There Never Were Any Snakes: St. Patrick’s Day and Ireland

So I’m not Irish. Not even a teeny bit. I’ve never even dated an Irishman, as much as I may have wanted to. I dated a guy from Boston once. Turns out his origins were Eastern European, like mine. But I have been to Ireland. Multiple times. I’ve even been to Belfast and other areas in Northern Ireland, [...]

Kicking Ass and Taking Names: Violent Females and Comic Book Film Adaptations

For Roger Ebert, there is something deeply disturbing about watching a young girl engage in a violent action film. His review of the film Kick-Ass says so repeatedly. However, it seems that if she were to be engaged in a highly sexualized role, things might change a bit. It might be a different story. To [...]

To Hell With You: Blazing a Trail Through Hollywood with John Constantine

Seeing that it is now June and Comic Con is nipping at my writerly fingertips (as it does every year), I figured I would drag one out from the vaults to entertain and/or annoy you all with. For the last 5 or so years, I have been a participant in the Comic Arts Conference, which [...]

Cover to Cover: The Palimpsestic Identity of Sin City

We’ve all heard it before- there are no new stories, just new storytellers. While people may buy into this theory, seeing only familiar plotlines, tired characters and repetitious outcomes, many times it is in the retelling of a familiar text that innovative styles and new diegetic constructions are born. Raymond Chandler once said that a [...]

Book ‘em, Noir-o!: This Gun for Hire and The Glass Key

On February 9, I traipsed down to my local movie theater, The New Beverly Cinema, notebook in hand, excitement in heart. There was a double feature of two films that I had never seen in my favorite genre: film noir. At first, I thought I had seen This Gun for Hire, but as the film [...]

Gaffs, Gazoonies, and Geeks

Let’s talk about carnivals, shall we? I Love Them. Everything about them. The games, the sounds, the feel, the taste, the smells….well- maybe not *all* the smells, but hey- cotton candy fresh outta the machine? Who can resist THAT smell? In any case, I love carnivals. The reason I bring this up, has to do [...]

Written on the pages is the answer to a never ending story…

I remember the first time I saw the film and I imagined….the concept. The film was released in 1984, so I was a whopping 8 years old, full of curly brown hair and Rogers & Hammerstein tunes.  With a bit of Culture Club and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for good measure of course. After all, what [...]