Our resident Blog writing extraordinaire, Greg Strong, has his finger on the pulse of the storytelling industries.
Subscribe to our newsletter for early access to his piping hot takes on film, TV, publishing, new media and beyond
Blog
Brendan Fraser is The Whale
It’s a crime that Brendan Fraser got old. It’s unjust that his career stalled. Why? Because when he started to look a bit more like the common man, he revealed himself to be pathetically mortal. Just like you.
Click to read more
Papa's Gonna Buy You A Diamond Ring: Forging The Rings of Power
Familiarity is comforting. That’s why Amazon spent around $250 million on the rights to certain properties from Tolkien’s Estate, just as Disney paid through the nose to pry Star Wars from the muscular, if not slightly moist clutches of one George Lucas.
Click to read more
House of the Dragon: Top 5 things the show needs to avoid in order to succeed
One imagines the showrunners racing up a gutted train track, pursued by a steam engine billowing angry black smoke, as they lay down each successive slab of train track, each time narrowly avoiding being squashed.
Click to read more
Better Call Saul: Knowing How It Ends and Loving It
In Better Call Saul, we know what happens to many members of its cast of characters. But what we don’t know is what complex set of events and collisions sparked their tragic trajectories - what made them break bad.
Click to read more
Quirky Boots: Filmmakers Being Weird For The Sake Of It
If a film isn’t working, if it isn’t cohering as a work of art, with its meaning being posited effectively via the images, panic starts to set in.They start to produce indulgent, outlandish fare. And if the audience doesn’t buy it, it’s their problem for being so ignorant.
Click to read more
Feigning Ignorance Is Bliss: From Morbius to Minions
Teens on TikTok are coordinating group viewings, besuited in their Sunday best, adopting uniform stances, and applauding at regular intervals as though attending the opera or something.
Click to read more
Cool Story Bro: From Page to Screen
Punters like to loudly announce upon leaving the cinema that the film they were just witness to “wasn’t as good as the book”. That’s ok, though. Adaptations are simply versions of the written story.
Click to read more
Rotten: Film Criticism By the Numbers
What would you give yourself out of 10?
It has been deemed increasingly vulgar to assign a numerical rating to one’s appearance. These shallow metrics objectify the individual and leave little room for nuance of subjectivity.
Click to read more
Knowing How It Ends: Sequels, Prequels and the Unsurprising Death of Surprise
We’ve all laughed at prequels, barfed at sequels, cried at reboots both soft and hard. We’ve even been treated to squeakuels, spinoffs, reimaginings, spiritual successors and much, much more.