Smorgasbord Fantasia

Pacific Rim is a completely brainless movie that is rooted in it's corny theme and sticks through with the same throughout. It is still a good escapist fun ride packed with all the right ‘masala’ ingredients to hit it big. Alien monsters, metallic monster killing machines and All-American soldiers (though they have tried hard to make it as generic as possible! Bringing in a characters ranging from all over the world- Australian father-son, a Russian pair, a Japanese girl - sadly all molded in the usual All-American manner) – all heart, full brawn and a lot of yak and needles bravado. A typical big budget movie that seems like a lot of fun as long as you skim along the surface. But trust me, don’t even bother to dig deeper below the surface, you will be devastated at the lack of storylines, plots or even a decent believable premise tinged with logic. But yes – on the surface of things, Pacific Rim packs in a lot of heart in this movie and it serves you dollops of ac...

Irreverant, lush, evocative, poignant and most decidedly epic.  The 8-volume Buddha series by Osama Tezuka, widely revered in Japan as the grandfather of Manga, is a sprawling, awe-inspiring work of art and fiction that is stunning in the scope of its vision and achievement. I jumped a book – and dove straight into book two : The Four Encounters that sees a 13-year old Siddhartha come to terms with the evils in life – the themes of the caste system that draws strict lines of divides in the society, the differences between the rich nobility and the poor mendicants of the streets – and teaches him about the frailty of life and the inevitability of death and introduces him to the concept of the cycles of life. I know I have missed a masterpiece by not having read book one, Kapilavastu but I have resolved to correct that error. Have ordered book 1 and 3. Buddha is in many ways, a confusing series as it crisscrosses across multiple characters and timelines but Tezu...

THREE is Jay Posey's debut, the first book in the Legends of the Duskwalkers series, this was an ARC I got from Angry Robots, perhaps the first book that I'm reading from their stable. It's an odd ball mix of western, science fiction and horror and a very entertaining tale of flight and survival set in a distant dystopian-end of the world kind of settings. The story follows the fate of a lone gunman with a mysterious past, Three, whose life changes when he decides to protect a woman and her gifted six-year old son fleeing from unknown assailants. Three, a bounty hunter who lives by his gun, runs into Cass ( a chemic who survives on body-boosting energy shots) and her six-year old son, Wren,  who is special. ( Now that's a dead giveaway, I agree but i wont harp on it)Three saves her from a bully and inadvertently ends up killing another in a bid to save her.  This sweeps him into a murky conspiracy from which the woman and kid are trying to flee - maki...