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You owe me twenty quid: Tyres in Spaced

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15 May 2020 Last week Becca Harrison tweeted about re-watching the turn-of-the-millennium Channel 4 sitcom, Spaced , and some of its most quotable lines (concerning jaffa cakes in coat pockets) and imitable actions (mimed shoot out). Being an Ulsterperson, my fondness for the show often homes in on Tyres played by Belfast-born, Holywood-bred actor Michael Smiley (if you're a Ben Wheatley fan, you ought to recognise him). This train of thought, not for the first time, got me thinking about the significance of Tyres. When Spaced first aired in September 1999, Northern Ireland was a year-and-a-half into its fragile official peacetime following (and not quite yet distinct from) the prior thirty years of conflict. I was in my mid-teens and it was only when I reached my early and mid-twenties that I fully understood the characters in the show, especially the oddities of being a grown-up but feeling not as mature as your age suggested, of feeling the ageing process but still being
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Spirited Away

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22 May 2020 Back in what feels like the beforetimes in February, Netflix began a staggered release of Studio Ghibli films, which put me in the mood to revisit many of them as well as see the few I'd missed for the first time. As the Covid-19 crisis became more apparent and lockdown was (finally and suddenly) introduced in the UK, the desire in particular to find comfort in Sprited Away (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) grew all the more. It's a film I've watched a few times before, and I enjoy the experience of seeing the works in both the original Japanese and English dubs. When Channel 4 ran a Studio Ghibli season, oh goodness, 10 to 15 or perhaps more years ago, only the dubbed versions were shown. But Netflix gives fantastic options for audio and subtitle combinations, and this time round it has to be the Japanese. In early April my anxiety concerning the pandemic was overwhelming, and getting it under control led to fatigue. One afternoon I had to admit defeat and lie i
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Shadow Dancer

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*DISCLAIMER: I am writing about the film with an approach to critical analysis with only a hint of review, therefore there are spoilers within if you have not seen the film. This post serves as a line of thought that I am archiving for later development.* It appears that reviews of Shadow Dancer (Marsh, 2012) have not been entirely complimentary, as far as I am aware (I am deliberately avoiding them so feel free to correct me), and seem largely to have been written by men. The film is much more than critics and general commenters deem it to be (e.g. one I came across stated that this is yet another Troubles film making the IRA out to be scum). Shadow Dancer does not attempt to depict the Northern Ireland conflict through a microcosmic narrative, rather it draws out a suppressed individual struggle within patriarchal organizations, and in doing so attempts to reflect the hidden lives many were forced to lead. The most striking aspect of Shadow Dancer for me is its evocation
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