“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” As iconic movie lines go, these immortal words of vengeance and loss from The Princess Bride are right up there among the best. How iconic exactly? So famous and suffused through the pop culture consciousness of humanity that Continue Reading
TV
Trio of tremendous TV trailers: Sex Education S2, Insecure S4 and Nora From Queens
I love TV. I also don’t have enough time for TV. Well, all the shows I want to watch anyway and in this age of Peak TV, that is more shows than I can possible keep track of (and pixels know, I’ve tried!) and watch in a lifetime. Still, the Continue Reading
Yeehaa compagno and compagna! The Mandalorian gets the Spaghetti Western treatment
Defined as a “broad subgenre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone’s film-making style and international box-office success”, Spaghetti Westerns are brilliantly, wonderfully over the top. They were a big deal with over 600 Euro-Westerns made between 1960 and 1978 and given their Continue Reading
Have you seen our robot? Thoughts on Lost in Space (season 2)
If you were to be uncharitable, you could be forgiven for wondering why anyone in the 24th Colonist Group to Alpha Centauri lets the Robinsons anywhere near their precious spaceship, the Resolute, in the robust frame of which rests not only the lives of a select group of human refugees Continue Reading
Open up! Update from the Eurovision Song Contest 2020
It might seem like a long wait until the Eurovision Song Contest 2020, which takes place on 12-16 May, but truth be told, it’s just 135 days until the grand final! In a busy month for organisers, the first tranche of tickets went on sale, and surprise, surprise, completely sold Continue Reading
Do Rick and Morty and Back to the Future have anything in common? Turns out they just might
SNAPSHOT As we see in today’s boomer, millennial and zoomer animosity, generational divides can seem so impenetrable that connecting with each other might as well require time travel. ‘Back to the Future’ made this literal when Marty had to meet his parents at his age to understand them. In the Continue Reading
Small screen, big stories, much bingeing: My 20 favourite TV shows of 2019
Peak TV done got me again. Just when I thought I had all my televisual options under control and more than achievable, along come yet another streaming platform or two – hello Amazon Prime and Disney + ! – and suddenly all my best laid plans of sitting in front Continue Reading
Merry pop culture Christmas to all … and to all a goodnight!
Merry Christmas from the 25th Century … and also from me! Thanks for a wonderful year of pop culture goodness and here’s to an even better year of books, movies, TV, graphic novels and songs in 2020! But wait … this is the most wonderful time of the year so Continue Reading
On 12th day of Christmas … I watched “The Hard Luck Kid I” (That Girl) and “The Hard Luck Kid II” (The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
We are by nature a communal nature a communal species and never more so than at Christmas when the idea of being alone is anathema and we (for the most part anyway) seek out friends and family for some festive communal togetherness. That’s not always the case with some people, Continue Reading
Ho! Ho! What ho! My 2 fave British sitcom Christmas episodes – Miranda and the Vicar of Dibley
“Hi, my name is Andrew and I am a Christmas tragic.” I utter these words not out of any kind of sense of shame because, well, CHRISTMAS, but because it’s best we get it out and into the open. (Although if you’ve been paying any attention to the blog at Continue Reading