Guardians of the Galaxy is a phenomenon. Released just under two weeks ago in the USA, it has already taken in approximately $175 million domestically, with similar success overseas, it has taken everything we thought we knew about Marvel’s unarguably successful superhero films, all of which march to a reasonably similar Continue Reading
RIP Robin Williams: From Mork and Mindy to Dead Poets Society and beyond, you will be remembered
Robin Williams was an amazing man. Bursting into my childhood in the late 1970s via the colourful sitcom, Mork and Mindy (1978-1982), in which he starred as a manic, over the top alien with a penchant for eggs, learning about his new home Earth, and the eventual love of Continue Reading
Happy 40th birthday ABBA: Live at Wembley Arena to release this September
If you thought that ABBA are done celebrating their milestone 40th year, think again. Along with the Waterloo Deluxe album release, and books ABBA the Official Photo Book and ABBA The Backstage Stories / The Treasures, and The Story of ABBA by one of the band members Björn Ulvaeus, the Continue Reading
Marvellous massing of movie trailers: Horns, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, Maze Runner, Interstellar, Predestination
We’re off to explore the fantastical, the unusual, the intergalactic, the oddly non-linear in this edition of Marvellous Massing of Movie Trailers with movies that refuse to be bound by the bland, the everyday, the here and now. And the results are quite promising with all five movies featured Continue Reading
Weekend pop art: The books of our childhood tattooed on our heart … and elsewhere
I have always been a prodigious reader. I can’t remember a single moment from my childhood when I wasn’t reading any book I could get my hands from Dr. Seuss through to Tove Jannsson’s Moomins and Nils-Olof Franzén’s Agaton Sax series through to The Hardy Boys, the William series, Alfred Continue Reading
Falling Skies: Saturday Night Massacre (S4, E7 review)
* Here there be beamers, mechs, skitters and … SPOILERS* You may not have realised it, what with all the death, destruction and alien invasion going on, but all throughout the harder, darker, grittier, passive/aggressive Lexi-filled season 5, Falling Skies has been apocalypse flirting with us. With a monstrous Continue Reading
Movie review: Lucy
Ever since Charles Darwin handed down his ground-breaking work on evolutionary biology, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, there has been an ongoing debate about exactly what humanity as a whole is capable of. Are we destined to keep evolving to ever higher forms until we reach some, at Continue Reading
Book review: The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
The urge to belong is a powerful impulse. It impels us to do everything from mimicking certain patterns of speech, adopting different hair and clothing styles, seeking out fora both online and off that we can actively participate in, and giving up all manner of affectations, luxuries or vice, Continue Reading
I spy a new gleefully funny trailer for The Penguins of Madagascar
SNAPSHOT Discover the secrets of the most entertaining and mysterious birds in the global espionage game: Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private now must join forces with the chic spy organization, the North Wind, led by Agent Classified (we could tell you his name, but then… you know), voiced by Continue Reading
Movie review: These Final Hours
If there is one common thread running through the seeming never-ending spate of apocalypse-themed movies and TV shows of late, it is that it is possible, even as the world is ending, to come across some modicum of humanity, a lingering trace of the better angels of our nature. Continue Reading