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Andrew's wonderful world of pop culture

Book review: The First Murder on Mars by Sam Wilson

Posted on January 31, 2025January 31, 2025 by aussiemoose

(courtesy Hachette Australia) There’s a lovely, and surprisingly enduring, romantic idea that if you could just take humanity away from its usual surroundings that somehow we’d suddenly morph into thoughtful, more caring and emotionally and intellectually advanced beings. It’s borne from that post-World War Two optimism, now being sadly and Continue Reading

Posted In Books

Can the end of things also be its beginning? Thoughts on Earth Abides (season 1)

Posted on January 31, 2025January 31, 2025 by aussiemoose

(courtesy IMP Awards) It’s become a well-worn pattern in apocalyptic storytelling to portray the end of the world as a one-way, cataclysmic slide into oblivion for good old Homo Sapiens. Whether it’s alien invasion or zombies or a pandemic, humanity is knocked down and comprehensively so, and if it does Continue Reading

Posted In Books, Streaming, TV

Book review: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

Posted on January 29, 2025January 28, 2025 by aussiemoose

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) When you have spent much of your life being placed in the “Others” camp, that is, not part of the heteronormative white mainstream, then it can be tough to explain to those firmly in that camp what it’s like not slot neatly and without censure into Continue Reading

Posted In Books

Movie review: A Complete Unknown

Posted on January 29, 2025January 30, 2025 by aussiemoose

(courtesy IMP Awards) Plunging into a biopic of someone you know about but who isn’t someone you know well, can be an interesting, and sometimes illuminating, exercise. By sheer dint of their celebrity and ubiquity, you will have some surface knowledge about them floating around your knowledge-burgeoning mind, but beyond Continue Reading

Posted In Movies

Book review: Special Delivery by Leesa Ronald

Posted on January 28, 2025January 28, 2025 by aussiemoose

It’s often the case that when our lives change, they change in fairly big ways. Sure, we witness incremental shifts on an almost daily basis, but that’s usually to do with small things such as a picking different café to get our coffees or walking a different way to work. Continue Reading

Posted In Books

Comic strip review: Breaking the Chain: The Guard Dog Story by Patrick McDonnell (Mutts)

Posted on January 28, 2025January 27, 2025 by aussiemoose

(courtesy Abrams Books) From its launch on 5 September 1994, the comic strips Mutts by Patrick McDonnell, has always worn its heart very much on its sleeve. Far from being just four panels and a gag – though that is not a bad thing; whimsical escapism in and of itself Continue Reading

Posted In Comics

Book review: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on January 24, 2025January 24, 2025 by aussiemoose

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Stuck, as many of us lamentably often are, in a variety of fairly unchanging workplaces, the idea that we might be condemned to wandering the earth without ceasing for our entire lives might seem an attractive Continue Reading

Posted In Books

UPCOMING READS: All Wrapped Up by Heidi Swain

Posted on January 24, 2025January 23, 2025 by aussiemoose

(not final cover; courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) SNAPSHOTIn Wynbridge, the scent of autumn is on the breeze and love is in the air… Clemmie Bennett has been renovating beautiful Rowan Cottage on the outskirts of the small town of Wynbridge, for eighteen months following a very public heartbreak back Continue Reading

Posted In Books

A revolution begins … Thoughts on Silo season 2

Posted on January 22, 2025January 22, 2025 by aussiemoose

(courtesy IMP Awards) Humanity has always been defined by an exuberant need to LIVE. Not just get by nor survive but to LIVE, to revel in possibility and promise and to explore all the amazing ways we can express our innate curiosity, passion and vivacious fascination with life. But what Continue Reading

Posted In Books, Streaming

Book review: The Serial Killer’s Guide to San Francisco by Michelle Choiunard

Posted on January 22, 2025January 20, 2025 by aussiemoose

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Once upon a time, a certain reader devoured all of Agatha Christie’s novels in one roughly year-long go at the suggestion of his book-loving dad who saw the works of the masterful English crime writer as Continue Reading

