Why Nolan’s war movie is more haunting than the latest Blumhouse
I love Hallowe’en and ghost stories. As kid I would obsess over tales of haunted houses or werewolves but as I got older I realised none of that was real, sadly, and what real horrors there are in this world are far more human and sad than the gothic adventures…
Pockets, Soaps and Episodic Storytelling
I remember as a kid watching the, now legendary, episode of The X-Files titled Squeeze where a man who creates nests out of bile can crawl through the tiniest of spaces into people’s homes to kill them and remove their livers, and thinking “I hope this isn’t going to be…
Why 80s and 90s movies were the real Devil’s Advocate
How do you imagine The Devil? You know, the physical manifestation of evil and mankind’s collective sins? Whether you believe in Christian theology or not you will have some conception of what the devil looks like. Most people assume it is a ‘He’ for instance, which stands to reason given…
Why Snyder’s Übermensch misses the point
I finally got to see ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ recently and was able to see the culmination of this iteration of Superman’s character arc. And it was… interesting.
What began in Man of Steel as a man with a practical wariness against revealing himself to the world, progressing into a…
A thank you to teenage girls
I was a teenager when the Spice Girls had taken over the world. A new single seemed to come out every month, they were on the cover of every magazine, interviewed on every TV show, they had a movie out and not a day went by without hearing or seeing…
Reentering Wars, Nations and Society
I can’t and won’t pretend to be an expert on the current crisis is in Afghanistan, nor the still ongoing civil war in Syria, nor the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, nor the continuing assault on the people of Palestine by Israel. What I do know — what we…
“Cut short is the branch that might have grown full straight”
Just being alive has become a lot of work. Whether it is being able to afford the basic necessities of survival like food and shelter or avoiding the deadly virus that is still burning through the global population, the practical reality of staying alive has become the product of constant…
Childhood homes, the housing crisis and communities
It is the stairs I remember most about my childhood home. The house I grew up in. It was an old victorian end-of-terrace and the stairs were part of that aesthetic. Despite the ‘licks of paint’ the house was given intermittently over the 15 years we lived there, its features…
Discussing death in the midst of the Pandemic
We have become too comfortable with death. Whether we see it simply as the idea of unbeing, or the skeletal, hooded figure with his scythe, or Charon beckoning you across the Styx, death has become an unwelcome, yet common, bedfellow. What, in recent years, has become a stranger to us…
