Freaky Trigger is ten years old this March. We’re going to have a few things celebrating that fact – some kind of party, some other bits of special content – but this is also a really good opportunity for me to revisit some of the s[…]

24. The Orb – Blue Room
It was a dark day when my tape of Rave’92 broke. Repeated rewinding and pausing had caused a hole to develop in the tape, and my rubbish cassette player refused to play it unless I wound it back manually and flippe[…]

I am not a film distributor. I just go see the blasted things. But even I can see that the release of A Christmas Tale (the new Arnaud Desplechin movie) might have been a touch botched, with it coming out mid-January. But then I saw it, ALL 150 MINUT[…]

Vachss is a unique writer. Most of his novels centre on a man named Burke, someone far enough beyond the underworld that they don’t know he exists. He makes a living ripping off child porn fans and wannabe mercenaries, and will take a PIish cas[…]

A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after that (except[…]

Bear in mind that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is made up of a ragbag of old people and industry professionals. What does this superficially hip, nearly MTV edited, earsplitting, scatalogically* partial subtitled film got over t[…]

Let’s kick the BBC again. For all the rights and wrongs in the current furore over the BBC not showing the DEC appeal for humanitarian aid in Gaza, a key point appears to have been missed. I must admit the arguments over news impartiality, appr[…]

I didn’t walk out of the The Good Night because I fell asleep. HA HA – what an irony when the film itself is about sleeping! I did not fall asleep for very long, but I wish I had. You have probably already detected a theme in this list of[…]

Comics Should Be Good links to my old Pitchfork essay on THRILL-POWER, a term I use a lot without ever having managed to give a good summary of what I mean by it. (“Earthlet, if you have to ask, you’ll never know”)
This awesome comm[…]

Cassandra’s Dream
If I had seen Cassandra’s Dream in the cinema I would have walked out. As it was I got half an hour in on the DVD and then flung across the room in disgust. (And then cleaned it and hoped no-one at LoveFilm would notice)[…]