AvidBards
Movies

“Venom” Movie Review: Are Critics Always Right?

Warning: major spoilers below! Though perhaps somewhat of an underdog in the Marvel comics universe, Venom has longtime been a highly cherished character, who appeared predominantly in the Spider-Man comics, especially to die-hard fans. For those of us who aren’t as much into the comic books, you might remember the titular amorphous alien symbiote from the film Spider-Man 3 back in 2007, absorbing itself first into Peter Parker’s spider suit, and later into the character journalist Eddie Brock. Essentially, the concept of the alien symbiote is that it takes on hosts; giving its host immense power but simultaneously (and sinisterly)…

View Post
Reviews

“Atypical” Season 2 Highlights

Warning: major spoilers for “Atypical” Season 1 and 2 below! Netflix original show Atypical, created by Robia Rashid, quickly became one of my  favourite shows almost immediately into watching Season 1 (released in 2017). It presented itself as a world that you can both escape to as well as relate to, which is something I always enjoy. Atypical balances real, raw content with quirky fun, all wrapped up into half-hour episodes in relatively short seasons; a tactic that always leaves you wanting more. Of course, the main reason why I love this show is because of the representation. Focusing on…

View Post
Books

Book Review: “Warlight” by Michael Ondaatje

The Trauma of the Post-War Generation In the second review from the Man Booker longlist, Warlight by Michael Ondaatje proved a much more intense read than the crime-thriller Snap by Linda Bauer. A Canadian writer born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje is an author of high regard, having won the Man Booker prize once before for his internationally acclaimed novel, The English Patient, and similarly winning the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018 (the prize conceived to celebrate 50 years of the Man Booker which awards one book per decade a prize) for the same novel. To all those who know…

View Post
Movies

The Past and Present of BlacKkKlansman

Last weekend, I went to an open air cinema to watch Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. I had heard nothing about the film, except for a rather vague explanation from my brother who was watching the film with me, and was frankly slightly apprehensive about watching the movie. The reason simply being that it’s not usually the style of film I would watch. BlacKkKlansman, a modern age Blaxploitation style film, is a telling of the real life (“based upon some fo’ real, fo’ real shit”) infiltration of the Klu Klux Klan by an African American cop, Ron Stallworth (played impeccably by John…

View Post
Movies

“To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” Film Review

Warning: Major Spoilers below! When I first watched the trailer for the new Netflix film To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (based on a novel of the same name), I wasn’t sure what to think. Personally, I am not a massive fan of overly sappy movies or shows because I find sappiness to be disingenuous most of the times, or romanticized to a point of unbelievability. That’s sort of how this film came across, but what caught my eye was that the main character was a PoC (actress Lana Condor is of Vietnamese ethnicity, playing half-Korean character Lara Jean…

View Post
Books

Snap by Belinda Bauer – Book Review

Snap by Belinda Bauer (Penguin Random House, Bantam Press) “On a stifling summer’s day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack’s in charge, she’d said. I won’t be long. But she doesn’t come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed forever.” While a very popular genre, crime novels have never been at the top of my reading lists. Not for lack of interest! I went through a phase in high school when I bought and burnt through every Kathy…

View Post

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Where to next?