Collected short stories, essays and novels by Zepp Jamieson
People stayed away from The Death of Robin Hood in droves, and I suppose you can’t blame them. For 800 years the name Robin Hood has been synonymous with an outlaw who defies and steals from corrupt authorities, personified by the Sheriff of Nottingham, and who redistributes the wealth to “the poor”; presumably the serfs of feudal England. He’s always been THE counterculture hero for Britain and…
Moviegoers familiar with Steven Spielberg’s work (and who isn’t?) will find themselves on familiar ground with Disclosure Day. You have mysterious aliens with even more mysterious powers, government secrets, coverups and lies, and a plucky group of people, some of whom have been affected by the alien visitations, working to blow the whole thing wide open even as humanity faces an existential…
Even before Netflix aired the second season of Avatar, a howl went up. In essence, the complaint was “They changed too many things! They couldn’t leave well enough alone!” Well, fen tend to be a bit fundamentalist at the best of times, and if you are monkeying around with a beloved show from their childhood, expect howls of rage if the show has a particular scene on an overcast day when the same…
It’s only been a couple of months since I watched a dark-comedy time-loop movie. Relax, I’m From the Future was a cheerfully bent Canadian production, with an utter goof from the future set on changing history to save humanity from destruction. I wasn’t supposed to see another time loop comedy until September 6th, 2035, well before when I have to travel back to 2028 to warn you all not to eat at…
The thing to know about acclaimed children’s book author Roald Dahl was that he had a deep understanding of the seven-to-twelve year old mindset. Wikipedia writes, his children's books were renowned “for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters.” Anyone who has listened to, or remembers playground repartee is aware of this.…
In The Wonderfools, we meet Park as a gravely ill young woman, Eun Chae-ni who concocts a scheme with her two stoogish friends to fake her kidnapping in order to extort funds from her wealthy grandmother so she can travel and see the world before she dies. She is a disorganized mess known to the neighborhood as “The Trainwreck” and her accomplices are a town pest noted for off-topic declamations…
Robin Hobb brought her “A” game to the Soldier Son trilogy. It features the same fantastically rich and meticulous world-building that her readers expect, and a cast of strong, memorable characters. At roughly 2,500 pages, the trilogy represents a brief break taken midway through the Elderlings series.
Nobody who has read Stephen King’s “Misery” or seen the award-winning Rob Reiner movie with Kathy Bates and James Caan can see the phrase “Number One Fan” without repressing a shudder. A famed novelist, Paul Sheldon, is injured in a car crash and rescued by Annie, who turns out to be an obsessive fan (“Paul, I’m your number one fan”) who is deeply upset that Sheldon has killed off her favorite…
This version, while keeping the main plot line and most of the characters, shifts focus from the dystopia of the Soviet Union and then Russia, and instead, looks at the dystopian silent coup staged in America by corporations and the fascist oligarchy, many of whom descended from the families that attempted a coup against Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. As a result, the head pig, Napoleon, is depicted…
Fans of Schitt’s Creek will recognize Dan Levy’s character (Nicky) in Big Mistakes to be something of a giant step sideways. The character is arch, somewhat prissy and meticulous, but also good-hearted and intelligent. Oh, and his sister is outgoing and a bit on the wild side and often drops him into the shit with her antics. But also, at heart, a good person. Well, it’s a chemistry that made…
What would it be like if Ai were fantastically cute, and had a sparkling, sunny personality that only partially hid the pure malice beneath? Well, you might have something like the live-action Thai production of Girl from Nowhere: The Reset.
Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express is a brief animated film on Netflix that’s one of the more interesting efforts out there. Based on the vision of Yōhei Kameyama, the 3-D animation tells the tale of six juvenile delinquents who are sentenced to the public service of cleaning a four car subway train. While all six are roughly human juveniles in appearance, they all sport a variety of…