Totally Rad Adventure: The Final Leg
This is the last in Caitlin's series about her adventures taking the Space Pyrates to SPX in the USA. Missed parts 1-3? You can get them here!
Showing posts with label comic. Show all posts
Relish: My Life in the Kitchen Reviewed
Lucy Knisley's foodie memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen landed in my lap by way of my husband who picked it up at the Melbourne Writer's Festival. He's a graphic novel aficionado but, well, they've never really done much for me. However Knisley's book may well be a meeting point for the two of us.
The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, Relish is a series of short stories detailing Knisley's experiences growing up in a home where food was kind of a big deal.
Knisley is clearly a woman after my own heart, as essentially Relish is a book about a love of food and the journey it can take you on in life. Food discoveries, rebellion and comfort through food, the way certain kitchen smells transport you back to another time and place...This is Relish, a collection of food-related experiences, or is it experiences related to food, that are hopefully familiar to just about everyone. They certainly were to me.
At heart, I am a lover of good food although I do tend to suffer the same fate as Knisley with her occasional hankering for complete and utter junk. In this way Knisley's stories are relatable. She covers not only her fancy food loves but her dirty little food secrets too.
The record of events is not presented in traditional memoir format, neither is it your typical graphic novel. Instead the stories are told via the text, with comic strip illustrations presented to accompany and enhance the storytelling. Beautifully presented, I really enjoyed both Knisley's writing and her drawings and found them to be complimentary in rounding out the experience.
What's also fun about Relish is the inclusion of illustrated recipes at the end of each chapter, taking Knisley's life experiences and bringing them into your own, should you so choose.
Totally Rad Adventure: Space Pyrates @ SPX
The next installment of Caitlin's Totally Rad Adventure is a couple of weeks away, because in between she and Matt take the Space Pyrates to Brisbane Supanova over the weekend of 8-10 November. Pop in and see them!
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Totally Rad Adventure: San Fran and LA
Welcome to part two of Caitlin's Totally Rad Adventure to the US of A. In this week's installment, Caitlin and Matt arrive in San Fran and LA, stay in the shittiest parts of town, and run late for super important meetings. Oh dear!
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Totally Rad Adventure: The Road to SPX
Recently Caitlin and her partner Matt attended SPX (Small Press eXpo) in America. Below is part one of their totally rad adventure!
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R.I.P.D. Off
R.I.P.D. (Rest In Peace Department) or ‘Men in Black from beyond the grave’ is based on a graphic novel of the same name, which I'd never heard of before the movie. Nowadays whenever someone tells me ‘hey, it's based on a graphic novel’, it’s with some trepidation that I go along, and I almost always leave the theatre of the opinion that it should have stayed a graphic novel.
Look, it isn't all crap. The internal consistency of the R.I.P.D. world is solid, the acting is ok, and there are a couple of neat action scenes. But that's all the nice it's gonna get from me.
Look, it isn't all crap. The internal consistency of the R.I.P.D. world is solid, the acting is ok, and there are a couple of neat action scenes. But that's all the nice it's gonna get from me.
Here’s the low down: Some time in the past, Nick Walker (Ryan Reynolds) and partner Bobby Hayes (Kevin Bacon) stumbled upon some gold during a drug bust and split the findings. Walker is now apprehensive and wants to turn it in. While on a raid, Hayes corners Walker, reveals that he can't let him handover the gold, and kills him.
On his way to eternal judgement, Walker is yanked from his ascension and given a job tracking down ‘Deados’ (spirits that somehow slipped through the system and continue to walk the Earth avoiding judgement) to arrest them for processing. He is partnered with a cranky old Marshall from the 1800s who prefers to work alone (Jeff Bridges). The two must track down and arrest rogue Deados while disguised as a senile Asian man and a hooker, which is played for a few cheap laughs that quickly wear thin.
Deados look like any average human, but are really just bad CGI in disguise, which, when they get a whiff of curry powder, go all Jar-Jar Binks and gimmick out for your 3D viewing pleasure.
What begins as an interesting premise quickly degenerates into a film that's confused about how to shoe-horn adult themes, like drug busts, death and rampaging destruction, into kid-friendly Disney-esque slapstick. It plays on so many conventions you can almost hear the committee decisions that went into every scene. Hero had a wife he loved? Boo-hoo. His ex-partner turns out to be the Big Bad? Surprise. Cops are taken off the case only to disobey a direct order and solve it anyway? I now believe lazy film-makers do this just to fast-track a resolution.
What actually bugs me the most about R.I.P.D., though, is the CGI. It is a real step back in technique and technology. The design of the Deados makes no sense and when one has been revealed it isn't so much scary as annoyingly stupid. They are lumbering buffoons, not fear-inducing zombie thugs, which is what I think they were going for.
If you do inflict this film on yourself, you'll walk out wondering wha..? Huh? I... no... wha..?
You have been warned.
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