Before Neil Gaiman’s vision of London Below became a hit novel it was a short made-for-TV series that had a limited airing way back in 1996. With a largely unknown cast of UK talent including Gary Bakewell, Laura Fraser and Peterson Joseph, it tells the story of how an innocent act of kindness on the part of office worker Richard Mayhew (Bakewell) throws him into a weird and world that is a fantastical mirror image of the nation’s capital.
On Monday, March 20th 2005, twelve people were killed when sarin nerve gas was released on the Tokyo underground rail system by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. More than fifty others suffered serious ill effects as a direct result of the incident, which is considered the most significant attack on Japanese soil since the Second World War. In an attempt to understand the background and convey the human cost, novelist Haruki Murakami conducted interviews with both victims of the attack and people who were members of Aum itself. Far removed from his quirky and dreamlike fiction, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a startling and revealing piece of journalism that highlights the true cost of a terrorist act on a modern-day society.
There was a time when Metallica were viewed as at the cutting edge of modern heavy rock and metal; considering the relative mediocrity of their more recent efforts it’s all too easy to forget, which makes their 1984 LP all the more essential. At this point the greatness of Master of Puppets was yet to come and they only had one full-length album under their belts; nevertheless, Ride the Lightning should be considered as one of the highlights of the band’s career.
It is testament to the prolific nature of Billy Corgan’s songwriting talent that, after only two full studio albums, there was more than enough extra material to make up a complete album of b-sides, outtakes and other odds and ends. Pisces Iscariot is just that: a collection of b-sides, outtakes and other songs that had otherwise been hard to find. Because of this, it lacks the ‘flow’ of songs whose components had been intended to be heard back-to-back in one place, but there’s no denying the quality of indvidual songs on offer here.
Famously promoted as Jet Li’s final martial arts epic, Fearless is a suitably sweeping and visually impressive piece of cinema that ensures its star bows out of action movies in great style. It is based, albeit loosely, on a real-life Chinese hero: Huo Yuanjia, a legendary fighter from the turn of the Twentieth Century.
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