Daily Archives: May 13, 2025

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Comics Films (8) Kingsman

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Shot (heh) from the best scene of the Kingsman film series (from the first film – you know the one)

 

 

 

(8) KINGSMAN

(2014-2017: KINGSMAN 1-2. Yeah, I don’t count the 2021 prequel, let alone 2024 spinoff Argyle. I do count that short film crossover with Archer)

 

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a playful and subversive parody of spy films in general and James Bond in particular – adapted from a comic by Mark Millar (similarly to another Millar work, Kickass, a playful and subversive parody of superhero film).

The film apparently originated when Millar and director Matthew Vaughn were at a bar discussing how the spy film genre was too serious and they wanted to do a fun one. And oh boy did they deliver on that premise – as Guardian writer Jordan Hoffman quipped, “no one in the production can believe that they’re getting away with such a batsh*t Bond”. It takes all the elements of a Bond film and ramps them up with its tongue firmly in its cheek – Bond on crack.

Of course, there is the eponymous spy agency – stylish (“manners maketh man”) and quintessentially British (named for Arthurian characters), with Colin Firth’s Galahad in a superb action role. However, it is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the spotlight, hamming it up with his lisping, megalomaniac supervillain Valentine – such that he makes Bond villains look positively tame by comparison (although his blade-legged henchwoman Gazelle comes a close second). Valentine’s supervillain scheme is to fix global warming (yay!) by killing most of the world’s population (um – not so yay?) – the mechanism for this is revealed in an awesome frenzied continuous action scene.

Per Rolling Stone magazine – “This slam-bang action movie about British secret agents is deliriously shaken, not stirred … Even when it stops making sense, Kingsman is unstoppable fun”.

The 2017 sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle enjoyably repeated many of the same beats, extending them also to the Kingsman agency’s cousins in the United States, the Statesman, but didn’t quite match the fun of the first film.

 

FANTASY OR SF

 

Leans to the SF side of the genre, as usual for comics films.

 

COMEDY

 

Also leans to the more comedic side for comics films, including spy film parody.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Revised) (13) Dictionary of Imaginary Places

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(13) ALBERTO MANGUEL & GIANNI GUADALUPI –

THE DICTIONARY OF IMAGINARY PLACES (1980)

 

Again, exactly what it says on the tin – a literal dictionary in alphabetical order of entries for imaginary places.

However, there’s a fine line between the imaginary places of mythology and those of literature or fantasy, with many entries in the latter. For example, I would argue that Atlantis transcended its (minor) literary origins in the works of Plato to become mythic. Even when Plato wrote it, he attributed it to Egyptian records of it. And so on, with imaginary or legendary places such as Hyperborea or Eldorado – although the imaginary places of mythology lose out somewhat with places off the planet Earth (albeit more exclusive of SF locales) as well as “heavens and hells”.

Again, the publisher’s blurb sums it up:

“This Baedeker of make-believe takes readers on a tour of more than 1,200 realms invented by storytellers from Homer’s day to our own. Here you will find Shangri-La and El Dorado, Utopia and Middle Earth, Wonderland and Freedonia.”

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Stone Ages / Stone Age Iceberg (Special Mention 6-10)

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Kebaran culture (Levant and Sinai) microliths 22,000 – 18,000 years ago (public domain image)

 

 

(6) BOW STONE AGE

 

Like the spear but even more so as a Stone Age game-changing ranged projectile weapon. Apparently the first evidence of bows or arrows goes back to 60-70,000 years ago or so – and their use had spread everywhere but Australia and most of Oceania by the end of the Paleolithic.

 

(7) CLOTHED STONE AGE

 

I’d like to see a demarcation between the Naked Stone Age and the Clothed Stone Age.

Interestingly, such a demarcation is not too different from that between the Paleolithic and Neolithic, although the Naked Stone Age doesn’t quite go so long as the full Paleolithic, wrapping up (heh) towards the end of the Middle Paleolithic.

It always strikes me how recently humans developed and used clothing, with the weight of opinion seeming to be approximately 100,000 years ago, and before that the Stone Age was gloriously naked, albeit hairier.

This was the intuitive truth behind the Biblical Garden of Eden. How far we have fallen from our nude Eden!

 

(8) DOG STONE AGE

 

I like dogs so why not have a Dog Stone Age?

But seriously, the domestication of dogs is something of a key transition in the Stone Age, particularly towards the domestication of animals for agriculture. The dog was the first animal and only large carnivore to be domesticated, occurring at some time towards the end of the Paleolithic (usually opined at an upper limit of 20-40,000 years ago), reflecting its usefulness for human hunter-gatherers prior to agriculture.

 

(9) CERAMIC STONE AGE

 

The development and use of pottery was another key transition in the Stone Age, usually associated with the Neolithic but occurring as early as the Upper Paleolithic. Pottery is also iconic of archaeology – I tend to quip archaeology is mostly dusting off broken pieces of pottery as opposed to Indiana Jones.

Of course, from our modern perspective, we tend to see pottery as decorative or a novelty, because we have since moved on to other materials for storage and cookware (even where the importance of it persists in the surname Potter).

 

(10) WHEELED STONE AGE

 

The iconic invention of prehistoric humanity, so much so that the phrase reinventing the wheel has become proverbial – albeit the Wheeled Stone Age is pretty much a few seconds before midnight of the Stone Age and perhaps more accurately as part of the transition to the Bronze Age, if not indeed in the Bronze Age itself.

We tend to think of the wheel for wheeled vehicles, but it also overlaps with the previous entry in the development and use of the potter’s wheel.