12 May 2013
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Pine, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana
Script: Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci
Genre: Action, sff
Setting: space, the future
6 Stars
5 Comments
Terrorism is everywhere these days. From Iron Man to Star Trek and everywhere in between, you just can’t get away from it. In this case Capt. Kirk is on the trail of a Star Fleet operative gone rogue. He’s blown … Continue reading
25 July 2011
Call no: 800
Genre: sff
Setting: future
8 Stars
3 Comments
Newsflesh book 2
It is alwasy difficult to blurb about the second book in a series. Giving the details of the start of this book will reveal the end of Feed, and that would be just plain mean, so I’m not going to do that. Instead I’ll just say you should read book one and then go pick this one up, and then wait, with me, because book three isn’t out yet :(
8 May 2011
Call no: 937
Genre: history, non-fiction
Setting: Italy, New York
7 Stars
2 Comments
It is hard to blurb this book. On the one hand it is about Vesuvius and volcanic explosions and disasters both natural and man-made. But it is also a book about the origins of the earth, of the universe, and about how precarious our existence is. How so much of what we are today is dependent on natural events a thousand years ago, or a millennia ago, or so long ago that it is almost pointless to count the time because it is so difficult to grasp those sort of numbers.
20 September 2006
Cast: Mary McCormack, Rory Cochrane, Scotty Noyd Jr., Tony Perez
Script: Chris Gorak
Genre: thriller
5 Stars
7 Comments
I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from this film, but I didn’t get it. The plot should have been able to create tension and drama easily enough. After all you can’t really get more tension filled than a … Continue reading
24 June 2006
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Liam Cunningham, Myles Horgan, Orla Fitzgerald, Pá¡draic Delaney
Script: Paul Laverty
Genre: historical fiction
Setting: 1920s, Ireland
10 Stars
9 Comments
Opening with a hurling scene in Cork in the 1920′s this film lives entirely within the experience of the main character, Damien. A young doctor about to leave Ireland for a career in London he is pulled into the Irish War of Independence. And this film is about his fight. The film starts without any introductory text, there is no attempt made to make the viewer aware of the wider world, this is Damien’s story and only his story. Continue reading
22 June 2006
Cast: Cheyenne Jackson, Christian Clemenson, Opal Alladin, Polly Adams, Trish Gates
Script: Peter Greengrass
Genre: drama
9 Stars
2 Comments
This is a film that is pretty impossible to review as just a film. We’ve all seen the news footage of those planes crashing into the World Trade Centre, we all know what happened that September. And part of me … Continue reading
17 July 2005
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OK, I’ll admit it: I’d really had enough at that point. I was tired of confrontations with small people with authority complexes. I was tired of feeling scared. I knew that I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, and that I’d presented clear evidence that I was not a threat. In fact, all things considered, I still think I’d been more than pleasant about the whole thing up until that point. I saw no good reason why I should have to give this canine patrolman my ID. He seemed intelligent, and I assumed that someone in his position was supposed to be reasonable. I also assumed that someone in his position would know that if I’d really wanted to take secret photos of this public landmark that he would never know about it. Sure, I knew why he was asking for my ID, and why he was really asking for my ID. And he knew why. But I was wondering if he had the balls to actually say it to my face. I was back to wondering when I could start saying “no”?
14 July 2005
2 Comments
Obviously enough there has been a lot in the papers and on the telly and all over the shop in webland about terrorists and the bombings in London. (Slightly less on the continual attacks in Iraq itself, but that is a different issue) And a lot seem to be asking the question why did these “normal” young British men change. How does some one go from being “sound as a pound” to blowing himself up?
5 May 2004
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Putting a personality to those blocked out faces That is me,” he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image
25 March 2004
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The view that the war made an attack “a lot less likely” got an asterisk (less than 0.5 per cent).
This is substantially less than the proportion of people who are reported (in other surveys) to believe that Elvis is alive or that aliens are controlling government policy. Continue reading