Sandra Harris Writes

  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA!  BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library. It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen. I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmark...

ADOLESCENCE. (2025) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY JACK THORNE AND STEPHEN GRAHAM. DIRECTED BY PHILIP BARANTINI. STARRING STEPHEN GRAHAM, OWEN COOPER, CHRISTINE TREMARCO, ERIN DOHERTY, ASHLEY WALTERS AND FAYE MARSAY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s about six in the morning and a little housing estate somewhere in England is still slumbering peacefully. Suddenly, a convoy of police cars and vans pull up outside one of the houses. A cohort of masked, heavily armed men dressed in black and toting huge guns emerge from one of the vans and start to break down the front door with a battering ram. The family of four inside are terrified as they are shouted at to stay still or get on the floor. Upstairs, a thirteen-year-old boy who looks much younger is revealed as the reason for this early morning raid. He’s told he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder, though he’s not told of whom and strangely, no-one in his family thinks to ask. It’s a shocking opening to a well-plotted and well-act...

NOVEMBER BLUES... AND BROWNS, REDS AND ORANGES TOO… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I have the November Blues. It happens every year at the same time. Yes, November, lol. I know some people who love November because they’re looking forward to Christmas so much, but, to me, November is kind of a ‘meh’ month. I’m usually tired, for one thing, after all the effort I put into making Halloween the best time of the year. I love September and October, with the brown and red and orange foliage and falling leaves and glorious early sunsets. Also, there are the films…! HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN 3, THE THING, THE FOG, THE SHINING, THE CHANGELING, THE HAUNTING, PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, these are all on my regular Halloween go-to list and they literally just improve with age. I never get tired of watching these classics by terrific directors such as John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. Then there’s the best film Hammer never made, the superb horror comedy CARRY ON SCREAMING , with the gorgeousl...

  ALBA. (2021) BASED ON THE TURKISH DRAMA SERIES, FATMAGUL’UN SUCU NE? DIRECTED BY PABLO GUERRERO, CARLOTA MARTINEZ-PEREDA AND HUMBERTO MIRO. STARRING ELENA RIVERA, ERIC MASIP, CATERINA MENGS, ADRIANA OZORES, ALVARO RICO, POL HERMOSO, JASON FERNANDEZ, FRANKY MARTIN, CANDELA CRUZ AND ANTONIO GIL. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘Our power derives from denying theirs.’ There are almost too many twists and turns in this Spanish psychological drama-thriller, and it could have done without maybe three of its thirteen fifty-minute episodes, but I still really enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of the English drama series LIAR , which in turn was based on the Spanish drama series LIES AND DECEIT , as drug-rape is the main topic in all three Netflix shows. The thing I’ve noticed with very long, multi-episode series is that they run out of steam a wee bit before the end and as a result get twistier and turnier until some of the twists are, frankly, incomprehensible. Such is the case ...

  WHEN THEY SEE US. (2019) A NETFLIX TRUE CRIME DRAMA SERIES WRITTEN, CREATED AND DIRECTED BY AVA DUVERNAY. STARRING FELICITY HUFFMAN, VERA FARMIGA, FAMKE JANNSEN AND JOHN LEGUIZAMO. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This is a superb four-part true crime/drama mini-series, but it’s the most harrowing thing I’ve ever seen on Netflix, and all the more harrowing for its all being true, and the fact that the stuff that happens to the young boys in it all actually happened. And, if it’s harrowing to watch, how much worse must it be to have actually lived through all this horrible stuff. Let me tell you the story. On the night of April 19 th , 1989 (can you remember where you were and what you were doing in April of that year, just to put the timeframe into context?), a young white woman, an investment banker called Patricia Meili, went for a run late in the evening in New York’s famous Central Park. Somewhere along the way, she was accosted, raped, beaten severely and left for dead in ...

  THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY. (2016) BASED ON JEFFREY TOOBIN’S 1997 BOOK, THE RUN OF HIS LIFE: THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON. STARRING CUBA GOODING JR., DAVID SCHWIMMER, JOHN TRAVOLTA, NATHAN LANE, SARAH PAULSON, STERLING K. BROWN, KENNETH CHOI AND COURTNEY B. VANCE. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I absolutely loved this gripping ten-episode series, only on Netflix until February 28 th , 2022, which forms the first season of true crime anthology series, AMERICAN CRIME STORY. The writing is brilliant, the acting top-notch and the pacing wonderful. The series is based on the real-life murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by acclaimed NFL (football) player and sometimes-actor, Orenthal James Simpson, better known to the public as OJ ‘The Juice’ Simpson. OJ was Nicole’s ex-husband, with whom he had two children, Sydney and Justin, and Ronald Goldman was Nicole's then boyfriend. After a widely televised low-speed car chase through Los Angeles (‘The J...

  IN PRAISE OF BACON, AND A GOOD DAY… BUT MOSTLY BACON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Every now and then, you get a lovely day, don’t you? One that shuts your complaining trap for five minutes, lol, and makes you realise how lucky you actually are to be alive. Today was one such day. I had a nice walk in the sunshine with my son, who was off school for an appointment, which got cancelled and left us with some unexpected free time. I love it when that happens, when something just unexpectedly frees you up like that!   I took him for a haircut after we’d done our errands and shopping and such, and, while he was chatting away about football to his barber, I had a bizarre but highly enjoyable conversation with a total stranger, a college student who lives locally. It turns out that this young man, not a native Dubliner, hails from the same place where my mother’s family comes from. I named him all the places where my different aunties lived, he knew them all and furthermore informed...

THE SERPENT. (2021) A BBC CRIME DRAMA WRITTEN BY RICHARD WARLOW AND TOBY FINLAY. DIRECTED BY TOM SHANKLAND AND HANS HERBOTS. STARRING TAHAR RAHIM, JENNA COLEMAN, BILLY HOWLE, ELLIE BAMBER, TIM MCINNERNY, MATHILDE WARNIER AND AMESH EDIREWEERA. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Oh boy. I had to keep reminding myself while watching this fantastic crime drama on Netflix recently that it was actually based on real life crimes and real life murders, and that real people had actually suffered terribly in real life in the timeline concerned. And why? Why did I have to keep reminding myself of these unpleasant facts? Because Tahar Rahim, the actor who portrays Charles Sobhraj in this superb dramatization of the life and crimes of a real life serial killer, is so hot that I literally forgave him all the crimes instantly, no questions asked.  Even though he didn’t personally commit them, lol. And then I had to sternly tell myself that writing to Sobhraj in prison, where he apparently still...

THE LAST CZARS. (2019) A NETFLIX DOCU-DRAMA. DIRECTED BY ADRIAN MCDOWALL AND GARETH TUNLEY. STARRING ROBERT JACK, SUSANNA HERBERT AND BEN CARTWRIGHT. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I absolutely loved this Netflix based-on-real-events docu-drama, although I’ve just read some reviews which delve painstakingly into all the historical inaccuracies supposedly contained within. Well, I don’t know anything about that. I’m not Russian and I didn’t really study much Russian history at school. I’d heard about Lenin and Trotsky, though for the life of me I couldn’t have previously told you what they were meant to be famous for, and, of course, I knew about dear cuddly old Uncle Joe, otherwise known as Stalin. Therefore, I was watching the show as a viewer looking to be entertained, rather than as an amateur historian looking to pick holes, and, in this sense, I bloody enjoyed every second of it. I was highly entertained, plus I even learned a few things about a really fascinating part of ...