Happy pop culture new year everyone! – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

Here’s to more movies, books, songs, TV shows, cartoon and comic strips and so much more in 2019!

Book review: That Island Feeling by Karina May

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Heading off on holidays, all we really want is to get away from the insistent stresses and strains of everyday life. Hand us a cocktail, sit us by the pool or in a bush cabin somewhere, banish the internet to a simpler, more analogue time and Continue Reading

Movie review: Project Hail Mary

(courtesy IMP Awards) At the heart of every great and enduring sci-fi story, sits an impressive amount of evocative humanity. It’s easy just to see the spaceships and the planetary expanses and aliens and wars and epic space opera sprawling across millennia and impossibly far light years of stars and Continue Reading

“Oh my God, run!!” The End of Oak Street releases a prehistorically intriguing trailer

(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOT“Our house, our neighborhood, our whole street has moved.” Filmed for IMAX. After a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports their neighborhood to someplace unknown, the Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on them sticking together as they navigate their Continue Reading

Book review: The Last Poem by Courtney Peppernell

(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) When my parents died less than four years apart in the mid-to-late 2010s, I was plunged into the kind of grief I had never really known before. And honestly, I wasn’t sure what to do with it; I expected it to be intense then ebb Continue Reading

Meaning and mutual understanding: A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough

(courtesy First Showing) SNAPSHOTThis intimate documentary blends the remarkable story of David Attenborough’s first encounter with the baby gorilla Pablo with a deep dive into how Pablo’s direct descendants are doing today in the mountains of Rwanda. Weaving together contemporary and archival footage of the gorilla group and narrated by Continue Reading

Movie review: Hoppers

(courtesy IMP Awards) Really believing in something, in its purest and least judgmental form, is among life’s greatest joys. There’s nothing like the passion that courses through your veins, the sparkle of idea fizzing with excitable urgency around your brain and your heart being fully engaged in something that really Continue Reading

Book review: I’m Not the Only Murderer in My Retirement Home by Fergus Craig

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Even though the books of Agatha Christie were my entry way into adult reading, thanks to the insightful thoughtfulness of father, an inveterate reader himself, I spent many years away from the crime genre for reasons I can’t fully explain. My way back to the genre came Continue Reading

Finding your (unexpected) people: Thoughts on Dog Park

(courtesy IMDb (c) ABC TV) When life begins to resemble a faint sparkle of its former sparkling promise and glow, the natural reaction is to withdraw from the people around you. It makes sense in one way; life has become too much to handle, and since people make up much Continue Reading

Book review: The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) What a marvellous creation, The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell is. Set for much of its intriguing and compelling storyline at the titular magical hotel in Switzerland, the novel is a richly intoxicating and moving exploration of how grief manifests in all kinds of ways, Continue Reading

Movie review: What is Love? (C’est quoi l’amour ?) #AFFFF26

(courtesy French Film Festival/Palace Cinemas) The end of romantic love is generally portrayed as a piece of cataclysmic, antagonistic trauma with hopes sullied, joy vanquished and that cost sense of belonging messily ripped asunder. In short, it is very much a Dickensian worst of times. But in What is Love? Continue Reading

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