(Ebury Press, June 2010) Oh Danny boy. After 246 pages I established 246 times exactly what I had established on the cover of the book; that you, you are a man. I don’t say this with any strain on the vowel; you are not a maaan or the man but just a man, a simple [...]
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(Faber & Faber, March 2005) The Unconsoled is like a glimmering mirage that sucks you in as you try to look away. Think the glistening red apple proffered in fairytales or the White Witch’s shimmering, crystalline Turkish delight; the novel is irresistible yet its consumption is overwhelming. The novel produces a kind of delirium in [...]
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‘The dream is real’ (Inception, Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010, 148 minutes) Ten years ago Christopher Nolan’s Memento perplexed audiences with its disordered style of storytelling. Inception makes the idea of memory and perception even more complicated. The film explores the multiple questions of life; what is real and how do we know it isn’t all [...]
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I am writing this poem to tell You I am dying, In the same sense that Anyone Is dying, Who knows When it could happen, It could happen anytime, Somebody May come And shoot me from this very chair, So I take this opportunity to tell You I care, I promise I do.
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“Judy was the big money-maker at the time, a big success, but she was the ugly duckling…I think it had a very damaging effect on her emotionally for a long time. I think it lasted forever really” Taking a retrospective look at Judy Garland’s performances in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939) and ‘A Star is [...]
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Pie in the sky……………. [La città nel cielo (The City in the Sky), Giacomo Gimini, 2009, Italy, 26 mins.] Last week I wrote of how watching short films is often akin to ‘panning for gold’; where, if you put the effort in, and ‘sift through the sludge and dirt’, you very occasionally find something wonderful. [...]
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(Harper Voyager, 2008 RRP £7.99)* The other week my boyfriend was watching the E3 games conference, and I was pretending to read, but secretly watching, as Microsoft unveiled their latest arm waving, controller-less motion sensor game-thingy. ‘You see,’ I shrieked, like a crazed witch-from-the-future, ‘Ray Bradbury was right! We are all going to end up [...]
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Taking a look behind the veil……. (Marrying God, Duke Johnson, 2008, USA, 19 mins.) I often feel that there is not enough precedence given to short films. I think that the main reason for this is probably due to the fact that it often seems for every good short film there are roughly 25 mediocre [...]
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Karaoke Cinema (Predators, Nimrod Antal, US, 2010, 106mins) Filmmakers and fanboys – two species that usually live apart, and rightly, because scientists have long known that any cross breeding produces a dangerous hybrid creature with confused creative instincts. Of course filmmakers are sometimes fans and some fans, notably the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Predators’ [...]
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When did perilous danger become so funny? As news of the third Jackass film reaches our ears, this time in 3D, it begs the question – How do we begin to de-construct the style and content of Jackass and understand this as indicative of that which audiences all over the world happily pay to see? [...]
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