Adapting any story, regardless of its literary source, into a big screen film, especially one with a budget as big as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, is an exercise fraught with a thousand degrees of barbaric difficulty. No matter how you slice or dice its plots, themes or characters, someone, somewhere Continue Reading
All aboard for Harmontown: A documentary about Dan Harmon, creator of Community
Brilliant and wildly creative he may be, and the father of Community, one of the one of the most idiosyncratic, funny and inventive sitcoms I have ever had the privilege to watch but there’s no escaping the fact that Dan Harmon is a polarising figure. His flair for flawed, Continue Reading
Oh my! Sci-fi: Trailers + posters for Jupiter Ascending, Edge of Tomorrow, The Signal
This year is shaping up as another banner year for science fiction with a host of releases on the schedule including Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (6 November AU/7 November USA), UK production The Machine (25 April USA), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Transcendence, The Prototype (date unspecified) and even Continue Reading
Weekend Pop Art: Famous bands and their Lego doppelgängers
Lego are quite the flavour of the month at the moment, thanks largely to the incalculable charms of the recently released The LEGO Movie. The movie, about which barely a bad review has been penned, imagines a world where everyone and everything is made up of the wonderful Danish blocks, Continue Reading
Music review: The Take Off and Landing of Everything by Elbow
There is a world weary beauty, both musical and lyrical, to Elbow’s The Takeoff and Landing of Everything that captivates the troubled soul, and soothes the ear dulled by the cacophony of life’s trials and tribulations, from the first delicate opening notes. Never afraid to tackle the weightier issues Continue Reading
Movie review: The Grand Budapest Hotel
It would be tempting to call The Grand Budapest Hotel, writer/director Wes Anderson’s latest gleefully whimsical excursion into grand and imaginative storytelling, the icing on his creative cake, were it not not such an obvious reference to the pastries which are a recurring motif of the film. And yet it’s Continue Reading
Poster me this! Dumb and Dumber To, Orphan Black S2, Blended
They, whoever they are, may be intent on prosecuting poor Bill Posters but the rest of us can’t wait to see what else the master of promotion does next. I will grant you that threats of prosecution usually accompany physical posters on hoardings and buildings and so on but Continue Reading
Road to Eurovision 2014: Week 1 – Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium
WHAT IS THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST? Started way back in 1956 as a way to draw a fractured Europe back together with the healing power of music, the Eurovision Song Contest, or Concours Eurovision de la Chanson – the contest is telecast in both English and French – is open Continue Reading
The Walking Dead: “Us” (S4, E15 review)
For a series set in the zombie apocalypse, where survival must be fought for inch by inch, second by second, and there isn’t a whole lot of time for philosophical reflection – unless you’re Tara (Alanna Masterson) entering a dark walker-filled rail tunnel with Glenn (Steven Yeun), in which Continue Reading
So Fargo, so good: Trailers in abundance for FX’s latest offering
For reasons I can’t quite explain, given my lifelong predilection for all things quirky and idiosyncratic, it took me quite a while to warm to the highly imaginative ways of the Coen brothers. I first came across them via 1987’s Raising Arizona, a film that starred Nicolas Cage and Continue Reading