There’s a whole lot of creepy going on in Extant … and for the most part it’s all quite well executed. Which is a pleasant surprise after the dramatically nonsensical debacle that was, and is Extant‘s summer sister series on CBS, Under the Dome, which inexplicably continues to attract viewers Continue Reading
Movie review: Reaching For the Moon
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander remarks with considerable insight that “the course of true love never did run smooth”, a recognition that the meeting of two hearts, the coming together of what Plato called the twin yearning halves of the one soul, while glorious and overflowing with Continue Reading
(re)Visions: Alice – Interview: Kaye Chazan, author of the novelette “What Aelister Found Here”
This is the first in a series of interviews with the (re)Visions: Alice that I published on a now sadly defunct writing site back in 2012. I hope you enjoy discovering more about the authors behind these remarkably imaginative re-imagined tales. Kaye Chazan describes herself on her blog as “a writer Continue Reading
Movie review: Still Life
The tightly circumscribed world of John May (beautifully played with a gentle intensity by Eddie Marsan) is a grey, well-ordered and wholly predictable one in Uberto’s Pasolini’s latest film Still Life. Employed by the council in the South London district of Kennington for 22 years to track down the often-ambivalent, Continue Reading
Rip’d from the pages of my childhood: The life-changing books of conservationist Gerald Durrell
I have always been a voracious reader. As a child I devoured anywhere between 75 and 150 books a year – and yes, I have the geeky award cards from the school librarian to prove it; this explains, of course why I was so wildly popular with my peers during Continue Reading
Weekend pop art: The painted “bookbenches” of London
If you’re a book lover, forget about Paris in the Springtime! Well for the purposes of this post at least. Consider instead London in the Summer and its marvellous Books About Town campaign which has seen the city dotted with “50 unique BookBench sculptures, designed by local artists and Continue Reading
Falling Skies: “Exodus” (S4, E3 review)
There was a touch of the Steve McQueens about Falling Skies this week, even down to the motorcycle that Tom Mason (Noah Wylie), Distractor of Skitters and Rubber Man Who Can Fall From Great Heights and Live, used once again, this time sans the Ghost headdress, to distract the Continue Reading
Saturday morning cartoons: The Wacky Races (Hanna-Barbera)
I grew up in a far simpler age when television audiences outside the major cities of Australia only had access to two TV channels – one belonging to national publicly-funded broadcaster the ABC, and the other to a commercial company who usually took a mix of programs from the Continue Reading
Now this is music: 1000 Forms of Fear by Sia (review)
In a world of out there, hard-to-miss pop divas, all of then clamouring for attention via outlandish costumes (Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj), faux or actual controversial content in their songs or videos (Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus) or glass-shattering vocals (Mariah Carey, Xtina, Florence and the Machine), Australian Sia Furler Continue Reading
Movie review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Being both a blockbuster and a sequel should have, by the usual standards of slapdash Hollywood out to make a quick buck, left Dawn of the Planet of the Apes a doubly-cursed, slathering mess of incoherent plotting, poorly-expressed ideas and sub-standard acting. And yet, thanks to a nuanced, well-paced Continue Reading