Ariadne's Thread

Netflix’s 'Love and Monsters,' a Review: ‘You don’t have to settle, even at the end of the world.’ Lucy Nield @lucy_nield1 Netflix’s Love and Monsters (2020), promises the viewer a post-apocalyptic adventure, with lashings of romance, community spirit and heroic determination to survive. A comet called Agatha 6-1-6 was heading towards Earth, threatening to kill every living thing on the planet. So in true and predictable human fashion, those in power responded to this threat by launching rockets, nuclear weapons and missiles to prevent the pending collision. Unfortunately, they failed to consider the aftermath of blowing up Agatha, which included a ‘Monsterpocalypse.’   The chemical compounds and radiation form the weapons used to obliterate the comet, rained down over the world, infecting insects a various nonhuman animals, causing mutations and exponential growth in size. The mutated creatures displace humans at the top of the food chain, devouring cities and and ruining

So far, I’ve spent all of 2021 in the exact same way I spent 2020: nestled up in a comfortable bubble of books, anime, and video games. Here’s a collection of some of my stand-outs so far.  READ  Dream Fossil - Satoshi Kon In my endeavour to consume all things Kon, I was gifted his collection of short manga stories by my partner. Dream Fossil lays the foundations for Kon’s later work, complete with mind-twisting, dreamlike narratives that really show just how much his style and mind progressed over the years. I was particularly drawn to “Picnic”, written as part of a tribute to Akira , about an alternate version of Neo-Tokyo that partly exists underwater, and the collection’s final story, “Toriko”, which I desperately wish would have been adapted. Many of the stories bridge the gap between Kon’s heavier work, such as Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress , and what would have been his most ‘lighthearted’ project, Dreaming Machine . Just as with all of his works, Dream Fossil left me fe

“But what if someone died wearing it?”              This refrain is familiar to anyone who has a penchant for vintage or pre-loved clothes, usually uttered by a friend whose expression contorts in distaste at the thought of wearing clothes that another person has lived, loved and potentially perished in.  Admittedly, this sort or sartorial squeamishness is becoming less common, as environmental awareness increases and secondhand clothes become items of sustainability, rather than eccentricity.           And yet it’s a concern that is located at the heart of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), a peculiar film that can be found at the point where the Italian giallo horror genre and David Lynch meet.  The plot, if you will excuse the pun, is threadbare.  There is no comforting three act construction that audiences have gotten used to in their films; no conclusions, no resolution.  Instead, there is a saturated aesthetic quality to the film that bewitches even as it confounds, and the a