Christmas is a pretty powerful time of the year. Or, at least, that’s the way it often seems with popular culture and some sort of giddy group consensus joining together to ordain it as the time of the year, the most wonderful time of the year in fact, when just Continue Reading
Movie review: Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker
You might find it hard to believe but there are downsides to being the steward of one of the most successful cinema franchises of all time. Star Wars, which took the world by storm in 1977 when George Lucas released his charmingly low budget swashbuckling sci-fi epic, A New Hope Continue Reading
On 10th day of Christmas … I watched the movie Noelle
Unless you are someone staging a nativity play, in which case strict depiction of sacred religious truths is a virtue, there is a temptation whenever you tell a story about any aspect of Christmas’s many well-worn tropes and cliches to place your own merry, eggnog-addled spin on it. In fact, Continue Reading
Book review: The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith
History is all too often the art of looking back at facts and not personalities. When we examine the big epoch-defining events of our time and those that preceded it, we are often apt to look at what took place rather than who made it take place. That is largely Continue Reading
Christmas Comes to Moominvalley (adapted from the Tove Jansson classic) by Alex Haridi & Cecilia Davidsson / illustrated by Filippa Widlund
The chances are that if you haven’t heard of Christmas, then you have been living under the proverbial rock, without deliveries of junk mail or without access to a streaming platform or no nearby mall or singing angels in the sky announcing the saviour’s birth (you know, it happens ALL Continue Reading
Ho! Ho! What ho! My 2 fave British sitcom Christmas episodes – Miranda and the Vicar of Dibley
“Hi, my name is Andrew and I am a Christmas tragic.” I utter these words not out of any kind of sense of shame because, well, CHRISTMAS, but because it’s best we get it out and into the open. (Although if you’ve been paying any attention to the blog at Continue Reading
On 9th day of Christmas … I listened to The Holiday Sounds of Josh Rouse
When it comes to summoning up the sounds, and more pertinently for this review, the sounds of Christmas, there is an understandably heavy bias towards evoking the sensibilities of a cold and cosy northern hemisphere Christmas. Thanks most notably to the classic poem A Visit From St. Nicholas by Clement Continue Reading
Festively scary goings-on: The spooky fun of A Scooby-Doo! Christmas (2002)
Do creepy town-scaring ghouls, ghosts and monsters take Christmas off to be with their own demented loved ones? They do not, which frankly is a very good thing for 2002’s A Scooby-Doo! Christmas which sees Scooby (Frank Welker) and Shaggy (Casey Kasem), Velma (Mindy Kohn), Daphne (Grey DeLisle) and Fred Continue Reading
On 8th day of Christmas … I read Across the Void by S. K. Vaughn #BookReview
Nothing captures the imagination like trying to rescue someone in impossible circumstances and it doesn’t get much more impossible than the cold and unforgiving surrounds of outer space. An environment noted for its hostility to life as much as its startling beauty, journeying into space is not for the fainthearted Continue Reading
Further adventures in a galaxy far, far away: Thoughts on The Mandalorian
One of the marquee shows adorning the bright and shiny new Disney + streaming platform – quite where the “plus” comes in isn’t clear since the expansive roster of TV shows and movies is either directly Disney or from companies such as Marvel and Lucasfilm which are owned by the Continue Reading