Whether we realise or not, all of us launch on this strange journey called life with expectations aplenty, which, depending on our luck or dogged persistence, will find some fulfilment or die a slow and suffocating death. Or if you’re forty year old Lorenz Meran (Fabian Krüger), a Swiss Continue Reading
Road to Eurovision 2014: Week 2 – Denmark, Estonia, FYR Macedonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany
WHAT IS THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST? Started way back in 1956 as a way to draw a fractured Europe back together with the healing power of music, the Eurovision Song Contest, or Concours Eurovision de la Chanson – the contest is telecast in both English and French – is open Continue Reading
The Walking Dead: “A” (S4, E16 review)
The explosive finale of season 4 of The Walking Dead, enigmatically titled “A”, was many things – tense, deceitful, cruel, vindictive, hopeful, suspicious, but above all, an excellent lesson in relativity. Or to put it another way, no matter how great you think your own sins are, a factor which Continue Reading
Whoosh! Where’d they go? 3 movies that may have passed you by
Time is so annoyingly finite. In a perfect world of endless time and minimal sleep, I would be watching all the movies, #allofthemovies!, and doing my best not to overdose on Maltesers, popcorn and choc tops. But alas, there are only so many hours in the day and so Continue Reading
Movie review: Noah
Adapting any story, regardless of its literary source, into a big screen film, especially one with a budget as big as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, is an exercise fraught with a thousand degrees of barbaric difficulty. No matter how you slice or dice its plots, themes or characters, someone, somewhere Continue Reading
All aboard for Harmontown: A documentary about Dan Harmon, creator of Community
Brilliant and wildly creative he may be, and the father of Community, one of the one of the most idiosyncratic, funny and inventive sitcoms I have ever had the privilege to watch but there’s no escaping the fact that Dan Harmon is a polarising figure. His flair for flawed, Continue Reading
Oh my! Sci-fi: Trailers + posters for Jupiter Ascending, Edge of Tomorrow, The Signal
This year is shaping up as another banner year for science fiction with a host of releases on the schedule including Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (6 November AU/7 November USA), UK production The Machine (25 April USA), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Transcendence, The Prototype (date unspecified) and even Continue Reading
Weekend Pop Art: Famous bands and their Lego doppelgängers
Lego are quite the flavour of the month at the moment, thanks largely to the incalculable charms of the recently released The LEGO Movie. The movie, about which barely a bad review has been penned, imagines a world where everyone and everything is made up of the wonderful Danish blocks, Continue Reading
Music review: The Take Off and Landing of Everything by Elbow
There is a world weary beauty, both musical and lyrical, to Elbow’s The Takeoff and Landing of Everything that captivates the troubled soul, and soothes the ear dulled by the cacophony of life’s trials and tribulations, from the first delicate opening notes. Never afraid to tackle the weightier issues Continue Reading
Movie review: The Grand Budapest Hotel
It would be tempting to call The Grand Budapest Hotel, writer/director Wes Anderson’s latest gleefully whimsical excursion into grand and imaginative storytelling, the icing on his creative cake, were it not not such an obvious reference to the pastries which are a recurring motif of the film. And yet it’s Continue Reading