Hordern Pavilion
August 2nd, 2008

I don’t believe in God, but after seeing Sigur Ros at the Hordern Pavilion I’m left with a burning conundrum: who am I supposed to thank for the fact that they exist? It seems a wonderful and unlikely miracle that music so uniquely and sublimely beautiful can be created so consistently. Listening to their recordings is a joy – seeing them perform live is close to divine. Read the rest of this entry »

When they’re not lounging vacuously around water features and generally looking buff, our four intrepid heroes are narrowly escaping sinister Bahamanian gangsters through plot holes big enough to sink a pirate ship. Read the rest of this entry »

“Man proposes to sex doll”. You can just see the headline tucked away in the corner of the World section of your local newspaper - the obligatory quirky news item from some rural corner of the USA. Only in America. The amazing thing about Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is that the love affair it presents between a man and an inanimate object almost starts to make sense. Read the rest of this entry »

Not content to rest on his laurels between the second and third volumes of his Revelation Space series, Alastair Reynolds felt compelled to provide us with a couple of novellas set in the same universe, but outside that story arc. If he’s happy to keep churning this stuff out, we’re more than happy to read it! Read the rest of this entry »

Beautifully shot but brutal. I’m not sure Nick Cave’s screenplay successfully tells the story he wanted it to - many of the characters’ actions and motivations seem unfathomable, and ultimately you wonder what the point is supposed to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Star Wars, Indiana Jones… are there any more great films produced by George Lucas in the last 30 years that he can now cynically revive with so-called sequels designed solely to cash in the nostalgia of Generation X-ers? Phew, looks like he’s done the lot, unless of course he wants to release a CGI-augmented version of American Gigolo… Read the rest of this entry »

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has to hold the record as my most avoided book ever. A friend lent it to me twelve years ago and it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since. He probably wonders where the hell it went. The problem is, I know my friend’s penchant for esoteric works of much vaunted philosophical richness, and at heart I’m a lazy bastard who doesn’t like to think much. Well, it’s not that I don’t like to think, but I hate being bored, and boring was what this book looked to be. But let me tell you, this amazing piece of work is anything but boring.
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