What a difference a year makes! This time last year I was mired in the grief of losing my beloved father and while I still miss him dearly, life returned to normal, or whatever normal looks like after you lose a parent because nothing is ever the same again, Continue Reading
Movies
Movie review: The Florida Project
If you cast your mind back to the heady days of childhood, a feat that may be less taxing for some than others, you will recall how even the most troubling of events could be coated with a playful glow with little to no effort. That’s not because you Continue Reading
Happy Christmas everyone! May pop culture bless you every one …
What a big year it has been! Horrible in some respects – Trump, Australia’s treatment of refugees and North Korea sending off missiles I’m looking at you – but also delightful, wonderful, warm, funny and good for the heart, soul and spirit. Much of that joy has come from Continue Reading
Love and belonging are the unexpected gifts in Christmas short film “Tag”
Christmas is one of the most special times of the year. Family comes together, friends celebrate and neighbours commune, collectively giving the laudable ideals of peace and love a tangible, soul-stirring workout. But what if you don’t have that special someone, that companion who turns a bright and beautiful Continue Reading
Movie review: Coco (+ Olaf’s Frozen Adventure)
Families are wondrous and complicated things. We draw so much of our identity and support from them and yet we can also be messily at odds with them, inextricably part of them through flesh-and-blood and life experience, but separated by differing personality, opinion and life ambition. Pixar’s latest masterpiece, Continue Reading
Movie review: Wonder Wheel
If there is one consistent theme in much of American popular culture, it’s the Manifest Destiny-inspired notion that anything is possible in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This idea, while borne of some truth, is in many ways more ideal than reality, a Continue Reading
On 10th day of Christmas … I read A Die Hard Christmas picture book
Way back in 1988 when I first saw Die Hard, which is as much a love letter (albeit a violent one) as an action thriller – you may recall that John McClane (Bruce Willis) is in L.A. from New York where’s he’s a cop to see his estranged wife Continue Reading
Feeling festively frazzled? Watch this soothing short film of Mojave Desert ghost towns at night
SNAPSHOT SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM presents Mojave Forsaken — a timelapse journey through ghost towns of the Mojave Desert and the magnificent night skies there. Flanking the infamous Death Valley to the north, west and east, once-booming mining towns of Bodie, Cerro Gordo and Rhyolite now sit in decay at mercy of Continue Reading
Movie review: Star Wars – The Last Jedi
There comes a time in every franchise, even one as venerable and deeply-loved at George Lucas’s Star Wars when the old must give way to the new and the characters we know and love hand over, in this case at least, their light sabres and midi-chlorians and fly off Continue Reading
The short and the short of it: The serenity of the Fox and the Whale
Even a Christmas-aholic such as myself has to admit that there are times when the wonderful time of the year also feels like the most unendingly stressful. With pressure, internal and external to get everything in the bag, work and otherwise by 25 December – it’s an arbitrary line Continue Reading