(courtesy Aardman) SNAPSHOTAs the woolliest day of the year approaches on Thursday 12th December, our favourite Mossy Bottom Farm residents can be seen preparing for the big day. With snow falling, festive tunes playing and Christmas decorations at the ready, Timmy’s excitement grows, and the barn calendar shows the woolliest day Continue Reading
Movie review: Gladiator II
(courtesy IMP Awards) Sequels are tricky things to pull off. Not only are you battling against the fearsomely rose-tinted power of nostalgia, but you are trying to engender the same emotional response and devotion that the original garnered but without the full force of novelty and with a need to Continue Reading
Festive book review: Christmas Ever After by Jaimie Admans
(courtesy Boldwood Books) Enemies-to-friends is a fairly standard trope in romantic comedies, festive or otherwise. So, the fact that Christmas Ever After by Jamie Admans features it should not as an almighty Santa-loving surprise; what is interesting is how effectively the author this well-worn genre element to give her rom-com Continue Reading
Birthday movie review: Spellbound
(courtesy IMP Awards) We all want a happy ever after. But what about if that happy ever after doesn’t quite work as you think it will; what do you do then, when expectations are dashed, even if it’s in a good but different way? That’s the great dilemma facing Princess Continue Reading
Birthday book review: Winnie-the-Pooh: Winter in the Wood by Jane Riordan (illustrations by Mark Burgess)
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Ever since I discovered my mother’s much-loved 1940s paperbacks of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House on Pooh Corner when I was a kid, I have been enchanted by the wonder and whimsical naïveté od A. A. Milne’s marvellous creations. Winnie, along with Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit Continue Reading
“It’s good for me. It makes me feel useful” – thoughts on A Man on the Inside
(courtesy IMDb) Ask most people what sitcom should make you do, and you’ll likely to be told it’s to make you laugh. And while you can’t really argue with that as an outcome – it’s all in the abbreviated of “situation comedy” after all – the really good sitcoms should Continue Reading
Movie review: Wicked
(courtesy IMP Awards) Having the loftiest of your hopes and dreams fulfilled in life is a very rare thing. Oh, we are very good at going big and large when it comes to how good things can be or how they might play out – unless you’re a glass half-empty Continue Reading
Fun animation movie trailers x 4: Elio, The Bad Guys 2, Night of the Zoopocalypse + Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Please stop thinking animated films are just for kids. Yes, they are a perfect way to entertain, amuse and inform children and thank goodness for them during school holidays, long car trips and inordinate waits anywhere. But these gems of cinema also beautifully entertain adults too, and not just the Continue Reading
Festive book review: A Merry Little Christmas by Cathy Bramley
(courtesy Hachette Australia) There is an idea that if you’re writing an escapist story, then it must be purely froth and confection, its fairytale heart untroubled by the real issues of the world. And while, yes, a healthy amount of reality-defying escapism is just what the mental health-enhancing doctor ordered, Continue Reading
Movie review: And Mrs
(courtesy IMP Awards) When my parent died within 3 1/2 years of each other, the grief that enveloped me was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It felt as if all the old certainties had been swept away and that all the things I knew and could count on were Continue Reading