What a big year it has been! Horrible in some respects – Trump, Australia’s treatment of refugees and North Korea sending off missiles I’m looking at you – but also delightful, wonderful, warm, funny and good for the heart, soul and spirit. Much of that joy has come from Continue Reading
Comics review: The hilarious omni-shambles of Asterix and the Chariot Race
There is something about the Roman Empire that has always cried out for satire. Perhaps it is that it was, and remains, the greatest empire in the history of humanity. Or perhaps that it was so domineering, so efficient, so all-encompassing and damn near omniscient and omnipresent, that besting Continue Reading
Love and belonging are the unexpected gifts in Christmas short film “Tag”
Christmas is one of the most special times of the year. Family comes together, friends celebrate and neighbours commune, collectively giving the laudable ideals of peace and love a tangible, soul-stirring workout. But what if you don’t have that special someone, that companion who turns a bright and beautiful Continue Reading
Movie review: Coco (+ Olaf’s Frozen Adventure)
Families are wondrous and complicated things. We draw so much of our identity and support from them and yet we can also be messily at odds with them, inextricably part of them through flesh-and-blood and life experience, but separated by differing personality, opinion and life ambition. Pixar’s latest masterpiece, Continue Reading
Take a flight of festive imagination with Microsoft’s Paint 3D ad
Whoever would have thought that Microsoft could be joyously quirky and magical? Well, Microsoft marketing executives clearly because the tech giant’s ad for their successor to Microsoft Paint, Paint 3D, is as whimsical, sweet and idiosyncratically fantastical as you could possibly ask for. Springing from the fecund imagination of Continue Reading
On 12th day of Christmas … I listened to Warmer in the Winter by Lindsey Stirling
There are quite a few festive things that, right at home in the depth of a northern hemisphere winter, are almost comically out of place in a southern hemisphere summery Christmas. Take chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Or walking in a winter wonderland perhaps? Or even dashing through the Continue Reading
Now this is Christmas music: 10 favourite festive tracks + 5 fab indie covers
When you’re a Christmas tragic such as myself, one of the key ingredients to falling headfirst, and utterly, completely and absolutely so into the festive spirit – it begins sometime around the end of November, ending only on Boxing Day or in my case, considerably after that – is music, Continue Reading
On 11th day of Christmas … I finally read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, published on 17 December 1843 to almost immediate popularity and acclaim, is one of those books that is so happily ubiquitous that you feel as you must have read it. So intimately familiar with the story are we, thanks to countless reinterpretations on TV Continue Reading
Movie review: Wonder Wheel
If there is one consistent theme in much of American popular culture, it’s the Manifest Destiny-inspired notion that anything is possible in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This idea, while borne of some truth, is in many ways more ideal than reality, a Continue Reading
On 10th day of Christmas … I read A Die Hard Christmas picture book
Way back in 1988 when I first saw Die Hard, which is as much a love letter (albeit a violent one) as an action thriller – you may recall that John McClane (Bruce Willis) is in L.A. from New York where’s he’s a cop to see his estranged wife Continue Reading