Homemade Rage #2: S.H.E., Mercury Rev, Irene Cara

S.H.E. is a Taiwanese girl group. It's very difficult to engage with Chinese language pop music, because there's so much of it out there and even if you do find a song you like it's fiendishly difficult to ever actually find it again or find the relevant CD. This one I like. It's got a slightly rockier edge than most Asian pop, but is still unashamedly poppy and infectious.

Homemade Rage #1: Armstrong, Europe, Ruby

Thanks to the wonderful capacity of Youtube videos to be embedded in other web pages, I can do this: little collected groups of pop music videos I've selected for you to watch and listen to. I'm thinking of doing three videos each time, which seems nicely manageable and can fill 10-15 minutes of your day. This time around I've embedded tracks from Craig Armstrong, Europe and Ruby. I hope you like them.

Craig Armstrong is a phenomenal musician and composer - his music has backed an increasing number of Hollywood movies. This track, "Wake Up in New York", was from his second studio album As If To Nothing, and features vocals by Evan Dando. It's just a beautiful song, wonderfully performed.

Five Films: Tilda Swinton

One of my favourite actors in the world is Scottish actor Tilda Swinton. She has carved herself a strong niche playing slightly unusual, somewhat androgynous characters, and her immense talent has been rewarded with acclaim and prizes around the world – including an Academy Award in 2008. These days she balances her time between big Hollywood blockbusters (she’s the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, for example) and small independent features, as well as running a variety of strange and exciting film festivals (my personal favourite is the one held in a hall in the Scottish highlands where everyone watches the films in beanbags while Swinton bakes them cupcakes). Here are five of my favourite Tilda Swinton movies.

Mathilda, by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley is one of the most famous female authors of all time, despite having only written one novel: Frankenstein. Right? Right? Of course not. In truth Shelley wrote a bunch of stuff, very little of which has managed to receive a fraction of the fame and attention that her most famous novel got. One of these obscure works is Mathilda, a novella that Shelley completed in 1820 but which did not see print until 1959.

Why the 139 year wait between completion and publication? It is a book about, among other things, incest and suicide. Shelley submitted the manuscript to her father and publisher William Godwin, and he was so scandalised by its contents that not only did he refuse to publish it, he also refused to return the manuscript to Mary. We can all be thankful he wasn’t scandalised enough to throw the manuscript into a fire.

The many deaths of Sean Bean

Sean Bean sure does die a lot onscreen. This Youtube video comes with a violence warning - I'd also say it comes with a spoiler warning, but to be honest the man dies so often onscreen that seeing his name in the opening credits may arguably be considered a major spoiler.

Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing #1

You have to love DC and their hilariously unwieldy titles. Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing picks up some of the pieces left by the 24-issue series Brightest Day, which itself picked up many of the pieces left by the eight-part miniseries Darkest Knight, which was itself spun off from several years' worth of plot developments in Green Lantern. With me so far? (And comic companies wonder why their titles don't sell like they used to...)

The basic premise of this three-issue miniseries is actually pretty simple: Swamp Thing, a green elemental creature with magical powers that has been missing for many years, appears to have returned to Earth. Rather than the old benevolent Swamp Thing, this new incarnation appears to be destructive and potentially very dangerous. English magician John Constantine heads off on Swamp Thing's trail, hoping to track down his former friend and find out what has gone wrong. On his way he begins to encounter a group of superheroes including Batman and fellow magician (and, it turns out, ex-girlfriend) Zatanna.

Giant-Size Atom #1

This is, I suppose, a short review in the form of a complaint. Recently DC Comics has been making a lot of noise about their line-wide relaunch/reboot this September. It's been a pretty effective promotional campaign, because it got me into a comic shop for the first time in over a year with an interest in buying a few superhero comics.

Of course, it's often hard when you want to simply buy a single issue of a comic book to find one that's going to be self-contained. It's a serialised medium, and so finding a single comic book with a beginning, middle and end is often rather tricky.

In the end I went with Giant-Size Atom #1. I've always liked the Atom (aka Ray Palmer), and this purported to be an extra-length 'one-shot' guest-starring Hawkman, who I also rather like. (A one-shot is, rather obviously, a single issue self-contained comic book with a beginning, middle and end.) The comic was written by Jeff Lemiere, whose previous work I have not read but whose solid reputation has preceded him.

Oscar predictions: Part II

Animated Feature Film

How to Train Your Dragon, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet

Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich

Toy Story 3 is entering this race as the presumptive winner, so strong is the critical reception to this film (it even gained a Best Picture nomination – only the second animated feature to do so). It’s coincidentally the one nominee out of the three that I haven’t seen. I can’t help but feel a little bit of Pixar fatigue however – they’ve won every year from the past three, and despite their high and consistent quality I can’t help but feel they’re not always offering me anything new any more. My pick to win is easily Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, which was subtle, beautiful, funny and melancholic.

What’s going to win: Toy Story 3

What I want to win: The Illusionist