Up periscope: a celebration I love a good submarine film. The claustrophobia of the confined setting, the tensions arising from a group of people having to co-exist and operate in a completely unnatural, extremely dangerous environment, is all pretty much guaranteed to hook me in every time. I was reminded of this while I was watched the 2014 thriller Black Sea on the weekend. A hard as nails, embittered Scottish deep sea salvage expert, Robinson, (Jude Law), takes a job with a shadowy backer, to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars of
Read More Lockdown recollections of the outside world and the wonder of Space Age Books A tribute to recently deceased Merv Binn & his speciality science fiction bookshop – by Andrew Nette I was saddened over the Eastern weekend to hear of the death of Mervyn ‘Merv’ Binns on April 7, at the age of 85. Binns was a major participant in Melbourne science fiction fandom going back to its earliest days in the 1950s, and established Space Age Books, Australia’s first specialist science fiction bookshop, and a frequent bolt hole for
Read More “War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals.” Andrew Nette on the 50th anniversary of André de Toth’s „Play Dirty“ (dt. „Ein dreckiger Haufen“) Towards the end of last year I posted on my love for the 1968 espionage/war thriller, Where Eagles Dare. My first post for 2019 continues what is becoming an unofficial series of sorts on this site, ‘in praise of films I watched with my parents on the television on Sunday night when I was young’. This time, I want to briefly pay tribute to the incredibly hard-boiled
Read More He put Australia on the Map A few thoughts on the passing of Peter Corris, the father of modern Australian crime fiction – by Andrew Nette. I suspect a lot of fans of contemporary Oz crime fiction, and more than a few of its current practitioners, may have forgotten or perhaps don’t even know the debt we all owe to Sydney based crime writer Peter Corris, who died 30 August 2018 at the age of 76. Corris’ debut novel, The Dying Trade, was published in 1980 (something must have been in the water that
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