The challenge for any series that manages to make it past the first few seasons, when cancellation lurks like some sort of televisual predator (yes, even for streaming shows) is balancing the twin competing demands of delivering up characters and situations that audiences have come to love while still forging Continue Reading
What was life like for Bo Peep before Toy Story 4? Lamp Life fills us in
When we come across someone we haven’t seen in a while, we intellectually know they’ve likely done a LOT of living since we saw them; it stands to reason unless they spent the intervening period between meet-ups sitting in a dark room humming manically to themselves. (It’s not as much Continue Reading
Movie review: The Peanut Butter Falcon
If there are two things that define us, in the best way possible, as humans it is the need to belong and to feel as if and what we do matter. The two are often though not always inextricably linked with the simple but profound fact of finding our “why” Continue Reading
Everyone’s saying “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” … no, really
“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” As iconic movie lines go, these immortal words of vengeance and loss from The Princess Bride are right up there among the best. How iconic exactly? So famous and suffused through the pop culture consciousness of humanity that Continue Reading
Book review: Star-crossed by Minnie Darke
Are our lives governed by fate or free choice? It’s a weighty question, one that pops up in religious and philosophical reasoning far more than it doesn’t and for good reason – a great many of us want to know whether we are responsible for our actions or can happily Continue Reading
Success or exile: Warrior Yenni faces unyielding options in Given by Nandi Taylor
SNAPSHOTUnable to watch her father waste away from a mysterious illness, fierce warrior Yenni, of the Yirba tribe, sets off for a distant empire. Determined to find a cure for her father, Yenni travels to Cresh, where she comes face to face with culture shock, prejudice, and a brazen shape-shifting Continue Reading
Book review: A People’s History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian
Life is often a heartbreakingly beautiful mix of the good and the bad, the joyful and the morose, the ugly and the poetic. Life’s torturously contrary state of being is captured in all its tarnished glory by Mathangi Subramanian in her debut novel A People’s History of Heaven which centres Continue Reading
Awww stormtroopers are (alien) cat people too
SNAPSHOTI Miss You is a touching animated short created by artist Henrik Tomenius about a Stormtrooper missing his cute little alien cat who is far, far away. (synopsis (c) Laughing Squid) I’m a Rebel Alliance kind of guy. I want the goodies to win … and the baddies? Well, I want them to be bested, Continue Reading
Classic book review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
For a species wholly enamoured with its ability to stick around for the duration, humanity displays a surprising obsession with apocalyptic endings to its existence. Try zombies, alien invasions, viral epidemics, global warming, asteroid impacts, supernatural calamities … the list goes on and on and on. To this list of Continue Reading
Movie review: Jojo Rabbit
If there is one topic that is guaranteed, in something approaching land speed records, to set the ideological cat among the pigeons, it is anything to do with the Nazi era in Germany. It’s hardly surprising – in 12 years horrifically destructive years the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler enacted Continue Reading