Ed Williamson

News, Reviews & Features

Review: The Lego Movie 2 plays nicely but has no new surprises

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 10th February 2019

My nephews were younger when the first Lego Movie came out. I mean, everyone was. But in 2014 they were five years younger; a lifetime when you're under ten. The elder one loved it; the younger probably not quite at the age where he could be relied on to sit through anything for more than ten minutes without chewing his shoes. They'll love this too, because they're still under ten and they're idiots, despite the older one being quite capable of comprehensively schooling me about dinosaurs. Me, I think maybe the magic has faded a bit.

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Review: Green Book is a road trip that takes Route 1

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 6th February 2019

If racism can be solved in microcosm, film often likes to suggest, then can't we all just get along? Sure, except for all the massive systemic obstacles to that. The buddy relationship at the heart of Peter Farrelly's Green Book, one in which a white racist comes to accept a black man as a friend, wants us to believe that prejudice can be chipped away at through prolonged exposure to its object; that we only hate what we don't know. There's probably a broad truth in that. And yet social media has introduced everyone to people and cultures they'd otherwise never interact with, and Twitter in particular seems to make people even more determined never to change their mind. So is this any use?

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The Apprentice: season 14, episode 12 recap: "High Nut Content"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 18th December 2018

It's drawing to its close and we're all better people: informed, educated and entertained. Let's build on this experience and learn to live together in harmony, then burn the world in a big skip.

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The Apprentice: season 14, episode 9 recap: "Bad-Up TV"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 30th November 2018

In a meta twist, the housemates, if they're called housemates, are appearing in a TV show in a TV show. It's a bit like the Larry Sanders Show, only with a big pink-lips inflatable sofa and the creeping sensation that all around you is decay.

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The Apprentice: season 14, episode 8 recap: "Don't Make an Exhibition of Yourself"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 21st November 2018

I worked in an art gallery for a year or so. A guest at an event once asked me to order him a taxi, so I called a minicab, then when it turned up outside he obviously thought it was too downmarket and so pretended he didn't realise it was for him and continued to wait in the foyer. I let him sit and wait. He sat there for a good ten minutes before it drove away, then another five before he wandered over and asked whether his taxi was on its way. "Oh, you mean the minicab that was outside?" he said, feigning a puzzled look, when I told him it had just left. "I presumed that couldn't have been for me." And the moral of this story is that all art galleries should be burned down.

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Review: Bros: After the Screaming Stops drops the boys in at the deep end

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 12th November 2018

Echoing throughout Joe Pearlman and David Soutar's documentary are the words of Terry Wogan to Bros: "What are you going to do when the screaming stops?" It's a question pop bands with a predominantly teenage female audience have been asked from The Beatles onwards, based on the assumption that pop fandom is transitory; a girlish fad that will inevitably be grown out of. Certainly for most it abates as you grow older, but it lies dormant, easily rekindled by a Google image search, or the discovery of a dusty mixtape in a drawer, pocked with hand-drawn hearts.

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The Apprentice: season 14, episode 6 recap: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 7th November 2018

I'm happily watching the snooker on ITV4. It's an engrossing second-round match in the Champion of Champions tournament in which Kyren Wilson is opening up a confident lead over Judd Trump, and I'm nicely settled in after dinner and oh, what's this notification on my phone? Why, it's a Google Calendar reminder to OH SHIT I'VE GOT TO WATCH THE FUCKING APPRENTICE

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The Apprentice: season 14, episode 4 recap: "Crotch Socks"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 25th October 2018

I don't go to the gym. In a sense the street is my gym, but in another, more real sense, it's a street, down which I walk, not going into gyms, and eating Greggs ham and cheese pasties.

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The Apprentice: season 14, episode 2 recap: "Bad Boys, Ink"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 14th October 2018

I noticed the other day that A Question of Sport is still on TV. Literally still being broadcast on televisions. So as much as I would've been delighted if The Apprentice had been cancelled this year, I suppose it's understandable it's further down the list.

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Tully

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 11th May 2018

There are no ugly people in Hollywood, and as such the idea of ugging-up a bit for a role has become a "brave" one. It puts you in the awards conversation, as though peeling off some make-up or yellowing your teeth a bit reveals depth. This involves an acknowledgement that the profound is an exception, and I suppose that the industry is therefore preoccupied by surface sheen. For actresses this proposition also suggests that to be beautiful is to be shallow, which is a bit rich, since if they aren't beautiful they aren't allowed in the door. I think Charlize Theron largely transcends this, but she remains most critically celebrated when she's made to look her least pretty.

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