I, Tonya, the true story of American figure skater Tonya Harding, could have been a lot of different things. A failed, faux figure-skating Rocky; a mean-spirited take-down; a desperate, pandering biopic; a gritty sports drama. But it isn’t. Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya is Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya. It is some of those things, it is […]
Mental Health and Social Media: do we spend too much time staring at screens?
The panic around social media use today is like the panic around Grand Theft Auto in the noughties, video-nasties in the eighties and the development of the printing press back before people knew what penicillin was. Stupid and petty, silly and unfounded, peddled by the kind of people who can’t handle change. It would all […]
Uncommon tripe: a review of Tom Hanks’ ‘Uncommon Type’
There’s a moment in ‘The Past is Important to Us’, a short story in ‘Uncommon Type’ about a billionaire businessman so in love with a woman from the past he travels back to 1939 just to see her, when the black attendant monitoring the time machine is asked why he never uses it himself. ‘Being […]
‘The scheme isn’t looking for proven skills and experience. They’re looking for potential.’ An interview with Civil Service Fast Streamers
Civil Service jobs don’t have the most inspiring reputation. They’re not seen as particularly sexy. Design a soundscape based on what the average person thinks of life in the civil service and it’d probably be a weird, melancholy little thing; the light rustle of papers, the bleating of an office telephone, the *scratch scratch scratch* […]