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Andrew's wonderful world of pop culture

Book review: When Mr Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan

Posted on January 13, 2018June 15, 2019 by aussiemoose

  Dylan Mint, the refreshingly honest protagonist of Brian Conaghan’s debut novel, When Mr Dog Bites, is a typical 16-year-old in many ways. He has a “best bud” named Amir, with whom he texts and discusses girls, life and the things they want to do to make it mean something, Continue Reading

Posted In Books

The short and the short of it: Return of the Monster’s scary deja vu

Posted on January 13, 2018January 8, 2018 by aussiemoose

  Nightmares are scary – that much is obvious. But how much scarier are they when they loop over and over again, a ceaseless montage of freaky moments that repeat and repeat until you begin to wonder (a) What the hell was in that pizza I ate last night? and Continue Reading

Posted In Movies

Movie review: Call Me By Your Name

Posted on January 12, 2018November 19, 2018 by aussiemoose

(image via IMP Awards)   There is a heady agony and ecstasy to falling in love that most films fail to capture completely in its all conflicting glory. But Call Me By Your Name, an exquisitely beautiful film about love, longing and unfulfilled possibilities, manages to portray faithfully how love can Continue Reading

Posted In Movies

Dancing with Disney: James Casey shows us how

Posted on January 12, 2018January 1, 2018 by aussiemoose

  There are a lot of wonderful things that Disney does right in its rightly-celebrated animated features. Punchy, fun characters. Delightful catchy songs. Engrossing stories. Learnable morality tales … … and brilliantly inventive dance sequences, the kind so perfectly executed that you’d like to get up and dance right along Continue Reading

Posted In Movies

Book review: Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

Posted on January 10, 2018June 15, 2019 by aussiemoose

  The machines are coming to get us. That’s been the consistent message for years now from within the world of science fiction (Terminator et al) and without – surprisingly, one Elon Musk, champion of the future, being the standard bearer for this cause – and to be fair, acclaimed Continue Reading

Posted In Books

Jumpy lives to jump! Video game character goes all out to win

Posted on January 10, 2018December 8, 2017 by aussiemoose

  I’ll be honest – I have never really played video games. Largely because I am stupendously bad at them – I may have been gifted with the ability to write but that was not accompanied, and frankly why would it be, with deft hand-eye coordination. So video games remain Continue Reading

Posted In Movies

Star Trek Discovery: “Despite Yourself” (S1, E10 review)

Posted on January 9, 2018January 9, 2018 by aussiemoose

  SPOILERS AHEAD … AND UNLIKE ALADDIN, IT’S NOT SO MUCH A WHOLE NEW WORLD AS A WHOLE NEW UNIVERSE … We’re not in galactic Kansas anymore Toto! In “Despite Yourself”, an apt title for an episode where the issue of identity is a constant theme, the crew of the Continue Reading

Posted In TV

Kaboom! Independence Day meets Star Wars in this entertaining mashup

Posted on January 9, 2018November 7, 2017 by aussiemoose

  Not content with saving earth from alien invasion, Independence Day‘s Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) and David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) have now gone inter-galactic, travelling back in time to blow up the Death Star. Yeah, sorry about that Luke, but as Norwegian comedy group PistolShrimps made amusingly clear in Continue Reading

Posted In Movies

Comics review: Dastardly & Muttley (issues 1-4)

Posted on January 7, 2018January 7, 2018 by aussiemoose

  If you’ve looked around you this year and thought the world had gone quite horrifically, cartoonishly mad (hate to break it to you but it has), then you’ll find a lot to appreciate in the new(ish) Dastardly and Muttley series from DC Comics. Continuing the mostly clever reimaginings of Continue Reading

Posted In TVTagged In Hanna Barbera

Dr. Seuss – Putting Rhymes to Good Use (KaptainKristian video essay)

Posted on January 7, 2018October 24, 2017 by aussiemoose

  Got a spare few minutes? Need to bolster your drab workaday life with some bright playful rhymes? Then sit down and watch this brilliant video essay by the ever awesome Kaptain Kristian which regales us with the wonders of Dr Seuss’s technique and approach, all done in his trademark Continue Reading

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  • One last roll of the planetary dice … Project Hail Mary releases its first gripping trailer
  • This just ain’t his story. It’s our story.” Washington Black makes the leap from book to screen
  • Book review: Thoroughly Disenchanted by Alexandra Almond
  • Graphic novel review: Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath
  • Book review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

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RSS SparklyPrettyBriiiight

  • This just ain’t his story. It’s our story.” Washington Black makes the leap from book to screen
    (courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTFollows the 19th-century odyssey of George Washington “Wash” Black, an 11-year-old boy born on a Barbados sugar plantation, whose prodigious scientific mind sets him on a path of unexpected destiny. When an incident forces Wash to flee, he is thrust into a globe-spanning adventure that challenges & Continue Reading
  • Book review: Thoroughly Disenchanted by Alexandra Almond
    (Harper Collins Publishers Australia) What great longing rests in the depths of our seemingly endless hearts and soul? For most of us, it’s really no more than a guess though if pressed we could likely name a few wished and longed-for things that we would like to see manifest like Continue Reading
  • Graphic novel review: Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath
    (courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Appearances, as we all know and have been instructed about repeatedly, can be deceiving. For one reason or another, people project one thing while living quite another, a white lie in most cases that avoids emotional entanglement, vulnerability or the need to share in something that Continue Reading
  • Book review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
    (courtesy Penguins Books Australia) Delving deep into someone’s life over a long period of time is something rarely afforded to us unless they are a family member or close friend. We might know people well and converse, laugh and cry with them over all sorts of life events but really Continue Reading
  • Songs, songs and more songs #124: GRANT KNOCHE, MO, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Lil Nas X + Miley Cyrus
    (via Shutterstock) Life is a LOT. And while there’s no escaping that, you can find ways to work through the myriad of emotions that summons, including of course channeling it into some highly cathartic music. These five artists do that brilliantly and well and the resultant songs manage to get Continue Reading
  • Book review: Salvage by Jennifer Mills
    (courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) What would happen if the world “ended” in slow motion? In other words, rather than the big bang and boom of the usual fall of civilisation that we have seen documented in all kinds of apocalyptic storytelling, what if the cataclysmic hell of the end of Continue Reading
  • Movie review: Flow
    (courtesy IMP Awards) It’s a rare thing indeed to emerge from watching a movie of any kind and feel both soothed and euphoric. Surely the two states are antithetical, with the more active one bludgeoning the other into emotional oblivion with boundlessly energetic vivacity? Or the former chilling you the Continue Reading
  • Breaking free: How Jim Henson and his team made the Muppets magic happen
    (courtesy Muppet Wiki / (c) The Jim Henson Company / Disney) SNAPSHOTThe illusions that have baffled me for years is when muppets go outside when they seem to break free from their puppeteers and become little sentient creatures….These movies were released before CGI was ubiquitous. These are in-camera effects. What Continue Reading
  • Book review: The Emilie Adventures by Martha Wells
    (courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Growing up should be a time of limitless optimism and possibility, a temporal place where imagination runs riot, adventure is the order of the day and all the burdens of the world don’t fall upon your still small shoulders. But sometimes, all those good and wonderful Continue Reading
  • Want to borrow some nostalgia? Head on over to Video Heaven
    (courtesy First Showing) SNAPSHOTFor some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture – and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years Continue Reading
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