Fairytale

It’s official: the long-awaited Fable reboot is well on its way. At least, it appears that way, given the brand-new teaser trailer showing in-game cinematic footage that was unveiled at Xbox Games Showcase 2023. Thanks to a pithy introduction to Playground Games’ newest rendition of Fable by none other than British comedian Richard Ayoade, we’ve now seen a glimpse into what the reboot of Xbox’s classic open-ended roleplaying game series could offer players when it finally releases. We still don’t have a solid…

Moïra Fowley is the well-regarded author of three Young Adult novels, best known of which is The Accident Season. Eyes Guts Throat Bones is her first venture into stories for adults, which came about when she abandoned writing a fourth YA novel during the pandemic to bring, in her own words, something “bloody and beautiful” screaming into the world in a “horror-adjacent” mode.The first story, What Would You Give for a Treat Like Me, is a strong opener: a vivid, neatly executed post-apocalyptic road story with fairytale…

via CBS Films While Disney deservedly takes the majority of the flak for repurposing classic fairytales as live-action movies, the trend was industry-wide in the early 2010s before the Mouse House cornered the market for itself, with The Little Mermaid the latest to roll off the production line this coming Friday. Snow White and the Hunstman did manage to get a sequel – although it flopped horrendously – while a similar fate befell Jack the Giant Slayer, and to call Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror forgettable…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThe casting director of Grease has described the 1978 film musical as a “non-PC fairytale”.Grease, which starred John Travolta and the late Olivia Newton-John as two high school students who fall in love, has faced criticism in recent years for its problematic elements.In a new oral history of the film for The Guardian, casting director Joel Thurm also rejected one of the common…

New Zealand cartoonist K. O’Neill has won acclaim and awards for their much loved Tea Dragon Society trilogy, and their latest book, The Moth Keeper, is another story about magical creatures, community and how they work together. Anya is a teen girl who has been given the task of “Moth Keeper” – protector of the lunar moths that allow the precious Night-Lily flower to bloom once a year, its pollen essential to her people’s well-being. It’s a huge responsibility and one that Anya takes seriously – even though it means…

The Vijayanagara empire covered most of south India in the 15th and 16th centuries. Viewed from one angle, it was a seedbed for the globalised modern world, in that it became a haven for art and new ideas and an economic power-house that traded with China and Venice. Viewed from another, it was a thicket of intrigue, rocked by rival factions, foreign wars and palace coups. Which is to say it was everything: the noble and the vile, the progressive and regressive, the Hindu heaven of Svarga twinned with treacherous Game of…

Dizz Tate’s debut novel, Brutes, opens with a disappearance: Sammy Liu-Lou, daughter of a famous televangelist and an enigmatic rebel with shaved hair. When her mother discovers her empty bed, one question echoes around this fictitious Florida town, “tickling” the surface of the lake that lies ominously undisturbed at its centre: “Where is she?”Somewhat infuriatingly, Sammy is to remain a mystery, since this novel is not about her, but the gang of eighth-grade girls hunched behind binoculars at their bedroom windows,…

Britpop iconThe song that best sums up my 2022Too Good for Giving Up by yours truly.The song that gets me in the Christmas moodMerry Xmas Everybody by Slade and Fairytale of New York by the Pogues.The Christmas song I can’t standThere’s none I can’t stand, I’m all for it.The best bit of a Christmas dinnerThe sprouts, stuffing and obviously the bird.Favourite Quality StreetThe purple ones.The best Christmas present I’ve ever receivedMe mam scrimped and saved for a sky blue Raleigh Chopper when I was about eight. That’s not…

When Don’t Worry Darling premiered at the Venice Film Festival all the attention was on the cast and the highly publicized alleged feud between Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh. Lots happened, or allegedly happened, like spit-gate (which Chis Pine denied, and Harry Styles addressed at a concert), and Florence Pugh missing the press conference, among other things. One wholesomely hilarious thing that really did happen was Harry Styles kissing Nick Kroll after the screening, and now Kroll is opening up about that experience,…

Fairytale of New York video. Warner MusicOnce upon a time a band set out to make a Christmas song. Not about snow or sleigh rides or mistletoe or miracles, but lost youth and ruined dreams. A song in which Christmas is as much the problem as it is the solution. A kind of anti-Christmas song that ended up being, for a generation, the Christmas song.That song, Fairytale of New York by the Pogues, has just been reissued to mark its 25th anniversary; it has already re-entered the Top 20 every December since 2005, and shows no…