November 21, 2020 – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

When you’re growing up, figuring out who you are and how the people around you matter is not always a straightforward exercise. It should be, on paper at least, a slam dunk that you would love your mother since she, in all likelihood very much loves you back but in Continue Reading

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

Retro movie review: Speed

Movie review: Days of the Bagnold Summer