Getting to see movies in the cinema this year has proved all but impossible thanks to COVID-19. It still remains the case that seeing movies on the big screen is more difficult than it used to be with cinemas selling a vastly reduced number of tickets due to social distancing Continue Reading
Movie review: The Half of It
Love, of the kind that resides with Cupid, in endless romantic comedies and more than a few Hallmark cards and Valentine’s Day rose bouquets, is a fairly polarising thing. While there are those who sing its praises with lofty, rose-coloured glasses abandon, believing firmly, like Plato, that we are separated Continue Reading
Way way away from the Bridge: The challenges and fun of Star Trek: Lower Decks
SNAPSHOT“Lower Decks is developed by Mike McMahan, creator of Hulu’s Solar Opposites and co-creator of Rick and Morty. It focuses on the support crew aboard an insignificant Starfleet starship, the California-class USS Cerritos, shortly after the Next Generation era, in 2380, after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis. “The cast Continue Reading
Book review: The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery
For most people in the heavily secular 21st century, the world begins and ends with the things we can touch, see and taste. We live, as Madonna observed, in a material world and the majority of us are content with boundaries that are physical and see no need to venture Continue Reading
The delightfulness of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking #Peanuts #ChristmasInJuly
There’s no question that Peanuts makes Christmas special. Spending time with Snoopy, Charlie Brown. Lucy, Sally and the rest of the thoughtfully lovable cast of characters brings not only a richness to proceedings since these are kids who really think things through, but a quirky delightfulness as they pose the Continue Reading
Book review: Ghost Species by James Bradley
As the dominant species on the ever-worsening earth block, Homo Sapiens has developed quite the existential swagger. Unchallenged for some 300,000 years, we think we are the be-all and end-all of sentient, kings and queens of all we survey, so mighty and in control that there is nothing we cannot Continue Reading
Weekend (animated) pop art: 6 amazing Instagram animators
While there are complaints aplenty about the attendant evils social media and the internet, the reality is, as with any technology, that we have gained far more than we have lost. Access to massive online audiences has allowed creators of all kinds to reach people who would never have seen Continue Reading
Time to have a retro “Christmas with the Addams Family” #ChristmasInJuly
Just how many Santas is too many? And, by extension, how many presents are too many? You might think that there can’t possibly be a surfeit of either thing at the most wonderful time of the year but in “Christmas With the Addams Family”, broadcast on 24 December 1965, that Continue Reading
Movie review: Love Sarah
Initially, and this is thanks largely to a trailer which is eager to accent the heartwarming quirkiness of it all, Love Sarah comes across a fey, souffle-light whisp of a film, the kind the British churn out (in the nicest possible way) with the polished efficiency of, well, a well-run Continue Reading
Book review: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books (via NetGalley) – release date 8 September 2020 in Australia and UK. Buried somewhere deep within a great many of us is a compulsive need to seek grand, soul-soaring adventure, the kind that plucks you giddily out of the banal and the everyday and sends Continue Reading