Thursday, 6 February 2014
“Of the Month” February 2014
Album of the Month:
The Zoo at Night by The Jesus Rehab
TJR’s first full-length album in a long, long while is good, stripped down, unapologetic rawk. Read my in-depth album review here. Or just listen to this sample song and hear for yourself:
Book of the Month:
Urville by Gilles Tréhin
An incredibly fascinating book. Gilles Tréhin is an autistic savant. For years and years he has been painstakingly designing, conceptualizing, and drawing a fictional city on a fictional Mediterranean island: Urville. Gilles creates the entire fictional history of this city from its founding through today, and has painstakingly detailed and perspective-accurate drawings of all of its districts throughout the course of its history. The amount of detail in both the renderings and the history is truly astonishing, and the drawings are all internally consistent with one another. Here’s a sample drawing:
Pont des Investitures (Investiture Bride), built in 1138.
And there are some 300 drawings in this book.
Movie of the Month:
Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro does giant robots (Jaegers) vs giant monsters (kaiju) in a rain-soaked, near-future Earth. The results are not terribly surprising, but pretty spectacular nonetheless. This is the first live-action giant robot movie that I can think of that is actually good. Del Toro’s mastery of the visual medium is supreme, and the look and feel of the movie is incredible. The design team did an excellent job of not mimicking any specific robot or monster source, and the results somehow pay homage to almost every giant robot. The ultimate pastiche, the ultimate tribute, but still Pacific Rim manages to stand on its own and not be beholden to its influences. Plus it’s danged good fun.
Categories: Of the Month.
