Great sci-fi concept: DVD review of Surrogates
My current hunger for sci-fi, in all its forms, led me to last year’s Surrogates. Casting Bruce Willis as lead automatically indicates a film that is less sci-fi and more mindless thriller, but, to his...
View ArticleVisually lush but undisciplined: DVD review of The Imaginarium of Doctor...
I didn’t borrow Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus because of its now universal tagline, ‘Heath Ledger’s last film,’ but because of some intriguing reviews read in retrospect. And I...
View ArticleRock music in panorama: Book review of Bill Flanagan’s Evening’s Empire
As a sucker for novels set in the milieu of rock music, I was blown away by Bill Flanagan’s Evening’s Empire, partly because it is completely different to all the others I’ve read. Rather than...
View ArticlePity about the script: DVD review of The Invention of Lying
Ricky Gervais is a hero to me, his brand of savage, ironic humour a lifeline to someone who rarely finds funny what others do. So I watched The Invention of Lying (Gervais co-wrote, co-directed and...
View ArticleNon-trite thriller: Book review of Michael Gruber’s The Good Son
The thriller genre used to feed off the Cold War. More recently, the ‘bad guys’ have tended to come from terrorists, Islamists, etc., and in most cases I’ve found such books to be excruciatingly...
View ArticleSoviet Union revisited: Book review of Maria Tumarkin’s Otherland
My 2008 ‘return to roots’ trip to Estonia and Siberia haunts me still, so I was naturally drawn to Maria Tumarkin’s Otherland. Tumarkin is an adventurous, cerebral researcher/writer who couples an...
View ArticleBrilliant & captivating: DVD review of Sam Mendes’s Away We Go
Oh to live in New York and see movies like Away We Go, directed by young Sam Mendesand powered by a Dave Eggers/Vendela Vida script, as they are released, in the glory of a cinema! Away We Go came out...
View ArticleLangorous yet sumptuous: Film review of South Solitary
The star of South Solitary, an Australian film by director Shirley Barrett that zapped across our cinema screens for scant weeks, is its setting, a lighthouse on a bleak, remote island. Cinematographer...
View ArticlePratchett at his best & worst: Book review of Terry Pratchett’s Unseen...
My sons lapped up Terry Pratchett’s comedic, bursting-with-ideas, oddball fantasy novels the moment they were published, so over the years I have read a fair few of his forty-five books. Unseen...
View ArticleGFC must-read: Book review of Roger Lowenstein’s The End of Wall Street
Roger Lowenstein is one of the most consistently insightful yet energetic chroniclers of the financial world; I loved When Genius Failed (2002) and Origins of the Crash(2004) and he has also written...
View Article
