Book Club – Otherlands
Book club reconvenes as Charlie shares a run down on Thomas Halliday’s blockbuster history tour Otherlands.
Sturgeon departs. What now?
When news broke yesterday morning that Nicola Sturgeon was tending her resignation as First Minister, most in Scotland were caught off guard. This didn’t arrive after some great scandal – though the political heat had certainly risen in recent months – but was rather hastened by Sturgeon’s inner sense that it was time for her…
Movie Mondays: Aftersun
Few movies do so much with so little as Aftersun. In the modern age of filmmaking where projects like Avatar 2 can cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make Aftersun is very much on the other end of the spectrum, relying on two excellent performances and an amazingly personal script. This is the…
Top 25 Albums of 2022
2022 has been a whirlwind of a year – the first full year post-covid without any covid lockdowns, and the closest we have come to normal for some time. There has been no shortage of year-defining events that have made headlines and caused sensation, but similarly no shortage of great music being released. One of…
Movie Mondays – TraumaZone
There’s a prevailing trend in documentary making these days where the narrator becomes part of the story in a fusion of self-promotion and naked bias. Personally, I blame Super Size Me (2004). I feel a hot take brewing, but while that’s still on the boil it’s a return to inertia’s much-neglected Movie Mondays. For this…
My New Companion // A Eulogy
I’ve been navigating empty spaces lately. Tracing the outlines of where someone once was, wearing their clothes and sifting through paper trails. Grief of this kind is akin to shuffling around in a pitch-black room, feeling the contours of unknown furniture with outstretched hands and piecing together a mental map of the new confines of…
Book Club – Crash
There are a lucky few books that make it to print, and fewer still that will outlive their authors as cultural milestones. Of this rare handful some will set out grand ideas, while others may one day come to be regarded as bold leaps in literature that expand the bounds of language and expression. There…
And There They Were
Last month I managed to steal a weekend away to the Highlands. The weather was balmy for March, with summer feeling as though it had arrived early. Not a cloud in the sky, taps aff, etcetera. The trip seemed blessed by the sun itself, a well-timed getaway destined to be plenty of fun. The journey…
Movie Mondays- Boiling Point
This week for Movie Mondays I thought I’d talk about a movie from last year that I missed when making the best of 2021 list. Despite having its official release date last year, Boiling Point was widely released to the UK public back in March via Netflix. The entire hour and a half runtime amazingly…
Inner Ears vol. 1
Welcome back to inertia. We return to you with a new musical feature titled Inner Ears, a fresh freeform feature where our contributors serve up some piping hot music recommendations. Based on what’s been streaming through our own headsets, hopefully you find some artists, albums and genres here to plug into that you’ll dig as…
Movie Mondays- Paris, Texas
Sometimes it can feel like you’ve already watched most of the classics, or at least the ones that appeal to you most strongly. With such a rich back catalogue of brilliant films from across the world, it is to be expected that the occasional gem may pass you by entirely. Relying on streaming services as…
Book Club – How Late It Was, How Late
A comedy of errors without much to laugh about, 1994’s How Late It Was, How Late was a second-hand purchase of mine bought on a whim. It stuck out in the Scottish Literature section like a sore thumb as the title rang the bells of familiarity in my head. Counting out my loose change to…
Movie Mondays: Best of 2021 Special
As we’re only just into a new year I thought I’d bring back Movie Mondays with a bit of a retrospective on the best movies of 2021. There are definitely some films that I have not gotten around to yet but will hopefully watch soon. Some of these movies that will not be included here…
Top 25 Albums of 2021
With 2021 being a bit of a damp squib, we have thankfully had plenty of great new music as a silver lining to the mundanity of staying at home. With touring returning for musicians for a while only to once again be put on hold with the arrival of Omicron, many artists have used the…
The Call of the Void
I’ll preface this post by saying that none of this constitutes any qualified opinion or advice regarding mental health. I’m mainly putting this out to raise awareness and give people an idea of the lived experience of a misunderstood mental illness. For resources from charities, health bodies and psychologists, please see the bottom of this…
The Carbon Footprint Paradox
Growing up in Scotland during the noughties, climate change and environmental awareness were a part of the curriculum at both primary and secondary school. I would say that it is safe to assume that including such topics in school has an overall positive affect on the way that children think about the world that surrounds…
