Jared Shurin's Blog, page 16

Hubble, bubble, toil and feminism: Witches in comics

Halloween is upon us and the usual parade of monster, ghouls and goblins are sure to be out in force. Chief among those will be the 'big three': vampires, werewolves and, of course, witches.

Unlike the first two, however, witches have a real-life history every bit as chilling as the stories in literature and film. The persecution of women (and, less often, men) for the crime of witchcraft is widespread and well known, with the most famous example being the witch trials in Salem in the 1690s....

Pennywise and Paper-Thin: Why IT���s clown is too two-dimensional to be terrifying

So, you know the drill: spoilers ahead.

A few months ago, when we rolled out The Official Pornokitsch Taxonomy of Villains ���, I promised two things: An Obsessed, and a Monster. Half of that promise was fulfilled last month with our look at Khan(s). This month, I deliver on the second half by focusing on the most notorious monster of 2017: Pennywise the Dancing Clown, from Stephen King���s It. I���ll mostly be focusing on the 2017 film version, but will reference other versions as appropriat...

Stark Reviews: A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (1987)

Stark says: May I drop dead if that thing doesn't clear the head better than whiskey

I bet after I reviewed Lemonade Joe ��� the bizarre, brilliant Czech Soviet-era comedy musical western ��� you thought you were safe. ���There cannot be another Soviet-era comedy musical western,��� you may have said. ���That would be absurd, and reviewing it would be willfully niche.���

But then I discovered A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines. What did you expect me to do? I pounced on it like a bobcat...

Malls, Mallrats and Browsing

Briarwood Mall, Michigan (1970s - via Malls of America)

Doug Stephens wrote a powerful piece on how 'to save retail, let it die'. In it, he lists all the ways in which retail is doomed (hi, Amazon!) on his way to a, more-or-less, familiar conclusion: retail spaces need to become experiences.

Stephens posits that the future retail spaces aren't about buying products at all, but about:

gathering data selling experiences that involve the products

Imagine, I suppose, the LEGO store, but solel...

Draft Posts and Middling Along

How Animals Tell Time (1967)

A week on the road and with a really, really tetchy computer, but - I'm back. And straight into the middle of things.

Middle Relievers Don't Win the Cy Young

We tendency to lionise the start and the end of creative projects, and forget about the middle bits. 

We all become 'authors' as soon as we open a Word file, 'artists' as soon as we buy paint, 'bloggers' as soon as we register our domain name. By contemplating creation - simply by having an idea - we re-ide...

10 Films We've Outgrown (But Were There For Us When We Needed Them)

We were inspired by this terrific piece on Film School Rejects, discussing the importance of respecting films we've "outgrown". The article points out an unlikely hypocrisy: we uncritically adore our childhood nostalgia, but we're utterly vicious to those films that 'mean something' to us when we're coming of age.

With that in mind, here are ten movies (mostly) that we've outgrown. They were there for us when we needed them, but, um...

Grosse Point Blank (1997). An amazing cast, and I���d st...

A Tale of Two Khans

Spoilers ahead for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and S1:E22 of Star Trek the Original Series.

It was the best of Khans, it was the worst of Khans. It was the film that redeemed its predecessor, and the film that tarnished its predecessor. It was the voyage that went where many others had gone before.

Among Trek fans, the scripture is clear: there is but one Khan, and He has a silver mullet. The existence of a small Benedictine branch of the faithful does nothing...

Growing Up On The Ice: Tillie Walden's Spinning

Tillie Walden (A City Inside, The End of Summer) says of her new autobiographical novel, Spinning - covering her teenage years as a figure skater - that "it ended up not being about ice skating at all".

Instead Spinning ends up being one of those rare books that's not particularly about anything, but potentially about almost everything. This quality means that what you get out of this book really does depend on what you bring to it.  In writing about it, therefore, you may end up revealing mo...

Fiction: Jade City (Extract) by Fonda Lee

Even in the shade, sweat trickled down the backs and faces of the year-eight students. Ten of them stood nervously, each behind a short tower of hot bricks. ���One more,��� said the master, and the assistant year-threes hurried to the fire pit with tongs, carefully but quickly removing bricks from the flames and placing another on top of each of the ten smoldering stacks. One of the waiting year-eights, named Ton, muttered quietly, ���Ah, what to choose, pain or failure?���

Ton had undoubted...

Venus is a Man's World (1957)

Thoughts Before Listening

This radio drama is called ���Venus is a Man���s World��� or as Illustrious Acquaintance is calling it, ���Weenus is a Man���s World LOL Weenus Hahahaha What a Funny Word is The Word Weenus���. I know I���m going to regret this, but I���m also wondering exactly how bad a show called ���Venus is a Man���s World��� can be. And isn���t it racist or PC culture or something to assume this is going to be bad just because it is called ���Venus is a Man���s World���? What...