It’s all too easy in our self-aware, postmodern age to be cynical about love, true love, and specifically its cinematic purveyor of choice, romantic comedies. After all, they’re an easy target – full of cliches, well-worn tropes, generalised characters formed by questionable life choices, odd best friends happy to subvert Continue Reading
Songs, songs and more songs #3: MANE, Elk Road & JES, Eves Karydas, Haelos, Eilish Gilligan + Eurovision update
Life is full of all kinds of experiences, good and bad. Sometimes we can express how they make us feel and sometimes we can’t; for those times when words escape us, we have music artists to do the heavy-lifting, articulation-wise for us, such the five featured in this post. Hailing Continue Reading
Monsters Inc: Gain a new perspective via Pixar’s Side-by-Side
SNAPSHOT Monsters Incorporated is the largest scare factory in the monster world, and James P. Sullivan (John Goodman) is one of its top scarers. Sullivan is a huge, intimidating monster with blue fur, large purple spots and horns. His scare assistant, best friend and roommate is Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), Continue Reading
Star Trek Discovery: “If Memory Serves” (S2, E8 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND BLUE SINGING PLANTS AND FAIRLY-INVASIVE THERAPY WITHOUT THE COMFY COUCH … Hands up everyone who loves dredging up really super-traumatic memories? And again, those of you who like doing that in a dank cave-like structure underground on restricted Federation planet Talos IV – the very same Continue Reading
Movie review: Non-Fiction (Doubles vies)
When is a comedy not really a comedy? When it’s Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies), a 2018 French film from director Olivier Assayas (who also wrote the screenplay), the trailer for which recalls some madly funny descent into adulterous farce but which in actuality plays more as a neverending literary festival where Continue Reading
Are Mickey, Donald and Goofy “Outta Time”? Yeah, they kinda are …
SNAPSHOT Mickey and Donald set out to rescue Goofy after he time travels back to the past in one of Professor Von Drake’s inventions. (synopsis via YouTube) The space/time continuum is a highly-delicate construct it seems. One small slip, one tweak of the timeline, one Goofy act (pun wholly and Continue Reading
Book review: A Love Story for Bewildered Girls by Emma Morgan
To hear Disney, Hallmark or a thousand other purveyors of romantic dreamscapes tell it, all we want it to fall headlong into someone’s arms, surrender ourselves to them and live, fairytale-like, happily ever after. It’s a captivating idea, that love could be that all-consuming and satisfying, that everything we’ve ever Continue Reading
IDGAF! Thoughts on Grace and Frankie season 5
One of the great rewards of getting older, and they are there, creaky body parts and forgetful memory notwithstanding, is the increasing sense that you can do as you please. Of course, you can’t always do that since people weirdly insist on your wearing clothes on public transport and a Continue Reading
We’re all looking for Someone Great right? Netflix thinks so …
SNAPSHOT Aspiring music journalist Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) has just landed her dream job at an iconic magazine and is about to move to San Francisco. Rather than do long distance, her boyfriend of nine years (Lakeith Stanfield) decides to call it quits. To nurse her broken heart, Jenny gathers up Continue Reading
Movie review: Captain Marvel
For those of us mere mortals caught unceremoniously, and with much banality in our ordinary lives of which movies usually are not made, superheroes are impossibly exotic and exciting. They may often be of terrestrial origin, the product of a radiation leak or a spider bite or parental deprivation, but Continue Reading