There have been a few recent screen adaptations of the classic tale of Pinocchio, the marionette who wanted to be a real boy. TJ Klune takes this tale and flips it in his latest book In the Lives of Puppets, while retaining everything that makes the story universal. And he does so in a way…
Movies based on video games are pretty common – Angry Birds, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu to name a few. But movies based on board games seems counter-intuitive. I mean, the board doesn’t move, and much of the play is inside the players’ heads. So the arrival of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among…
On finishing Susannah Wise’s standalone post-apocalyptic debut The Fragile Earth, some readers may have wondered where she would go next. It’s hard to imagine anyone predicting the antic, comedic, sometimes surreal ghost story with multiversal elements that is her follow up – Okay Then That’s Great. When the book opens, Marnie has once again seen…
A film for fanboys, Black Adam is mired in mythology, which will be far more meaningful if you’ve read the DC comics. The film tells the story of Teth Adam, the slave who became champion, who becomes Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson). The action starts in the ancient city of Kahndaq, where Adam is enslaved before…
From the folk tales of One Thousand and One Nights, to highest grossing film of 1992, Aladdin, the story of the genie in a lamp is familiar. Now director George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) provides a new take on the tale with Three Thousand Years of Longing. Dr Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a…
Canadian author J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters, a gaslamp fantasy with powered children at a secret school, an implacable enemy and an inimical other-world has plenty of obvious antecedents. But Miro has managed to spin these familiar elements into an enjoyable, tense and sometimes surprising narrative. A glowing blue baby is rescued from a train carriage…
Opera Australia’s production of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella is glorious from the get go. Though there is no real standout number, the musical’s soundtrack is glorious and easy-on-the-ear, filled as it is with recognisable Rogers and Hammerstein melodies and lyrics. Anna Louizos’ set design is superb, featuring slick transitions through scenes the sometimes include animal hand…
So, you think you know the Cinderella story – the one about the poor “servant” to the evil stepmother and her taunting stepsisters? Well, think again, for the creatives behind the musical have shaken things up, even if the essence of the tale remains unchanged. “Yes”, Cinderella still gets to go to the ball and catch the…
A. Lee Martinez specialises in a kind of fantasy comedy that riffs on a range of fantasy, science fiction literary and movie tropes. His 2013 novel Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain centred around a super villain, and the book before that 2012’s Chasing the Moon was a comic hero’s journey fighting a range of…
Multiverses are all the rage right now. From Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse to the upcoming Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, it seems like you can’t turn around without another multi-dimensional movie smacking you in the face. But Everything Everywhere All At Once is different. Yes, it’s another multiverse, but one the good folks…
