to move up and down
Mad Men: In Season 6 of AMC’s Emmy-winning series, will Don Draper be able to handle the youth? (Illustration: Andrew Barr/National Post)
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(Source: arts.nationalpost.com)
Return of The Walking Dead: A statistical look back at the series so far
This Sunday marks the return of AMC’s The Walking Dead. To mark the occasion, the Post catches you up to speed on everyone’s favourite gorefest
The best little horror house in Texas: A graphic history of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Click here for Andrew Barr’s carnage-count of the TCM franchise thusfar, on the eve of the release of Texas Chainsaw 3D: natpo.st/WqYNgd
Graphic: North Korea’s Unha-3 long-range rocket
In Pyongyang, North Koreans clinked beer mugs and danced in the streets to celebrate the country’s first satellite in space. In Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, leaders pushed for consequences for Wednesday’s successful rocket launch, widely seen as a test that takes the country one step closer to being capable of lobbing nuclear bombs over the Pacific.
The surprising, successful launch of a three-stage rocket similar in design to a model capable of carrying a nuclear-tipped warhead as far as California raises the stakes in the international standoff over North Korea’s expanding atomic arsenal. As Pyongyang refines its technology, its next step may be conducting its third nuclear test, experts warn.
With this in mind, the National Post’s graphics team takes a look at North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket.
Graphic: Stopping the Dead
A statistical look back at the zombie kills and the weapon used in the Walking Dead series so far.
Remember, remember the first of Movember
How facial fuzz became a mildly transgressive fashion statement (Illustration by Andrew Barr/National Post)
Prometheus fails to live up to high expectations
Unlike your Die Hards or your Terminators — film franchises that stick to tried-and-true genre templates — the Alien series succeeds because it constantly reinvents its freaky, H.R. Giger-designed packaging.
Ridley Scott’s 1979 original was a straight-up horror; James Cameron’s sequel was a war movie that just happened to take place in outer space; David Fincher’s directorial debut was a psychological thriller cum religious allegory; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sex-spiked take was, well, just plain weird.
Yet throughout each film there are constants, namely a strong heroine, a crafty android and at least one drool-dribbling xenomorph. Prometheus, Scott’s return to the franchise, features at least two of these three elements, though whether he takes the series in a successful new direction is up for debate. (Illustration by Andrew Barr)
Jedi Knights at the museum: Unleash your inner child, you can, at Star Wars Identities
Two years in the making by Montreal’s X3 Productions, the exhibition at Montreal’s Science Centre is partly an educational display aimed at explaining and exploring the concept of identity, and partly a shrine to some 200 props, costumes, and “artifacts” from George Lucas’s two Star Wars film trilogies. In an attempt to thread both aspects together, the museum uses high-tech bracelets to track visitors’ choices throughout the exhibition, so that everyone can create a Star Wars-esque character from scratch.
Each visitor picks a species (e.g., human, Wookiee, Ewok), genetic traits, personality traits, a mentor and so on, ending up with one of 50 million-odd possible personalized “heroes.” (Illustration by Andrew Barr)
Graphic: Friday the 13th – Jason Voorhees’ body count
Friday the 13th comes three times this year, so in honour of this (in?)auspicious date we are revisiting Andrew Barr and Mike Faille’s visual representation of slasher star Jason Voorhees’ body count. The Friday the 13th hockey-mask aficionado has waged a one-man war against the evils of premarital sex, drug use, being a teenager and not being Jason Voorhees.
The health epidemic unleashed on children by packaged foods
An excerpt from Outside The Box, by Jeannie Marshall:
“The dreaded children’s menu. It offered pasta for a first course, and breaded chicken served with french fries for the second. Another choice was pizza slices served with french fries and a soft drink. There were also hamburgers and hot dogs on the menu….
There are 42 million children under age five who are overweight or obese in the world. It used to take years to put on that much weight and it was rare to see an obese child. Now it’s an ever-growing problem for nursery school children. If something doesn’t change, these children will live difficult, unhealthy lives, and many of them will die an early death.” (Illustration by Andrew Barr)
Part One: The pervasiveness of junk food advertising to children
Jeannie Marshall: The pervasiveness of junk food advertising to children
In an excerpt from Outside The Box, Jeannie Marshall describes her efforts to shield her son from the lure of ‘packaged cakes, chocolate bars, cookies, yogurt-like products and ice cream’:
We have to be on guard to protect our children against so many potentially destructive intrusions into their lives, yet food marketing that goes directly to children often slips in at their level, where we don’t even see it. Even when we do see it, it’s astonishing how little we can do about it. If a well-dressed man in the park persistently offered sweets to your child, ignoring your requests for him to stop, I’m sure you would scoop up your child and leave the park. I’m fairly certain everyone in the park would run the man out. Yet there are men and women offering candy and food products to our children all day long. We let them into our houses through the television, radio, Internet and DVDs we let our children watch instead of commercial TV. They beckon our children to follow them, they offer them sweet and savoury delights and they promise never to say no the way that grouchy old parents do. (Illustration by Andrew Barr)
Friends with Kids may ultimately be pat, but in a few moments, Westfeldt pushes so many interesting buttons that you’ll be discussing it for weeks. And really, which would you rather watch? Just another perfectly formulaic rom-com, or one that, even while flawed, still gives you plenty to think and argue about?
Click here to read Nathalie Atkinson’s fill review of Jennifer Westfeldt’s film.