Snakes and Ladders | Part II
If you have found yourself here without reading Part I, you can find that here. Thatcher set out creating her game a year after she came to power in 1980, the year when her Tory government passed its landmark ‘Right to Buy’ legislation through parliament. The new law granted anyone living in a council house…
Snakes and Ladders | Part I
It was the turn of the 20th century, and Lizzie Magie found herself in a predicament. America would not grant women the vote for another two decades or so, and yet Magie was proudly outspoken: brimming with fierce intelligence and committed to bravely promoting ideas that would have been controversial for her time. She was…
Movie Mondays – Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The risk with making a romance film is that it doesn’t come across as authentic enough, or worse still it reaches so far into seriousness as to become a parody of itself. Filmmakers are often not ambitious enough when it comes to romantic relationships. Either they’re carefully positioned as a secondary consideration to the plot,…
Movie Mondays- Drive
Often, I get a feeling when it comes to a movie or album that I loved as a teenager that I should avoid revisiting it for fear that it doesn’t live up to my memory of it. For me, Drive is one of those movies; a highly stylised action flick with a morally ambiguous protagonist…
Book Club – Sapiens
Sapiens by Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari is a book that can make a rare claim to being a blockbuster read in a time when reading books is in sharp decline. Since its publication in English in 2014 it can often be spotted in living room bookshelves and hostel sunbeds the world over, having been…
Book Club- The Disconnect
It’s been too long since the last book club entry here on inertia, although I have been taking some time away from writing after experiencing severe burnout after finishing the second semester of my Masters. Now feeling recharged and armed with plenty of notes on a few books that I’ve managed to get through in…
Movie Mondays – Sound of Metal
I am not joking here when I say this is one of the best movies to be released in the past ten years. Since watching it a couple of weeks ago I still find myself thinking about it nearly every day. The film follows an aspiring metal drummer in America who suddenly starts to lose his…
Movie Mondays – Under the Skin
I always find it a point of total fascination that watching a film or listening to an album can be experiences where your enjoyment of what you’re consuming is not a guaranteed constant. Returning to stuff you used to like can sometimes provoke warm nostalgia, or otherwise make you coldly question what you even liked…
Pollokshields: Community in Action
The standout Scottish story to come from the previous few days’ newscycle was the amazing display of community from the Southside of Glasgow. Images of an immigration van boxed in by peaceful members of the community have stuck in my head and restored some faith in the power of people. At a time when it…
Back of a Cocktail Napkin Election Report
It’s a rare thing that a party in power for 14 years can increase its majority, but such is the situation in Scotland that the euphemistically named “constitutional question” continues to dominate. Even parties that complain about nationalists constantly banging on about independence seem to do extremely well when they also constantly bang on about…
The Culture War Election
In some ways, the upcoming Holyrood election is lacking in the drama of an American election night or a nail-biting referendum. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon enjoys approval ratings far higher than any of her opponents. The SNP are almost certain to win the election with even the worst polls for her party giving them a…
Beware the Beat of the Culture War Drums
With every passing week brings another bloody battle in the so-called Culture War that seems to have gripped Britain. In the red corner we have the lefties, supposedly baying for anarchy and hellbent on destroying our traditional way of life. In the blue, the Tories: their puffed-up outrage about such a threat on full display…
Movie Mondays – Lost in Translation
For me, Lost in Translation is as much a film as it is a mood. You’re never really whisked off your feet. You’re never really transported to a magical place. You don’t experience sweaty palms in a tense car chase. You’re kind of never really doing anything in this film. Instead, you flow with it…
Movie Mondays – Patrick
Following on from Ewan’s post last week I thought I would also review another film from Aberdeen’s beloved Belmont Filmhouse’s shiny new streaming service, this time 2019’s Patrick directed by Tim Meilants. A black comedy set on a Belgian naturist camp, this film reveals all but also shrouds a great deal in mystery. Once you…
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