously a great artist, terrific with mood, (which was good because most of those X-Men back-ups were moody as hell). But the action always felt a little stiff, and none of the characters ever really looked cool in that way that 12-year-old nerds demand. Wolverine usually just look like a sad little dork in Bolton's hands (except for that one story where he is hunted in the snow).

So I never really gave much attention to Bolton's comics, and more fool me, because his painted work outside the worlds of superheroes and his tights is genuinely stunning. His art on horror and fantasy comics is gorgeous, reaching photo-realistic heights that are still clearly his own style. 

Check out his Black Dragon (with x-collaborator Chris Claremont), or the unexpectedly wonderful Evil Dead comics he has done. Or his work with Clive Barker - The Yattering and Jack adaption is truly brilliant, especially when it's all confined to a boring suburban home. Even a forgotten Vertigo mini series like Gifts of the Night offer innumerable examples of his work at his finest. 

While he has largely stayed away from superhero comics since Classic X-Men ditched the back-up stories, he shines when he does things with the Man-Bat or the Joker. His artwork in Alien comics is breathtaking - there is an exactness to it all, even with the fuzz of the paint.

Neil Gaiman also made a film about him once, but we won't hold that against him.

You can find a lot of his ridiculously beautiful work at his website here, but it can also be found lurking in bins of cheap comics throughout the world, and they are always worth picking up. I'm still stumbling across some of the earlier work he did for the Hammer horror comic magazines that a young Marvel UK put out in the 70s, and it's even had me going back to those x-stories. It's not the fully painted brilliance of his other work, but there are charms to be found, even in a dorky Wolverine. 

Curation is always the key

The morons who have embraced AI drek to pump out tonnes of unreadable books overlook one tiny fact - there is already a shitload of stuff to read in the world, and we really don't need truckloads of literary slop to fill any gaps.

There are so many books to read, so many comics books to inhale, and so many movies and TV to watch. In this age of endless streaming, there is always something new, and centuries of novels and non-fictions works to discover and dig out.

There is one key to this mountain of entertainment that threatens to mentally drown us. It is, has, and always will be reliable curation from trusted sources. 

Not just critics that resonate with your own tastes, or your pals telling you to check out some sick shit, but in the way compilation albums and reprint comics always try to give you the best bang for your buck, and as much variety as humanly possible, and you can still see the choices somebody made about them.

Many of the comics I read growing up were cheap and cheerful reprints for the local market, usually in glorious monochrome. Big thick superhero anthologies and endless horror comic reprints. Sometimes the collections brought together a small run of similarr comics, other times it was a baffling selection of different stories, from all different eras. This is how I read my first Golden Age comics, sandwiched between more modern adventures.

The curation of these reprints could sometimes be a little baffling - although the worst example I ever encountered was the first Love and Rockets I ever read, which was in a British edition which treated all the Locas stories as standalone pieces like they were Archie comics or something and bounced around all over the place in an extremely confusing manner.

In other mediums, there is less curation than ever before these days. The power of the TV programmers has definitely faded - entire populations used to be at the whims of people who decided which soap operas they got to see, and that job has been largely handed over to the consumer, (which can truly be fucking exhausting sometimes). 

There is still curation on the radio stations playing in your car on the way to work, but that only lasts as long as the broadcast before fading away forever.  But I was digging out my CDs from storage recently, and so many of them are compilations given away free with the finest British music magazines, and I adore the selections. 

Some of these CDs date back decades, but there is still a personal touch to them that can still be heard on the discs. Someone out there chose to put these tracks on these collections. Somebody decided on the pacing of an album, and how it should start, and how it should end.

And I still see it in ancient comics that I still find in second hand stores, where some faceless editor from long ago decided to out something together, and you don't know the name of that editor, but you can tell they really, really liked Alex Toth.

In an age of endless algorithms that still struggle to get the point, nothing beats the human decision to put something together with something else, and you can still feel the impact of these decisions in crumbling comics and forgotten CDs, all these years later. Although I'd still love to know who thought it was a great idea to fill the early 2000ad annuals with the bloody Phantom Patrol.

Fight Man: One shot is all he needs!

- Fight Man #1 

Art and words by Evan Dorkin 

Inks by Pam Eklund 

Letters by Brad Joyce 

Colors by Su McTeigue

Legion Shrugged with An Ryd

When I was becoming more philosophically aware as an adolescent, I got very confused by all the talk of Ayn Rand and her very particular form of objectivism, because I kept getting her mixed up with the character of An Ryd, who was Ultra Boy's old flame and showed up in the one issue of Legion of Super-Heroes that I had as a kid and read a million times over. 

Poor An is quickly murdered in an attempt to frame Jo Nah, while Ayn has inspired some of the most terrible people in the world, who have objectively made the world a worse place. Ultra Boy's old girlfriend only ever appeared for a few pages in a Legion of Super-Heroes comic, but she was probably a better source of inspiration.

Freed from the tyranny of a self-imposed list

For the past few years, I've been taking note of how many films I actually see every year. It was useful to look back on when people asked me what I'd watched recently (my short term memory is shot to hell, man), and to see how many films I actually watch in a single year (usually around the 300-350 mark). 

It was also useful in that it forced me to watch new things, and more films with subtitles. More old films and more movies made in my own country. Less repeat watches, less franchises and sequels, and more films at an actual cinema.

This year I got off to a slow start, and by the end of April was only up to about 70 films, which means I was going to end up watching a lot less than recent years (this is a year to catch up with television). But I was tracking to see far more in the theatre, and a lot of non-English movies, and that gave me the dose of cinematic smugness I need in my film diet.

I never made a Letterboxd list, or made entries in a spreadsheet or database or anything like that. It has always just been a list in notes on my phone, and the other day I fucked it up and completely wiped this year's list.

It was shaping up so well, and it was all lost in a moment of idle bullshit on the phone. I know it was up to 70 films, but I'm fucked if I can remember all of those movies, so the list is a write-off for the year. I'll pick it up again in the sci-fi year of 2027.

But it has been oddly freeing, and my viewing habits are becoming not so rigid, so regimental, this year. I don't have to worry if a strange 69-minute doco on Tubi counts as a feature film, and if I have a mad desire to watch all the Marvel superhero films in a row, just to see how they hold up, I'm not going to fuck up the ratios. I can rewatch as many damn old films as I like.

I will start it up again, but for now, I can watch bits of movies, or the schlockiest of schlock, just because I feel like it, not because I'm trying to achieve some mad quota that absolutely nobody else in the world gives a damn about. 

There might be less old and foreign films that will undoubtedly be transcendentally good when I do finally see them, but I just don't need to worry so much about that for the rest of the year.