Despite their prevalence on early evening TV network schedules, I can frankly take or leave quiz shows. Usually leave, but if you tied me to a chair in a head hold that forced to look straight ahead at a TV screen and only at the TV screen with the Continue Reading
“I’m not your property … or your toy … or …”: Orphan Black drops intense season 3 teaser trailers
With just two months until BBC America sends in the clones all over again (pun quite clearly intended and happily revelled in), the New World offshoot of the UK’s national broadcaster has unveiled, one-by-one via Instagram, a series of dramatically-intense, defiant new teaser trailers profiling each of the female Continue Reading
Now this is music #45: Hunny, Steve Aoki and Moxie, Violet Skies, Royal, Anna O
No one ever said being a member of the human race was an undertaking for the fainthearted. Possessed of emotions richly-diverse and maddeningly contradictory, we rarely take the straightforward path through life, seesawing between happy and sad, angry and calm, content and agitated, often all at once. That’s why Continue Reading
Movie review: Selma
History is a crowded place, littered more often than not with recurrent and egregious examples of man’s inhumanity to man. But it is also, thankfully, marked by the brave examples of men and women, in great numbers and starkly alone, who, rather than remain complicit in a system that Continue Reading
The Walking Dead: Them (S5, E10 review)
I believe it was that great musical philosopher Annie who once opined in song that “You’re never fully dressed without a smile.” In which case, in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, mysteriously titled “Them” (there are a couple of contenders), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Daryl (Norman Continue Reading
There is nowhere else to go: Guillermo del Toro’s gothic horror masterpiece Crimson Peak (trailer + poster)
SNAPSHOT “Legendary Pictures’ Crimson Peak, a co-production with Universal Pictures, is a haunting gothic horror story directed by the master of dark fairy tales, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy series, Pacific Rim), written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins and starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston and Continue Reading
Book review: Rosewater and Soda Bread by Marsha Mehran
New beginnings, truly new beginnings, are a rare thing in life. Either they are not looked for at all by people caught in the slothful yet iron grip of the devil-they-know, or if time and circumstances do demand their provision, not granted by whatever mysterious powers in the universe Continue Reading
You want 20 TV theme songs in two minutes? Daniel Koren can help you with that!
I stand impressed. It is one thing to create a medley mashup of TV theme songs with each segueing reasonably neatly into the other and make them sound like they kind of sort of belong together. But talented New York musician Daniel Koren has managed to not just weave Continue Reading
Santa Claus in Ethiopia: The fantastically quirky apocalyptic world of Crumbs (trailer)
Much like the apocalyptic world in which its off-kilter quirky story takes place, Crumbs by director Miguel Llanso, a Spain/Ethiopian/Finland co-production that premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year, appears to have been blasted so far out of “the box” that it occupies a realm few other sci-fi Continue Reading
Weekend pop art: The beauty of the crystallised cast of The Walking Dead
Life isn’t easy in an apocalyptic environment. What with megalomaniacal, sociopathic Governors, endless herds of walkers, cannibals, deceitful fake scientists and the constant threat of starvation/injury/rabid squirrels (there is such a thing and yes you should be concerned, thank you), it doesn’t take much, as we’ve seen often among Continue Reading