I’m a sucker for the crumpled hero. The sort of figure that gets the win, but only after getting dragged through Hell backwards, often whilst on fire, to do it. It’s a difficult thing to be fond of because once you like it you relate to it and once you relate to it you find …
The first half of Fargo’s opening episode plays like a familiar tune in an off key. There’s a murder in the snow, a friendly, flawed man pushed to the absolute edge of his sanity and morals and a constantly building sense of something awful waiting for everyone, out in the blizzard. It’s beautifully shot, immaculately …
Welcome back to Open Mic Mondays! There’ll be a few of these in a chain, as I carve time out to update the blog regularly and first out of the gate is my friend Wabbit. A fellow former SFX blogger, she’s a relentlessly hard working, generous human, one of my martial role models and a …
Happy Feet is a deeply weird movie. On the one…flipper…it’s a standard ‘nerd discovers he’s special and saves everyone’ story whilst on the other it’s a musical. Or it’s a first contact story. Or a deeply unsettling exploration of abandonment and confinement and the effect it has on animals. Or all of them. Oh and …
Dave Robison is one of the finest people I know. He’s a dynamo of enthusiasm, ideas and energy, always driving forwards, always bringing other people with him and always with something else on the backburner. He’s an inspiration, a man whose absolute faith in other never ceases to humble and amaze me. A couple of …
Last Resort remains one of the lumpiest, oddest, most ambitious TV shows of the last few years. The basic premise is this: US Nuclear submarine is ordered to fire on Pakistan, refuses, is fired upon itself, annexes a NATO listening post on a small island whilst it tries to sort out just who is fighting …
The Antoine Fuqua directed version of King Arthur is 10 years old. On release it was gutted, the closing battle so badly censored that it’s literally the same footage re-cut and re-used twice. It was also, at the time, eviscerated critically, because that’s what the industry leaders in film criticism often do; scrabble to be …