In this issue Interzone's movie reviewer, Nick Lowe, reflects on Conan 2011. "Seventy-five years ago this summer, a thirty-year-old Texan pulp writer wound up the windows and took a borrowed Colt .380 from the glovebox because he didn’t want to outlive his mother. This is still regarded as quite a weird tale, and in 1996 they made an entire movie about it, The Whole Wide World with Vincent d’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard and Renée Zellwegger as Novalyne Price. It’s no wonder that Hollywood is particularly creeped-out by the idea that one of America’s key narratologists of manhood might love his mom to death, engaged as it is in its own genocidal war against maternity. Call it the Nemo test: how many of this summer’s films killed off the hero’s mother? Win one clownfish for dispatching her casually in backstory, two for an actual flashback, three for executing her in the very first scene, and multiply them together if the film manages to kill the heroine’s mother as well. Better dress for a busy little bloodbath, because of the eleven films canvassed below, only four score zero on the Nemo scale; and two of those are about machines, while one is a Miyazaki number anyway and consequently pumped full of antibodies to Hollywood infection.
In the Nemo stakes, if sadly not much else, the 2011 version of CONAN THE BARBARIAN crushes its enemies and hears the lamentations of their women.." Read the rest and much else for $4.99
