Christmas is usually the most wonderful time of the year. But when you have just lost someone impossibly near and dear to me, and you have have fond and abiding memories of Christmas, it can often feel like the land that happiness forgot, a season awash in jollity, tinsel and Continue Reading
Movies
On 5th day of #Christmas … I rewatched The Muppet Christmas Carol
Can you think of anything better than Christmas with the Muppets? How about Christmas with the Muppets as they bring quirky but affecting life to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, his immortal tale of festive redemption and renewal in which cruelly fossilised businessman Ebenezer Scrooge, played in this heartwarming iteration Continue Reading
Movie review: No Time to Die
Farewells are never the easiest of things to pull off. So much emotional baggage, so much pressure to make them count and be memorable in all the right ways and a host of jagged loose ends to tie up, the kind that don’t always lend themselves to neat and tidy Continue Reading
On 3rd day of Christmas … I watched Single All the Way (movie review)
It is never easy to remake any movie genre in your own creative image. Stray too far from the formula that audiences know and love and you risk killing the goose that laid the golden box office egg; cleave too closely to it however, and you lose any spark of Continue Reading
On 1st day of Christmas … I put 15 pop culture ornaments on my tree incl. The Rescuers, UP, Toy Story, Ahsoka Tano, Peanuts, Dr Seuss + Scooby-Doo
We all know history repeats itself thanks to the ongoing presence of human being in the process who alas have shown a freakish propensity for making the same mistakes over and over and over again, but did 2021 really have to ape 2020 so completely and absolutely? I think we Continue Reading
Movie review: 8-Bit Christmas
Ah, the hazy, crazy days of youth! Specifically the late 1980s when kids definitely wore bike helmets – shhhhh, no, they didn’t but don’t tell today’s kids that – and the biggest, baddest Christmas present goals out there were, beside getting a freckled Cabbage Patch Kid, was securing your very Continue Reading
Movie review: Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings
If you have ever believed that characters go a long way to making a movie, and they are integral to a considerable degree however much importance you place them, then you’ll find Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to be vindication of that approach. For though this recent Continue Reading
The festive short and the short of it: The accidental Christmas delights of Timber
SNAPSHOT“When Emily is nearly knocked off her bike by a careless driver, the passing car drops a Christmas tree in its wake. In the spirit of Christmas she takes it upon herself to find the owner, which leads her down an unexpected path.” The project started in Mid-November with a Continue Reading
Christmas is a time to Love Hard … or is it? (movie review)
Christmas comes with a lot of expectations. A LOT. Many of them are delightfully festive and tinsel-draped, some are not but one thing is for sure – finding love at Christmas comes with a host of problems, not least the idea that in the midst of falling snow, twinkling lights Continue Reading
Birthday movie review: Red Notice
For the most part, criminals and Bond masterminds with a propensity for over-explaining their evil plans aside, people are generally law-abiding folks who stay politely within legally-set margins. We are, for want of a better phrase, good people. Which could explain why watching other people, especially glamorous people with access Continue Reading