Baymax, the medical robot that injected a huge amount of heart into 2014’s Big Hero 6, is adorable. He is algorithmically relentless. It makes sense; he’s been programmed to provide the best care possible to those he identifies as being in need and he will do it whether you want Continue Reading
TV
The frontier awaits again: Thoughts on Strange New Worlds (S1, E 6-10)
Anytime you talk about fate, it feels incredibly, oppressively, inescapably final. Some may see a comfort in the surely of preordained circumstance, but for many of us, what we will be, if it not left up to the exciting possibilities of self-determination, feels like a noose around the neck, cuffs Continue Reading
Run! It’s the headless snowman! Getting scarily festive with A Scooby-Doo Christmas
Who doesn’t love a traditional warm and cosy Christmas? You’d think the answer would be a resounding “Nobody!” but in the festively besieged town of Winter Hollow, established 1764, everyone is afraid to celebrate Christmas, all too aware that when they do, a giant headless snowman – strictly speaking the Continue Reading
Merry Un-Christmas! I put 5 new ornaments on my #ChristmasinJuly tree – the Flintstones, Encanto, Mary Poppins, Mork from Ork + National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Christmas is such a fun, wonderful, warm-spirited, cosy and nice time of the year that it really needs to be celebrated at least twice, right? Right! So, Christmas in July is increasingly a festive thing, and while it’s not as big a deal as the main event in December, it’s Continue Reading
The truth is all in how you frame it: Thoughts on Only Murders in the Building (S2, E1 & 2)
Can murder ever truly be cosy? It appears so; the plethora of murder mysteries where resolution is a near certainty (think any of the Law and Order iterations, from a franchise which at last count had something like 403 different shows on air) or set at a cosy time of Continue Reading
Trailers, trailers everywhere! Take a look at Blasted, The School For Good & Evil, The Munsters reboot, Vesper, Black Adam
In his 1798 epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned the immortal lines – “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”, a lamenting of the fact that though you may be apparently surrounded by something, some quirk of circumstance may mean you not able to Continue Reading
A colourful collection of streaming trailers: 1899, Wednesday, Sweet Tooth (season 2), the Sea Beast and Wendell & Wild
So many streaming platforms … and not a thing to watch? To hear some malcontents on social media that’s precisely the case, but honestly there are so many diverse and amazing programs coming down the pike that it’s hard to see how you could possibly find nothing that interests you. Continue Reading
Weekend poster pop art: Meet (sort of) some of the characters from Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
SNAPSHOTThis epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung Continue Reading
The frontier awaits: Thoughts on Strange New Worlds (S1, E 1-5)
It is a rare, rare thing indeed, especially in an age of multitudinous streaming abundance where derivative ideas and leveraged brands are everywhere like rabbits in plague numbers, to find a new show that feels like a freaking breath of fresh air. It’s even more remarkable when said show, in Continue Reading
“I never imagined any of this”: Meet the cast of Ms. Marvel
SNAPSHOTMs. Marvel, launching on Disney+ in [U.S.] Summer 2022, is a new series that introduces Kamala Khan—a 16-year-old Pakistani-American growing up in Jersey City. A great student, an avid gamer and a voracious fan-fiction scribe, she has a special affinity for superheroes, particularly Captain Marvel. But Kamala struggles to fit Continue Reading