Tania studied Cinema Studies and English at the University of Melbourne, Australia and Queens University, Canada, completing her Honours in Cinema. Since graduating, she has worked in various areas of film and television in London and Australia including media recruitment and bookings, assistant to a documentary film-maker and for the past two and a half years as a Casting Coordinator for a talent agency. Ever since her childhood desperation to actually be little orphan Annie, she has heralded an unhealthy interest in all things filmic. It is only since being banned from engaging in regular rants amongst her friends that Tania has very recently decided to recommence her passion for writing.

Emasculated murderers

Far from contemporary sleek action sequences or shoot-outs, the audience is privy to a sequence of slips, breathless chases, wrestles and slaps, which are distinctly ‘girly’.

Paris 1936, 1968, 2007, today

Needless to say, amidst the ever-playing piano accordion, Parisian skylines and distracting caricatures it is sometimes easy to forget the troubled times of Paris in 1936 were just as real as the recession we face today.

The first step?

With the benefit of hindsight and study in a post-Hitchcock world, this tale of an everyday man thrust into a world of espionage, assumed identities and rom-com banter can be referred to and considered as part of a canon, rather than a stand-alone film.

Responsibility in popular culture

The Frat Pack films have enhanced the notion that the goofy geek is also cool, that the thirty-something stoner is tolerable and of course the best of the adages: that everyone has the capacity to achieve. In condoning these approaches, mainstream adults and other over-achievers are consistently shown up as the true social losers.

Whatever happened to ‘Sex and the City’?

Everything that made Sex and the City so important and challenging, and exciting, and controversial, when the television series started, has fizzled away, and despite the promise and PR, this film does nothing to reignite it.

Where do filmmakers come from?

Jacobs admits that he originally wanted merely to document the space he grew up in and one can clearly understand why. The home of his parents, experimental film-maker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo (ingeniously cast as the mother and the father in this film), is a sight to behold.

The same old song

While I am a huge fan of ‘less is more’ when it comes to dialogue, it is crucial then for dialogue to be concise and simultaneously loaded. Unfortunately, we get a limited view into what each of these band members has to bring to the table and therefore a limited understanding of their dynamics and potential as a group.

Of teachers and pupils

Not only does the Poppy emphasise many times exactly how happy she is, but we also see how talented she is as a teacher, and can even presume that perhaps it is exactly because she didn’t plan to be there, that Poppy is especially content. This is the biggest difference between Poppy and the other teachers we see in the film.

Through a novel, darkly

This combination of fortitude, darkness, history but enduring humour embodied by Fermin is also the incarnation of Zafon’s depiction of post-War Spain; a fragmented and unsettled country. There is a sadness that hangs over Barcelona as so many people carry the scars of loss and fear that the years of the Civil War effected.

Still waters run deep… still

The film shrewdly combines traditional cinematic tropes with eyewitness accounts of the Aramoana massacre to emphasise that this catastrophe is merely one in a long line of similar stories the world over, being documented with frighteningly more frequency in recent decades.