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If you're a fan of "The Prisoner," I have a feeling you're going to really like Ben Wheatley's "High-Rise," adapted from the J.G. Ballard novel. One of the things I learned early on about "The Prisoner" was that it is not for everyone. While I love the look of the world and the way the stories are told and the heightened sense of reality, I have seen enough people reject the entire thing outright to get that it is a particular taste. When you're talking about adapting the work of British novelist J.G. Ballard into film, you're automatically starting from a place outside the mainstream. He wasn't writing books like Michael Crichton, hoping for a film deal to turn his barely-more-than-an-outline into a big summer blockbuster. Ballard wrote end-of-the-world science-fiction and he dealt with the darkest corners of the human heart in work like "The Atrocity Exhibition" or "Crash,...

So, I’ve been doing these links posts for awhile now and it’s been very encouraging that they’re some of the most viewed articles on the site every week. However, even more exciting and inspiring is that I’ve had several bloggers/writers contact me lately to tell me that my linking to them provides a bit of a bump in readers for them. It really makes me happy that my readers are actually clicking through and reading these fantastic articles on other people’s websites. I mean, obviously that’s the whole point of this project, but I didn’t know the actual result until recently. It’s nice to hear. That said, on with the show:

This week’s Must Read is an oldie, but a goodie. And by “oldie” I mean almost 50 years old. It’s Stan Vanderbeek’s 1961 manifesto “The Cinema Delimina” (careful: that...

James Graham Ballard, 1930-2009

The world of the Imagination took a heavy hit the morning of Sunday, April 19 with the passing of literary great Jg Ballard, the iconoclastic author of "Crash," "The Drowned World" and "Empire of the Sun," as well as numerous other novels and short stories.

Born November 15, 1930 to wealthy parents in Shanghai’s international settlement, in 1942 Ballard’s storybook world fell swiftly apart after he and his family were interned for three years at the Japanese army’s civilian assembly camp at Lunghua, some ten miles south of the city centre. This experience had a life-altering effect on the young Ballard, as he really never recovered from the spectacle of watching the breakdown of reality as he knew it – he henceforth referred to reality as a "stage set" – and the motif of a psychically-damaged professional finding some kind of personal salvation in an otherwise apocalyptic world repeats...