Received wisdom on Layer Cake was the shock that Matthew Vaughn (erstwhile Guy Ritchie producer) turned out to be a better director than Ritchie himself. LAZY LAZY LAZY! Yes, Layer Cake is a striking effort, but considering where Vaughn is in his car[…]

PICASSO and POLITICS:
“Guernica represents something recently demonstrated in this year’s passionate torrent of anti-Bush agitprop, namely art’s ineffectuality in the production of concrete political results.” I wonder if the[…]

FT TOP 100 FILMS
8: REAR WINDOW
Martin Skidmore says:
This film has become oddly topical in recent years, with its pre-echoes of reality TV, since it is about sitting there and watching ordinary people go about their lives. The filming of this is bri[…]

Ukraine
The Ukrainian election coverage by the BBC surprised me. Lead item for the last two nights and highly detailed in terms of context.
Why is this? Other elections in former Soviet Republics this year received far less BBC coverage. Georgia (whe[…]

POST INTRO 1: I just saw a man as I got off the bus with a tiny little moustache shading the philtrum twixt nose and lip but no wider than his actual nose. I do not believe I have ever seen a moustache like this on a live human being.
POST INTRO 2: I[…]

Economic Temple of Doom! Monkey Brains Solve Game Theory
I am wondering if this headline (loosely based in recent neuroscience, even!) beats Tom’s latest.[…]

I always wonder if Jamelia’s mum was a messy eater and hence her birth certificate accident. Or perhaps it was one of those cases where the mum really wanted a kid called James. Whatever, the Jam type Amelia reckons you can See It In A Boys Eye[…]

FT TOP 100 FILMS
9: BACK TO THE FUTURE
Think of films whose lead chararcters have bands named after them. Duran Duran – a character in Barberella – were enormously successful. Travis have been successful despite being piss poor*. And now […]

END-TIMES WATCH #3:
back in the 19th-century anthropologists and other colonial social scientists made studies of the various native societies and cultures that imperialism was smashing: religions which revolved round animism and the fetish object a[…]

Post idea 2: Old film mags had a local-paper quality lost among the glossies: a regular lament was the infelicities of NFT programming. So my two cents is: why seemingly every ruddy film ever made by George Cukor and a very incomplete selection of Li[…]