Because Everybody Else Has One

Major computer issues (are there any other kind) stopped me from posting this and a few other updates in time.  Look out for more content in the next couple of days, including, would you know it, a book review! This has been up on Channel 24 for over a week now so you may have caught it already. If not... What it's about Roman J Israel, Esq. is a brilliant civil-rights lawyer but, as someone not blessed with the greatest social skills, his expertise is behind the scenes work, helping his partner prepare the very best defence for his clients. When his partner has a heart attack, however, Roman is forced to come to the fore and face not only the realities of a failing law practice but who he really is as a person, as a lawyer and as a once-fierce but now potentially obsolete fighter for human rights. What we thought A brilliant, searing character study, wrapped in a fairly mundane and occasionally dull law-procedural plot, Roman J Israel, Esq. is as awkward a...

Brrrr... is there a chill in here or is it just Jake Gyllenhaal in his best ever role? This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about Lou Bloom is a “nightcrawler”, a freelance video-journalist who prowls the streets at night looking for grizzly accidents and violent crime scenes to film and sell to a local TV news station. In such a cut-throat industry, however, Bloom finds himself taking more and more extreme measures to get ahead – a perilous descent down a moral black hole that only feeds into his already anti-social state of mind. What we thought Nightcrawler is, all at once, an edge-of-your-seat thriller, a satire on journalistic ethics and a disturbing probe into the mind of a sociopath and, though it doesn't exactly always make for the most pleasant of viewing, it is compelling as hell. Especially for us (amateur or otherwise) psych-majors and philosophy enthusiasts. Lou Bloom (played with chilling brilliance by Jake Gyllenhaal) seems o...