Because Everybody Else Has One

We've already had Hollywood trying its luck with Ghost in the Shell so how does it fare with another iconic manga property? Like Ghost in the Shell, adapting Alita: Battle Angel has been, if nothing else, more interesting than one might expect... This review is also on Channel 24 What It’s About Hundreds of years in the future, much of the world lays in ruins as a nuclear World War between Earth’s sky-cities have decimated humanity. One of the planet’s last remaining sky-cities, Tiphares, hovers above a place known simply as Scrapyard City, so named because it is literally a dumping ground for the trash and waste coming from the affluent city above it. When biomechanical expert, Dr. Ido, finds a cyborg head amongst the heaps of garbage routinely discarded from Tiphares, he attaches the head to a mechanical body that he made for his deceased daughter. The transplant is a success but the cyborg has no idea who she is or where she’s from so Ido adopts her as his own and na...

And now, for the big movie of the week! Well, OK, considering its abysmal box office numbers, "big" might not be the word I'm looking for... This review is also up at Channel 24 . What it's about Returning once again to the stylish-noir world on Frank Miller's Sin City, we meet old faces and new as their paths cross and criss-cross in often deadly ways. What we thought As I haven't revisited the first Sin City in film in many a year, nor having caught up with any of the comics in even longer, I'm not sure if my luke-warm reaction to Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a result of my having outgrown the property or if, very simply, this sequel just isn't anywhere near as good as the first film. Either way, though it certainly has its pleasures – even if those pleasures are more often that not on the guilty side – A Dame to Kill For is a definite misfire. To be sure, even if the first film was genuinely good (and I am starting to h...