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Celebrity Mastermind
Specialist subject: Laura Ingalls Wilder
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Category Archives: Film
The trouble with superheroes taking on terrorism..
I love superhero comics and they’ve never been handled with more love than by writers and filmmakers who grew up on them too. And yet.. And yet.. In the latest Captain America Civil War film, when a terrorist bomb goes … Continue reading
The man who knew infinity: Difficult history & dreaming spires on film
How do we re-visit history? Watching the continuation of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford I went to see The Man Who Saw Infinity with a greater consciousness of how our institutions choose to tell their own versions of … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Film, History
Tagged BIG ISSUE, Cambridge, dev patel, front row, janaki ramanujan, jeremy irons, oxbridge, ramanujan, the man who knew infinity
13 Comments
Why Obi Wan Kenobi is pure evil & why R2 D2 is Moses
An excellent panel of minds got together at Conway Hall’s latest #LondonThinks event last Thursday to discuss the theology and ethics of Star Wars films. You can watch it in full here on Youtube (below). Or open it in another … Continue reading
How the Space Shuttle Broke My Heart
This weekend’s Radio 4 Extra Floating In Space 3-hour special (9am and 7pm Saturday Mar 1th and iplayer after) with Simon Guerrier explores the history and the fantasy of manned space exploration from the cosmonauts to dreams of Mars … Continue reading
Posted in Children, Culture, Design, Film, History, Politics, Radio, Science, Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV, Uncategorized
Tagged 70s, Carl Sagan, culture, film, FTW, nasa, Obama, politics, Space shuttle
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Inside the world of Angels: the secret history of film & TV costumes
The chill hits me and a slight tang of…meat. I’ve entered the Fur store room at Angels Costumiers. We stand in silence. There are racks of fur coats – like a multiverse of Narnia entry points. Fox stoles are piled … Continue reading
Posted in Business/Economics, Culture, Design, Film, History, Media, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Theatre, TV, Uncategorized
Tagged angels costumiers, BBC, cinema, culture, film, Hollywood, Theatre Royal Stratford, tim angel, tv
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Not about “Us”: What the Oscars whitewash reveals about some viewers
This column first appeared in the Big Issue magazine – Journalism worth paying for It was one of the most exciting and original nights out I’ve had at the theatre in years – Moliere’s 17th century French satire, Tartuffe, about … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Film, Media, Theatre, Uncategorized
Tagged a wolf in snakeskin shoes, creed, marcus gardley, oscars, rocky, ryan coogler, sylvester stallone
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Is there a transphobic equivalent to blacking up?
I wrote a piece for the BBC News website today, originally commissioned about the idea of white actors playing black roles, but I wanted to explore further issues Juliet Jacques had touched on when she came on Front Row recently … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Film, History, Media, Theatre, TV, Uncategorized
Tagged blacking up, culture, film, Hollywood, indians, juliet jacques, literature, media, race, Theatre Royal Stratford, trans, tv, zoolander 2
5 Comments
Leaving home: The 60s and getting out
The roots of this Sunday’s Something Understood for Radio 4 are in one song – The Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home and one time: the 1960s. Over the course of the decade young people found greater opportunity through a huge growth … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Culture, Film, Music, Radio
Tagged 60s, David Bowie, London, Lord Kitchener, Lynn Redgrave, Philip Larkin, Rita Tushingham, Smashing Time, Something Understood, The L Shaped Room
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On location for HG Wells and the H Bomb
As well as this documentary I’ve written this feature for BBC Culture about how the Atom Bomb changed our culture and imagination. And I discuss it with Robert Elms on BBC London here. Listen from 1 hr 39 minutes. In … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Film, History, Politics, Radio, Science, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Uncategorized, War
Tagged Atomic bomb, BBC Sunday Feature, HG Wells, Jacob Bronowski, Leo Szilard, literature, politics, Radio 3, The World Set Free, Things to Come, war, Winston Churchill
22 Comments
Shylock: A Traveller in Time
The film producer Davina Belling once said of Jonathan Pryce that she always uses him as a lesson for actors “not to count their lines when they’re offered a role. He had 20 lines in the whole film [Breaking Glass] … Continue reading
Posted in Comedy, Culture, Film, History, Media, Theatre, Uncategorized
Tagged anti semitism, breaking glass, bullingdon club, carry on matron, Germany, jonathan pryce, judaism, kenneth cope, Nazism, shakespeare, Shakespeare's Globe, shylock
3 Comments