Culture
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
inertia 