So it ticked all the boxes for the kind of story I’d post on Facebook. A British woman, Michelle Thomas – gorgeous, though that probably shouldn’t matter - goes on a Tinder date. The evening goes swimmingly…
- Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne
I’d first attempted to watch The Newsroom when it premiered back in 2012. I watched two, maybe three episodes. I felt manipulated. I felt embarrassed that I’d been manipulated. So I stopped. Cold turkey…
A Danish professor has called on schools to screen pornography so students are prepared to see it in the real world.
Finally! A selfie stick I can actually get behind. Or under. Or over, even, depending on my mood. A couple of weeks ago, in a splendid scene of suburban domesticity, I’d made a batch of gnocchi and we…
I’d been given a copy of The Body Shop Book one Christmas back in my mid-teens. A good decade has passed since I’ve laid eyes on it but there’s a bit I still sometimes think about. Amid the exfoliation…
A pair of lovely Swedes were in town this week to interview me for a local TV show. The topic was masturbation because it is of course, my area of greatest proficiency. The duo - who had been in Melbourne…
The trailer for Foxcatcher did something miraculous: it lulled me into thinking that sport and male competition - two things I have pretty much no interest in - could be made watchable and perhaps even…
There’s a bit during the titular interview when talk-show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) reads aloud the lyrics to Katy Perry’s “Firework”. A closeted fan, the Supreme Leader (Randall Park) pleads to…
So it’s that time of year when everything gets boiled down to arbitrary lists of ten. The top ten uses for milk crates in cafés. The ten most mawkishly reported news stories. The ten most offensive things…
If John Waters - think Pink Flamingos rather than Offspring - were writing plays, he’d be penning things like the House of Yes. Made into a film in 1997 - Parker Posey in the lead - the story began life…
Tommy Lee Jones may not have done the catering or cleaned-out the Porta-Loos, but he pretty much did everything else for The Homesman, having written, directed, produced and starred in this dreary tale…
A decade of piano lessons with a woman who never allowed my lack of passion, prowess or practice ruin a good thing, exists as a mere red herring. A good woman, a sane woman, but even ten years with her…
A friend had made a self-deprecating comment about not being “cut”. “What?” I said, incredulously. “You are cut.” “You think I’m cut?” he said, grinning far too widely. “I know you’re bloody cut.” A bizarre…
A six dollar ticket and 114 minutes of my time felt like a fair exchange. Sure, seeing Rosamund Pike in a Best Supporting Girlfriend role after all her scene-stealing craziness in Gone Girl was a tad sad…
A confronting minute or two with Hank (Robert Downey Jr) and his title character father (Robert Duvall) in a bathroom together encapsulates the strength of The Judge; their rough rapport is executed with…
Shortly after I saw - and then wrote about - the racist romp No Good Deed, coincidentally a controversial article about Shonda Rhimes appeared in the New York Times. Rhimes - if the name is unfamiliar…
For the first couple of hours I was preoccupied by how long I’d been seated, that I really shouldn’t have drunk that whole bottle of water and that 165 minutes is at least 45 minutes too long for a plotless…
In late April my grandma died. In early May a solicitor told my parents that such deaths either make or break families. In our case the solicitor was correct - a story for another time - but realistically…
It was a matinee screening in a small town in Massachusetts. I’d stayed for the credits, feeling an odd need to confirm that I’d heard Dido on the soundtrack. Only one other person had been in the cinema…
The phrase “blind-buy” is common among perfume enthusiasts. A fragrance gets purchased without spritzing or sniffing, bought blindly based on text: marketing copy perhaps, or gushy fan reviews. I take…
Amidst all the stabbed kittens and delightful dickheadery of the Melbourne International Film Festival’s WTF Shorts session, a carby gem emerged. Lievito madre. Or Sourdough, to the rest of us. “I knew…
It was the never-ending shot of a forkful of chocolate cake that finally broke me. The night prior, printed e-tickets in hand, our arrival at the cinema was met with commotion and the revelation of an…
“Have we all composed ourselves?” asked the Alpha-lass to her entourage in the row behind us. Her hands were on her hips, it’s essential to note. Truth be told, her question could have been asked of most…
A month or so ago I finished listening to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. It’s an all too rare occurrence that I find myself sacrificing sleep to keep the characters in my ears. The Goldfinch was such a book…
It’s scarcely a surprise that, a decade on, we’re still interested in hearing from a president’s mistress. It’s even less surprising that, a decade on, that mistress still wants to talk. The whys of our…
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