Without wanting to be judgemental, anyone who enjoyed The Amazing Spider Man 2 is a bad human being, and any critic who thought it was okay needs to resign from their profession in shame. The film desecrates cinema, insults the …
Snowpiercer is one of the most visually stunning, violent, and at turns bizarre science fiction films of the past few years. It is rich with ideas, originality and intelligence, and as such, is the rarest of flowers in an otherwise …
If my reviews don’t seem timely it’s partly because my cinematic viewing schedule is determined by the availability of DVDs from my friendly local Ha Noi street vendor. He, I am sure, is a licenced proprietor of aforementioned DVDs
I’ve …
The Left Hand of Darkness
I came to Ursula Le Guin in my early 30s. Voracious readers and lovers of science fiction would consider this sacrilege: she is after all, one of the giants of the genre.
But I’m very …
Review of Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life, by Nick Mamatas
Starve Better by Nick Mamatas is an entertaining, engaging, occasionally caustic introduction to the writing life. If you’re a writer looking for some sage advice, …
Lone Survivor
This was way better than expected. Admittedly, I didn’t expect much. Action movies these days have become a wasteland of reboots, sequels, and old, old men with puffy faces echoing catch phrases that lost their freshness three decades …
Paul Verhoeven is one of the great misunderstood satirists of modern cinema.
His work is often dismissed as mindless ultra-violence. Though most critics understand that Robocop and Total Recall were, at their core, satires of corporate culture and greed, he’s …
It’s not true, of course. Authors such as Orwell, Ishiguro, and Camus were formative influences on me, as were many others.
However – and as you can probably tell from this website – if I were allowed to choose only …
Alligator Blood, the true story of Australian entrepreneur, Daniel Tzvetkoff, should have been a compelling read. It has all the ingredients: greed, hubris, extravagant wealth, a dizzying rise followed by a precipitous fall; the noir underbelly of the online porn …
It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d been overseas for about a year. I was missing home, missing Australia. A Southern Cross tattoo – yeah, I thought: that’s what I need. So I got the ink. That …
