As consumers, we’ve noticed a significant shift in the way you supermarkets (and large retail stores) operate. The rising trend of self-checkouts has become a defining feature of our shopping experience. The intention behind this move is to streamline the process and cut costs, increasing your profits. Well, we’re not happy. During a recent shopping trip, I encountered a scenario that encapsulates the frustration many … Continue reading Dear Supermarkets
VICAR In the warmth of our homes, where laughter echoes and love abounds, the family unit stands as a foundation of society. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and each faces its own unique set of challenges—from the pressures of work-life balance to the strains of financial insecurity and the task of nurturing young minds in a fast-paced world. This week, Dear Readers of … Continue reading A Prayer for Families
BY ANDREW MOODY “Ernest Hemingway once wrote: ‘the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.” I first saw David Fincher’s Se7en when I was a precocious teenager, addicted to movies, very aware of the indie revolution bolstered by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax that was ongoing in the 1990s, instantly proclaiming it a masterpiece. … Continue reading Se7en
BY ANDREW MOODY “Made it ma! TOP OF THE WORLD!” Most media critics falsely claim that we are living in the “Golden age of TV”, based on Hollywood’s constant production of TV boxsets for streaming services like Netflix. We are actually, in a media sense, living in the Golden age of consumer choice. Nowadays, technology far in excess of that which sent the Apollo 11 … Continue reading The Public Enemy
BY ANDREW MOODY “We are all the children of DW Griffith and Stanley Kubrick.” –Martin Scorsese * On the Saturday before Christmas, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do but had never gotten round to: I sat down and watched all of Stanley Kubrick’s final six movies in a row, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon … Continue reading The Kubrick Variations
BY ANDREW MOODY “Had the Weinsteins been born seventy five years earlier, they might have been found running numbers on Hester Street, bootlegging whiskey, or sitting across a card table from Louis Lepke, the head of Murder Incorporated.” In the years following Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein’s arrest, trial and conviction for sex offences, Hollywood has been in a state of free fall. Weinstein was arrested … Continue reading Down & Dirty Pictures
BY ANDREW MOODY “The only good bug is a dead bug!” In its own time, (the late 1990s) Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers was initially a critical and commercial failure. Twenty five years later, and thanks to the film’s deeply loyal, obsessive fan base (primarily sustained on the internet) Starship Troopers has now been widely judged as one of the most misunderstood movies in Hollywood history. … Continue reading Starship Troopers
BY ANDREW MOODY Scarcely ten years after David O. Selznick had triumphantly opened Gone With the Wind, he was walking along a deserted street at dawn and saying to a companion: “Hollywood’s like Egypt. Full of crumbling pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” Another subtitle for Otto Friedrich’s superb, … Continue reading City of Nets
BY ANDREW MOODY “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…” Like almost every obsessive fan of The Godfather (1972) and its extraordinary sequel The Godfather Part II (1974), when I eventually came to watch The Godfather Part Three (1990) I was disappointed. Not only did it not include Robert Duvall as the Corleone family consigliere (director Francis Ford Coppola could … Continue reading The Death of Michael Corleone
BY ANDREW MOODY In a recent article about the onslaught (and danger) of Franchise pictures in the New York Times, fabled director Martin Scorsese wrote: Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I … Continue reading Batman 2022
BY ANDREW MOODY There has been some recent debate within Hollywood about the merits, (positive or negative) surrounding the industry’s focus on making Marvel Superhero films, especially given their popularity within the millennial generation. Nobody has been more outspoken than fabled film director Martin Scorsese, who after an October 2019 interview for UK film magazine Empire, was forced to write a follow up in November … Continue reading Scorsese on Marvel
BY ANDREW MOODY Netflix Originals’ most elegant documentary out now is Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019), one of the best movies on the realities of Social Media fame yet made. For the internet obsessed millennial generation, you can really do no better. Fyre Festival was a failed attempt on the part of business partners Billy McFarland and (rapper) Ja Rule to put … Continue reading Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
BY ANDREW MOODY Ever since Casino Royale (2006), the first of five movies with Daniel Craig playing James Bond, there has been something progressive about his take on Ian Fleming’s legendary spy. Connery was smooth and savage, Roger Moore a comic gentleman with a twinkle in his eye, George Lazenby (in only one Bond movie) hamstrung with a diabolical script; Timothy Dalton irritated and out … Continue reading No Time to Die
BY ANDREW MOODY If everybody in the post digital age were being honest with themselves, they would admit to using online pornography. With an ocean of porn flooding the internet, one popular genre is that of the CAM girl, where men pay a girl on screen to strip, masturbate, and flirt for tokens that can be turned into cash by the onscreen girl or her … Continue reading CAM
Back in 1999, two plucky, independent filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez released a strange, terrifying mockumentary called The Blair Witch Project at the Sundance Film Festival. The story concerns three documentary filmmakers who disappeared into the Black Hills in Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994, their footage being found a year later. Around the time of its release, a deluge of horror films, including seventies and … Continue reading Post Blair Witch
BY ANDREW MOODY Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s 2001-03 mockumentary The Office is leaving Netflix on the 29th of June. Most people are familiar with the TV show, at the turn of the century this charming, hilarious (and very English) comedy hit pay dirt, and Gervais was catapulted to rockstar status. Now twenty years since it first hit TV screens, it seems like the right … Continue reading The Enduring Office
BY ANDREW MOODY If a critic can be of any value or use in today’s strange times, in my humility I offer that I have now read Sinead O’Connor’s new memoir so you do not need to. It is dreadful in the truest sense of the word, as if Laurie Penny had been a pop star. It is so bad, that I even complained to … Continue reading U Compare 2 Nothing
BY ANDREW MOODY In 2008, several years before either Game of Thrones or The Crown debuted on TV, Eric Bana starred as Henry the VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl, opposite starlets Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johannson who played Anne and Mary Boleyn. Now the movie has reached streaming service Netflix. After compulsively gorging on the first four seasons of Peter Morgan’s The Crown, I … Continue reading The Other Boleyn Girl
BY ANDREW MOODY During the Covid 19 pandemic and resultant lockdown in the UK, one of the few trades that continued on at pace was that of illicit drugs. New to Netflix is a six part documentary series The Business of Drugs that is equally educational to drug addicts and those who have never taken any illegal substance, as well as being a fascinating research … Continue reading The Business of Drugs
BY ANDREW MOODY There is something deeply compelling about Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2009 mockumentary Brüno, directed by Larry Charles, who he had collaborated with on the 2006 blockbuster Borat. Held together with an extraordinary performance by Cohen, who takes the Stanislavsky method to heights rarely seen before in cinematic history, what intrigues me after years of watching the movie is just how dangerous the film … Continue reading Brüno
