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!

Latest releases May book review: Homebound by Portia Elan

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) OOOO OOOO OOOO (courtesy official author site) OOOO OOOO OOOO

(courtesy IMP Awards) Having just read a book about the messiness of real, honest grief, and not the clean, tidy kind that only exists in societal expectations and narratively convenient movies, it’s refreshing to encounter another story, this one based on a memoir, where grief is shorn of all its Continue Reading

Latest releases May book review: This is Where We Say Goodbye by Howard McKenzie-Murray

(courtesy Fremantle Press) We live in a society mortally afraid of death and so, when it someone we love dies, it’s expected that our expressions of grief will not be prolonged and will stay on socially neat lanes. Its a ridiculous expectation to have for a whole host of emotional Continue Reading

Movie review: Finding Emily

(courtesy IMP Awards) Give a genre enough time in the pop culture sun and it will inevitably find itself weighed down with tropes and cliches in abundance which it is expected will be presented and accounted in every story that falls within its grasp. You can’t escape it – as Continue Reading

Eight dates … eight moments … eight chances to fall in love … Two Years Later drops trailer

(courtesy First Showing) SNAPSHOTWhen their work commute is interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns, Emily and Ryan (starring Phoebe Tonkin & Brenton Thwaites) reunite two years later after a series of brief flirtatious interactions. Ryan proposes an idea – to go on a series of eight dates to decide if Continue Reading

Latest releases May book review: Side Character Energy by Olivia Tolich

(courtesy Text Publishing) Have you ever been rolling along in life, thinking everything is okay and then woken up one day to realise you’re actually a bit player in your own life? In other words, if there were awards for your life, and why the hell shouldn’t there be, you’d Continue Reading

Movie review: Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

(courtesy IMP Awards) You have to feel a certain amount of sympathy for anyone connected to a major franchise who is trying to steer it through the viciously opinionated waters of today’s digital age. Everyone seems to have an idea about what should, and even more emphatically what shouldn’t happen Continue Reading

Latest releases May book review: Henry Goes Bush by Wayne Marshall

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There are certain figures who are so intrinsic to a country’s modern identity that you automatically assume you know everything is about them. But as a fantastically imaginative and thoroughly clever new novel, Henry Goes Bush by Wayen Marshall, makes clear, that’s not always so. The Continue Reading

Sometimes the universe leaves you a message: Voicemails for Isabelle trailer

(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTVoicemails for Isabelle charts an unexpected romance between Jill (Zoey Deutch) & Wes (Nick Robinson). After her sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo) dies, Jill copes by continuing to leave her new voicemails. About everything from her boss Chef Bastien’s (Nick Offerman) insufferable antics to how heartbroken she is Continue Reading

The short and the short of it: motherhood in the spotlight in Pixar artist’s Mother’s Nature

(courtesy First Showing (c) Pixar) SNAPSHOTMother’s Nature is a series of vignettes with a playful twist on what it means to be a mom, whether you’re a turtle, parrot or anything in between. Directed by Valerie LaPointe and Produced by Claire Munzer and Paige Johnstone. (courtesy YouTube (c) Pixar) This Continue Reading

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