What’s with all the Time Loops? — What’s with all the time loops? Whether it’s Deathloop, 12 Minutes, The Forgotten City, Lemnis Gate or Hades the genre of entertainment revolving around loops or time loops is all the rage lately. This ‘recursive genre’ lends itself to the video game format because the point of contemporary video games…

Not just a math rock band. — In an interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, actress Julia Fox, was asked if she was a muse and what a muse is. Her response was that she considered herself to be the writer/director Josh Safdie’s muse for the film Uncut Gems. The internet, instead of picking up on…

No. — I see this phrase a lot. Sometimes above or below some wince inducing spectacle of a boy, man or men making a prat of themselves, as we are all wont to do from time to time. But most often it’s a caption for a video of what is often a…

Class Dismissed — The Gentlemen appeared on Netflix recently and after the, frankly dreadful, King Arthur & Aladdin, it seemed like Guy Ritchie was returning to his Lock, Stock and Snatch roots with another fun gangster caper, so I fancied a look. Sure enough it is a classic Ritchie gangster caper complete with…

The disruption between creator and consumer. — In 2012 the final video game of the Mass Effect trilogy was released to widespread outrage from fans of the franchise. As the finale of an epic sci-fi opera its ending was deemed insufficient by its player base. Criticisms and outright bile was poured, not just on the game itself…

Never, is the answer. — On the radio the other day I heard an advert for a Japanese car manufacturer (they’re not getting free advertising from me) that proudly stated: “we don’t need a fancy advert”. The statement seemed to say ‘Our product stands on its own’ and apparently it wasn’t their job — you…

What Hollywood can learn from this late 90s gem — Men in Black is one of those films that has followed me around most of my life. I saw it at the cinema back when it came out with my Dad and Brother and we loved it. We also predicted they would make a sequel and promptly hashed out the…

The problems with Cinema and Communication — One of the strange things about communication in Post-Modern culture is how indirect it has become. Whether it is the use of emojis and gifs or through the use of oblique references to other media, the act of communicating has become a strange web of intertextuality. This is not to…

Why ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ didn’t work — Given the pretty rapid decline of the franchise after Terminator 2, when Dark Fate was announced I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it until the marketing trumpeted the return of original writer and director James Cameron. I am a big fan of the original movie and an even bigger fan…