Sun protection factor 35. You don’t get “sun block” anymore, apaprently our sun is TOO POWERFUL TO BE STOPPED. You get stuff like Soltan’s SPF 35 instead, and its copious warnings on the back about how actually it won’t […]

since his first screenplays, abt the IRA ronan bennett has assiduously mined the “political outlaw” seam, the borderline between fanatical idealism and crime
and the hamburg cell, an unscandalised and non-demonising C4 telefilm abt the […]

Spending time on holiday with my nephew means I get to watch television he cannot fathom and I barely understand. I am not talking about Yu-Gi-Oh! – I mean old episodes of Scooby-Doo (written independently of the Mark S treatise below. The Tao […]

Travel month eh? Well I am writing this on a plane, how is that for travel. I still cannot get blas’ about air travel, despite doing it twelve times already this year. What I have become to particularly like is the quirks of the individual comp[…]

San Andreas – Quick Questions?
1. Is it the case that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the first big-ticket computer game in which the player character is invariably black*?
2. Does this matter at all? In particular does it matter given the &#8[…]

Hey, What’s that Smell? Everyone sniff what’s going down.
I finished Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer last night. I am still in awe of what a literary work of art the story was. I am also, subsequently, reeking fro[…]

CHEAP FOOD I LOVE #4: Fray Bentos Pies
An office conversation reminded me of these delights, which I’ve regretfully given up as they are too obviously unhealthy even for me. The basic idea is PIE IN A TIN – you open the tin to reveal a ge[…]

CONAN THE BARBARIAN
dir John Milius
The other film I got last week besides these two was in ways a perfectly appropriate choice. On the one hand, Lucas talks on the Kurosawa disc about how it was Milius who first really got him into the Japanese dir[…]

let’s call it rotoscoped zizek
plainly i am pro all the scooby doo movies (at least till such time as i have to sit through one of them, perhaps), but it occurred to me as i sat watching an ancient ep of the cartoon last week (while waiting fo[…]

ILM is big and unwieldy enough now that doing this seems sensible as a way of a) directing the casual reader to good stuff and b) maybe drawing in new people who will say good stuff in their turn. Of course part of the appeal of ILM is always in the […]