The following is my love letter, on Love Your Bookshop Day, to my favourite bookstore in the world – Better Read Than Dead in Newtown, Sydney, Australia. It’s a rare thing indeed for me, even as an inveterate people person who connects with just about everyone after 4.5 nanoseconds (likely Continue Reading
Book review: Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
You could be forgiven, mere pages into the nostalgia-tinged, conversationally-oriented wonder that Daisy Jones & The Six, for thinking that the novel should be shelved in the music section of your local bookstore rather than on its fiction shelves. Styled like a VH1 Behind the Music special, where anyone and Continue Reading
MUTTS: Take a sneak peek at “The Art of Nothing”
There is a great deal that the legendary Charles Schulz got right about a great many things but perhaps one of his best calls was saying that the Mutts comic strip, launched by Patrick McDonnell on 5 September, 1994, is “one of the best comic strips of all time.” That’s Continue Reading
Life, love, and tragedy: The quirkily moving storytelling of Fleabag (season 1)
I love Fleabag. It’s a quirky, refreshingly honest and often funny take on the messy business of human, a grossly flawed undertaking at the best of times but one made all the more impossible to navigate by the intrusion of grief which twists and turns already-challenging life situations to the Continue Reading
The short and the short of it: The escapist joy of Pups ‘n’ Planes
SNAPSHOTA boy with muscular dystrophy and his dog go on an adventure of discovery in an old spitfire plane. (synopsis via Vimeo (c) Wonderlust) Imagination is a powerful thing. It lifts us well and truly out of the banal and the everyday, the hopeless and the can’t-be-done to a place Continue Reading
Book review: The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
For all the beauty, love and grandeur of which humanity is capable, there is also a frightening capacity for evil on a horrifying scale. Nowhere has this dark part of our collective soul been more terribly expressly that in the Holocaust when the Nazis murdered six million Jews (along with Continue Reading
Benjamin: “It’s about my inability to love, but I’m fine now.”
SNAPSHOTIn Simon Amstell’s affecting, bittersweet comedy, a rising young filmmaker is thrown into emotional turmoil by a burgeoning romance and the upcoming premiere of his second feature. (synopsis via IMDb) If you are to believe countless representations of falling love, all it takes is openness, a romantically fairy, god or Continue Reading
Movie review: Happy Ending #SCA19
Life is, whether we like to admit it or not, a series of reckonings. Going to school for the first time. Leaving home and starting life as a newly-minted grown-up. Marrying. Having kids. Not having kids. Securing that dream job. And as explored in Hella Joof’s supremely self-assured film Happy Continue Reading
Come and take a look behind the curtain with Star Trek: Discovery and Star Wars
Not everyone likes to pull back the curtain hiding the gears and mechanisms that make a movie or TV show come alive. For some, wholly entering into that created world is sacrosanct; they want the experience of being transported far away from the everyday, to feel as if it is Continue Reading
Comics review: The Dream Merchant
We all know nightmares are frightening places to be. Which is waking from them, even if it is with a scream and a momentarily debilitating loss of certainty about where and who we are, is always a sweet and blessed, reality-embracing relief. But if your nightmares are the same each Continue Reading