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
The short and the short of it: Return of the Monster’s scary deja vu
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
Movie review: Call Me By Your Name
(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
Dancing with Disney: James Casey shows us how
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
Book review: Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill
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
Jumpy lives to jump! Video game character goes all out to win
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
Star Trek Discovery: “Despite Yourself” (S1, E10 review)
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
Kaboom! Independence Day meets Star Wars in this entertaining mashup
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
Comics review: Dastardly & Muttley (issues 1-4)
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
Dr. Seuss – Putting Rhymes to Good Use (KaptainKristian video essay)
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