Mining A Silver Lining

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

We were doing bong hits and watching TV one night in New York City when I was a teen, sprawled out on the floor of my friend Ted’s bedroom.  I’d just moved back from Rome, Italy, a culturally confused Ameropean, and I had fallen in with these rather hip actor-musician types, who either still went to or had just graduated from High School of the Performing Arts.  They had all been in Fame in one capacity or other, some with lines, others without, and I, who wanted to be an actor more than anything in the whole wild world, was in adolescent awe of them.

Few actors have grown as much over time as Charlie Hunnam, star of "Sons of Anarchy."

At a certain point, Ted groaned a heartfelt prayer as he tried to find a worthy channel for us to watch: “Dear God, please don’t let me be doomed for television.”  It was one of those opinion-setting comments from someone you admire as a youth, which determines your attitude forever more.  That is unless culture resets itself in some unlikely manner, as it has for television in recent years.

Winter Is Coming (Unless You Live in LA)

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

I started on a riff about Game of Thrones yesterday, bouncing off the subject of British accents and how they can make a film seem foreign to the ears of American plebs—i.e., the people who keep flocking to Hollywood dreck and thereby supporting the Great Crap Machine—even if it’s in English.  Including the riff meant the Attack The Block review grew to be two reviews in one, and at around three thousand words became seriously tangential and messy, even for a PFC post.  So it’s been broken into two.

And now, part deux:

Peter Dinklage (not Greg Kinnear) as Tyrion Lannister. If you've got a title, money and a cunning tongue, who cares if you're a... um, if you have a bad dye job?

The nuances of British accents are used to pleasing effect—albeit in an esoteric way pleasing to Anglophiles—in HBO’s TV adaptation of Thrones.  It’s doubtful that most American viewers, even the non-plebs who can afford premium cable, understand the fact that the dour northern Stark of Winterfell clan and its supporters speak with Mancunian/Liverpudlian accents from the north of England, while the louche, venal southerners from Kings Landing and Castlery Rock speak with ‘received pronunciation’ (RP) accents, or the so-called posh tones of BBC news readers, the royal family and the regions around London, not including thugs in council estates and the like.

So Many Gods

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

In the fourth book of the Game of Thrones series, the reluctant tomboy exile Arya Stark of Winterfell arrives in the free city of Braavos, described as a cross between Venice in its heyday as a Republic and ancient Rhodes: a colossus statue-fort called the Titan straddles the entrance to a lagoon city built on a hundred islands.  The citizens are distinctly Italianesque in their suave charm and balletic swords skills.

A little girl lost amongst wolves. Maisie Williams as Arya Stark with her father, Eddard.

Arya has already spent the past four years, since she was eight, and over three thousand pages, being buffeted about in a series of extraordinary and gruesome circumstances, which no child should ever be subjected to.  But hers is an eternally medieval world; even though she is one of the heirs to a powerful feudal kingdom, she has had more bad luck than an urchin born in the slums of Mumbai.

Comic-Con Artist

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

It does pay to read your friends’ spam email blasts, otherwise I wouldn’t have known that my buddy Tristan Eaton was going to be in SoCal doing signings of his book and launching a prototype of his new toy at Comic-Con last weekend.  I’d always wanted to go to Comic-Con, so this was the perfect opportunity to pack a picnic lunch, hop in the train and take myself on an outing, as my mother would call it.

But, James, you ask, aghast.  Why on earth would a modern misanthrope like you want to throw himself into the greatest concentration of unsightly, badly dressed geeks in the galaxy, if not the universe?

Greek revival: Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's forthcoming "Immortals."

You’re quite right, it was all of the above, and I should have been forewarned.  Before you savage me for being un-glamorous as well as inconsistent, it pays to remember that I’m not the only one with a geek hovering inches beneath my glossy-if-a-bit-tarnished exterior: