Billericay School – SpeakUp!

★☆☆☆☆ Dreadful doesn’t even cover it.    I don’t think, out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of films I have seen in my lifetime I have ever seen anything that relates closer to pornography than Michael Bay’s Transformers series. I am not the first to make a connection between this multi-million dollar blockbusting franchise and [...]

★★★★★ Hilarious. One of the best films of the year so far.  Big, crude, mouthy, irreverent comedies can be brilliant. Sadly, this is a rare phenomenon. They are usually some of the worst films going. They con their audiences into liking them with colourful marketing campaigns then claim to be word of mouth hits. They [...]

★★☆☆☆ Not very funny, and more than a little weird (and not in a good way). Bad Teacher has been advertised as a cool, biting romantic comedy. The promotional trailer shows Cameron Diaz as a teacher trying to raise money to have surgery to increase the size of her breasts, and by doing so secure [...]

Over the past couple of weeks the BBC aired two notable items which made headlines. One of them was a (very good) documentary about assisted suicide. It is understandable that this sparked debate in the press – it is still illegal in the UK to assist a loved one in killing themselves. The other was [...]

★☆☆☆☆   A truly repulsive film that celebrates racism, homophobia and a convicted rapist   Upon this film’s release, a journalist writing in the New York Times raised an interesting idea. What if The Hangover: Part II was actually the defining realisation of a new sub-category in the comedy genre? This genre could be appropriately titled ‘the [...]

★★★★☆ A wonderful piece of fantasy entertainment. Incredibly silly, incredibly fun. After some rather less-than-mediocre offerings from the Marvel stable (last year’s Iron Man 2being a recent low point), I was delighted to find that Thor, directed by Shakespeare god Kenneth Branagh, is not just a step in the right direction but an absolute feast of entertainment. [...]

★☆☆☆☆ An awful, boring mess. Avoid it if you value your brain cells.   Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight:  this film is not really a film. That word would imply some kind of artist endeavour has taken place, and if one was to go to see this fourth instalment of what has [...]

University has all finished for the summer. I move  into the house I am renting next year, with a group of my friends, on the 1st July (I shall be returning to Southampton to move some stuff over, but will remain in Essex for all of the summer). I was overjoyed to find out this [...]

  The last part of the semester has begun, and this week marked my final week of teaching for the English side of my course. Throughout this English module, known to those who study it as ‘Theory & Criticism’, we have looked at theorists such as Kant, Hume, Said, Spivak and Hall. Some of them [...]

Lewis – It’s not boring, it’s cosy!     Everything is fine. People can relax. All the stresses of life are cured. Because Lewis is back on TV. If you want to feel bruised and psychologically assaulted, as if you’ve just been dragged by the ankles around a museum of torture that uses sandpaper for [...]