(courtesy IMP Awards) Saying goodbye is never easy and that has never felt more poignant and obvious than during the final season of Sex Education, the fourth to be exact, in which a somewhat diminished cast spend much of their final year at school trying to better work out who Continue Reading
Festive movie review: Love at First Sight
(courtesy IMP Awards) Is there such a thing as fate? The answer to that huge, almost unanswerable question, likely rests on which side of the freewill vs inevitable destiny line you call on; if you’re a freethinker, the idea that you are somehow shackled to a particular outcome is odious Continue Reading
Book review: DallerGut Dream Department Store – The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out by Miye Lee (translated by Sandy Joosun Lee)
(courtesy Hachette Australia) There’s a scene in Pixar’s superlatively moving film Inside Out where Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and Bing Bong (Richard Kind) are passing through the part of the mind where dreams are made and Joy tries, and ultimately fails, not to fangirl over Rainbow Unicorn, the Continue Reading
Comic book review: Asterix and the White Iris by Fabcaro (writer) and Didier Conrad (illustrator)
(courtesy Hachette Australia) If you don’t have a magic potion to revive your spirits and strength every so often, or at least when a semi-threatening Roman legion is nearby, it can be easy to flag a little and to not be quite as peppy as you once were. That was Continue Reading
It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas ads … time to engage your heart (and yes, wallet)
(via Shutterstock) One of the old chestnuts, and not the fun kind that get festively roasted an on open fire, that comes out is every Christmas is how evil it is that this most iconic of festivals has been completely and utterly commercialised. And while, yes, perhaps we have taken Continue Reading
The short and the festive short of it: Believe in Christmas and No one Should be Alone at Christmas
(courtesy Stream Wars (c) Kurzfilm | Weihnachten Werbeclip der Erste Group Bank AG) Animated short films, especially those without dialogue, can really tell a powerfully impactful festive story with the most elegantly simple of ingredients. These two short films, which are, yes, ads in their own way, convey so much Continue Reading
Birthday movie review: One Life
(courtesy IMP Awards) If you haven’t directly exposed to the horrific vague ways in which people treat each other in war, violence and conflict, and how malevolently destructive extremist beliefs can be, it can be hard for them to move beyond the realm of dark and terrible things. We know Continue Reading
Birthday book review: Queen Bee by Ciara Geraghty
(courtesy Harper Collins Australia) Humanity is weird. We are; while we rightly take pride in our many positives and evolutionarily worthy accomplishments, we are also prone to more than a bit of superstition, twisted, strange belief systems and an enduring idea that certainly quite natural things are taboo in some Continue Reading
Songs, songs and more birthday songs #99: Retro favourites including “Pop Muzik”, “Born to Be Alive”, “I Eat Cannibals”, “Video Killed the Radio Star” and “Elaine” by ABBA
In my early years of discovering music in the 1970s, all I really listened to were the bands/artists my parents liked like The Seekers and Nana Mouskouri, and of course ABBA who were HUGE in Australia at the time. But then somewhere around disco bursting onto the scene, all kinds Continue Reading
Book review: Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland
(courtesy Hachette Australia) We all crave somewhere to belong. Somewhere where people know us, really know us, where we’re valued, our presence welcome and out absence sadly noted, and where, yes U.S. sitcom of legendary fame, everyone does indeed know our name. That’s why we join clubs, churches, volunteer at Continue Reading