Gareth Southgate was a defender as a player. It shows when he is in charge as England coach. Many have praised his time in the role due to reaching the semi finals in Russia 2018 and how we have negotiated the way through to the quarter finals of Euro 2020. He has brought a sense …
Author Archives: mirrorsmoke07
The Self Appointed European Super League
Many football fans don’t feel entitled to trophies. Nor do they feel entitled to status or membership of a league. They understand that a certain degree of success on the pitch is required to attain these things. A competitive edge. For a vast array of fans, they know only too well that they are entitled to nothing …
Silver Bullet V Blonde Bullshit
The announcement in November that a vaccine to combat Covid 19 was on the way marked a significant moment in the struggle with the Pandemic. The United Kingdom’s government were in raptures, perhaps because they’d been all over the place in regards to logistics and messaging so that the vaccine might make most of their problems go …
No Time To Be Released
With the announcement that the latest James Bond film is having its release pushed back a third time so that it could end up reaching cinema screens two years after originally planned, anticipation around the project will only grow. However, the stakes have also been precariously raised because if the film is a let-down, many …
Crocodile Tiers and Late Lockdowns – The UK Government’s Failure on Covid 19
By early March it was becoming increasingly obvious that the government were being overtaken by events as the virus had permeated through the United Kingdom. Washing your hands for a prolonged amount of time simply wasn’t going to cut it. At this point in a metropolis like London, the vast majority of people hadn’t got the memo …
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Portrayal of Class A drugs in the movies
In 1996 a film was released that many felt glamourized drug abuse. 8 years later another movie dealing with very similar subject matter arguably did so in a more explicit manner but curiously avoided that debate. The different public and critical reaction to each film tells us something about how society regards Class A drugs, …
Populist strongmen or Neo-dictatorships?
The world is dominated by several modes of government. Firstly, there are the broader names we are all familiar with: democracies, dictatorships, autocracies and monarchies. Yet secondly, they can rarely be summed up under these labels. For instance, each democracy has its own specific constitution while some may be democratic in theory but not in …
Prejudice – The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
In the 1990’s “political correctness” in the United Kingdom loomed large on the landscape. Decades on from homosexuality being legalised and at the other end of a century in which women had got the vote, society as a whole was expected to follow a new code of conduct that would not tolerate racism, homophobia or …
Death of the Film Maker
With multiple pay per view streaming channels popping up and television and film both being on demand and repeated or be downloaded infinitum, the contemporary viewer has never had so much control over the content they can watch. For decades, the vast majority of television viewers were at the mercy of channel schedules. In the …
The Seventh Seal – Antonius Blocking Out His Anxiety
An existentialist cinematic exposition about fatalism? A post-war re-evaluation of faith and nature? A dance with death in the Skandi traditions of Edvard Munch or Henrik Ibsen? Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal has been considered to be concerned with all these subjects since its release in 1958.
Athon 