Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

Sofia Coppola loves Past Lives.   That’s really all I needed to know.   I was thoroughly on board with the premise of Past Lives anyway, but the Coppola seal of approval elevates it to an absolute essential watch.   It’s probably got strong Lost in Translation vibes, and the parallels don’t stop there.   Past Lives is director Celine Song’s debut feature, as was Lost in Translation for Coppola in 2003.   I’ve been thinking a little bit about Lost in Translation recently because it was the topic of discussion on this week’s episode of the The Rewatchables podcast.   I listened to it straight away.   I didn’t see it at the cinema when it was released but I bought it on DVD and I fell for it hard.   I was obsessed with this film in my late teens and early twenties.   Maybe I outgrew it or overwatched it, but I haven’t watched it in ten or twelve years.   Now that its twentieth anniversary has rolled around, maybe the studio will release a...

I began writing regularly during my second year of Sixth Form.  By today's standards, 17¾ is quite a late age to start.  With a blossoming blog culture, anyone who has an interest nowadays invariably writes about it.  I know friends from my year at school who had kept online diaries right from their early teens, but these tended to be girls who started with Dear Diary, wrote in the sort of garish pink you had to highlight in order to read and who had no designs on a wide readership.  And while some of us had just discovered Bebo, which had been the early triangle ding of the social networking boom of Facebook and Twitter that would soon follow, we didn't know the capabilities of the Internet as we do now.  Back then, it was enough to be popular within your small clique.  But suddenly, popularity wasn't enough; people wanted to be famous.   Going back a bit further, I guess it was MSN Messenger that first got me into writing.  Everyone st...