Posted In Books

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  • Take the plunge with the fun new trailer for The Pout-Pout Fish
  • Book review: Unnecessary Drama by Nina Kenwood
  • Christmas movie preview: Jingle Bell Heist, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, Champagne Problems + My Secret Santa
  • Movie review: Tron: Ares
  • Book review: The Maskeys by Stuart Everly-Wilson

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RSS SparklyPrettyBriiiight

  • Christmas movie preview: Jingle Bell Heist, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, Champagne Problems + My Secret Santa
    (via Shutterstock) If you have only ever paid passing attention to this blog, and seriously, why would you not dive into its wonderfully eclectic depths (a conversation for another time perhaps?), you will realise that I LOVE Christmas. LOVE. IT. The apartments gets decorated within an inch of its life. Continue Reading
  • Movie review: Tron: Ares
    (courtesy IMP Awards) Movie trilogies are often, though not always, governed by the wholly unforgiving law of diminishing returns. What was vital and fresh in the first film becomes diluted though often still appealing in the second film all of which means that by the third instalment, there is a Continue Reading
  • Book review: The Maskeys by Stuart Everly-Wilson
    (courtesy Transit Lounge Publishing) Despite this book’s title, The Maskeys, and no, this does not require a spoiler alert, are not the centrepiece of the novel which bears their rather blighted name. Penned by Stuart Everly-Wilson, who brought us the superlatively good Low Expectations, The Maskeys revolves instead around Rodney, Continue Reading
  • Step into your future with the first official trailer for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy + sneak peek at Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S4
    (courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTThis thrilling new chapter follows a fresh class of cadets as they train under the watchful, demanding eyes of Starfleet’s finest. Together, they’ll face highs & lows of academy life: forging unbreakable friendships, clashing in explosive rivalries, experiencing first loves, & stepping into their destiny as the Continue Reading
  • Retro movie review: Tron: Legacy
    (courtesy IMP Awards) Long delayed movie sequels are pretty thick on the ground with Hollywood having taken up the rallying cry of “Leverage the IP!” with bottom-line scanning gusto. Like anything driven partly by a desire to expand a franchise rather than coming up with a startling new idea, some Continue Reading
  • Book review: Love Bites by Cynthia St. Aubin
    (courtesy Tor Publishing Group) The crime genre, early teenage voracious consumption of Agatha Christie’s entire output aside, has never really compelled this reviewer to sit down and read like, say science-fiction or slice-of-life quirky dramas. While most sections of my favourite bookshops see regular footfall from me, the crime section Continue Reading
  • Graphic novel review: Stitch Head by Guy Bass (writer) and Pete Williamson (artwork)
    (courtesy Larrikin Press) It’s a recurring theme in all kinds of creative expression – just who are the monsters really and might they be lurking where you least suspect? The answer, to the second question at least, is an emphatic “YES!!”, owing to the fact that humanity, despite millennia of Continue Reading
  • Retro movie review: Tron
    (courtesy IMP Awards) Jumping back in time, if not literally then at least cinematically, is always an interesting exercise. Nostalgia exerts a powerful pull on all of us, and watching how it fares when it comes to seeing the object of its hagiographying live and in person again is a Continue Reading
  • Book review: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
    (courtesy Hachette Australia) Life can often like a series of existentially testing events, punctuated by rare moments of levity and joy and wrapped in a lifetime of pain, hurt, loss and hard-won gains. That might seem bleak but for most it’s an accurate take on this thing called life, and Continue Reading
  • Songs, songs and more songs #129: Georgia, BENEE, Sigrid, Ella Collier + Moyka + ABBA performimg “Mamma Mia” in 1975
    (via Shutterstock) There are some months that just reward you with brilliant songs. Songs that, for a whole host of reasons, you play over and over again and which, for this beleaguered commuter reviewer at least, making walking to the train station and back not feel quite so arduous and Continue Reading
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