New fiction: A sneak peek at RECOIL

For the past few months I've been working on a movie treatment and script with director Amarbir Singh. We've written two versions of the treatment and we're now preparing the screenplay. It's a revenge movie, of sorts, that takes place following an assault in an Auckland dairy. The context of the story is the clash …

When God took Job’s teeth: Tommy Tiernan tells a Bible story

No one — NO ONE — tells Bible stories like Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan. That he tells Bible stories at all says something. Something about his Catholic upbringing, perhaps, and definitely something about where his faith is now. As he said in a recent interview on Irish television, ‘It feels to me that we're born with an …

My blue jacket: A fashion disaster story

The day I flew in to LAX from Nashville was memorable for two reasons. The first reason was that sitting behind me up at the front of the Southwestern Airlines plane was Keith Urban. I had watched him throughout the entire flight. When I say watched, I mean filmed. I had filmed him, surreptitiously, throughout …

Coffee and cigarettes: A captured moment

A kiss, but not a kiss A moment of connection, and also contempt. Those eyes, dark and foreboding, laughing with, or at, me. The casual and forceful exhalation of cigarette smoke in my direction ... towards the lens, towards my eyes, one of them closed but stung nevertheless. The ultimate act of dismissal. Or seduction. …

Escape From New York: Even the ultimate dystopian classic could not anticipate 9/11

One of my favourite dystopian thrillers in the 1980s was Escape From New York, which even after almost 40 years is still one of my favourite films. Its vision of the future was so bleak that it stayed with me all the way through my teenagehood—scenes continued to haunt me for years afterwards, from the …

Back to black: Amour and Amy

One movie ... every night ... for the next year ... Two pretty confronting movies the past two nights: Amour and Amy. Both of them devastating, and both very similar in their depiction of the slow degradation of health and life and love. The first is a French movie, superbly written, acted and directed, that …

American Movie draws back the curtain

The Dysfunctional Williams Family's expedition to watch one movie from our iTunes library each night for the next year continues. After Friday night's solo viewing of Alien, I followed that up Saturday night with Aliens—also alone. There's just no stomach in the Williams household for movies about creatures that burst from ... the stomach. I …

On solo movie nights, no one can hear you scream

Question: is a family movie night still a family movie night when the family clears off because they don't want to watch the movie? Hmm, in my book, yes. The movie in question was Alien, which none of them have seen, and which none of them want to see. Which left me alone, crusading onwards …

Adventures with a boyhood hero: Movie #4

Two of my early literary heroes were Asterix and Tintin. I encountered them both on a holiday to Aberdeen in the 1970s when Asterix was still relatively unknown. Asterix was more accessible to me as a kid, but back then only Asterix the Gaul and Asterix and the Golden Sickle were in print in the …