Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The resting place of stars and heavenly bodies are not large tombs or memorials and cenotaphs signposted for the conscious and the spatially aware, they are for many the crypts for the dusty thoughts of past glories of adventure, of exploration, of missed opportunities to be put right, to be secured as illuminated mausoleums that draw the faithful inwards.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The Midlands has its own sense of uniqueness in the ability to weave a tale through any medium of art. The gentleness of some though may leave other communities and areas at odds with the idea of what lays at the centre of it all, pure industrialisation, the machine that once powered a nation and beyond; and yet the fringes, the outer edge that encompasses a softening of the language and of the accent, there is a strength of purpose to which art such as Folk and the gift of song serenades the listener with guile and the image of nature in full flow.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There is no need to visually imagine how glorious sound is, to think of it as an experience that only the eyes can feast upon, that witnessing something magical is reserved just for a single sense to covet as a dragon might upon a pile of gold, all that is required in the willingness to confront and embrace clarity, to prepare the soul for every audible moment that may come your way.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
After Hours, is that time of the night when a few select friends and unobtrusive onlookers find themselves in the company of the artist at play, comfortable in their surroundings, not being scrutinised by the rabid and the feverishly inclined who pay their money and leave with a little part of the inner soul of those who they have demanded in return for their time.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Rupert Everett, Reece Budin.
There are people to whom history has, if not forgotten, then slowly erased from public view. Some of these are heroes of war to which their services had to remain under the cover of secrecy and mystery to avoid a conflict of interests later down the line where governments change and public opinion may shift due to the response to falsehoods, allegations, and fear, and it is to the right of the researcher, the scribe, and the playwright that these almost fearless people are now underlined and shown to be for the heroes that they are; no matter what they did before or after the war.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Jane Slavin, Lizzy McInnerny, Greta Scacchi, David Menkin.
It is a nightmare of the modern world, to find yourself arrested and placed in the void of bureaucracy, becoming almost disappeared, because the logical systems and beliefs of freedom have been erased by paranoia, the uniforms of hate and distrust blocking access to leave a country, on the basis that you may have posted a thought online, overstayed your welcome by a day, or just been someone to whom a member of their ever-increasing numbers of officialdom took exception to; this is the trauma awaiting all in this brave new world.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Tamsin Greig, Rory Kinnear, Aja Dodd, Amit Shah, Will Harrison-Wallace, Haydn Watts, Flora Saner, Hannah Brine.
Names are unavoidably erased from history, some through the sheer fact that not everybody can be remembered, and some because they have found a way to work under the auspices of a nom de plume, of hiding in plain sight so that the creative can have autonomy over their work whilst also holding onto the privilege of privacy. For writers and artists, it can lead to a thought of losing out on the credit where it was due, the public only adoring the name, and not the person behind it, gripping hard on to concealment at the cost of recognition.
Into the end of the bleakest night
I finally resolved
to shred the remaining memories
of you.
Old photographs
where once you grinned,
I thought in youthful
happiness, but betrayed
by deceit and the chisel of the sneer
of selfish vanity,
all went the way of the vigilant calm
of the machine, cutting with no emotion
through the last few years of never-ending scars.
Then
in silence I found a card, badly written
professing sorrow,
your words scrawled untidily
as if written by conviction
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Jing Lusi, Lesley Sharp, Jemma Moore, Martin Compston, Nicholas Rowe, Jonathan Aris, Trevor White, Tom Forbes, Richard Armitage, Robert Gilbert, Hannah Steele, Tom Ashley, Steph Lacey.
It is with surprise that the second series of Red Eye seems to have learned the lessons presented by its initial series and produced a far more intriguing situation to be investigated by D.S Lee and one that releases the damaging limitations that shrouded Jinh Lusi in the lead role and which reinforces a truth that the world at large is not only caught in the crossfire of ideology, but that at its very core it suffers from the best laid plans of those we might consider to be serving our own best interests.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Dark humour and pain are often seen as disturbed cousins, sharing a bond that is born out of discomfort and a psychological ache that refuses to beat in a way that would imply expired confidence, a sadness that is overwhelming. There is no avoiding this special connection in life, the only option is to embrace it, to feed the soul with all that comes in the forms of loss, the failure of errant communication, loneliness, broken faith, and even feeling ill at ease when the world is content and your body has no reason to squirm; and like mastering sarcasm, the need for dark humour even in the most trying of times is of paramount necessity.