Ooh, book within a book. The Land Of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll is a novel about a novelist. Or at least a novel about the writing of a biography of a fictional children’s author Marshall France. It is a slight pity that the version I read was […]

Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career is a little bit sad really, just when he started to make it big he stopped being able to do all the things that made him good in the first place. This does not mean that he does not still have great comic timing, […]

The Mother is not as misogynstic as a lot of Hanif Kureshi’s work, but it still has some pretty horrible women in the centre of it. On paper this is a potentially laudable taboo busting film about sex between an older woman and younger man. It […]

The film is called Noi Albinoi. Really before I went in I though Noi Albinoi had a proper, deep meaning, rather than – hey look at Noi, he’s and albino. The film is a bit like this. For eighty minutes of its ninety run time its pretty muc[…]

It has been a long day. People marching around London, I had a seminar and given a window of an hour I need to be at the pub I thought food. Off I went, in the wrong direction, to the Hare & Tortoise for the mentioned before Malaysian Chicken Cu[…]

What do I hate the most in movies and TV? Stupid people. This may seem harsh, okay, stupid characters. Actual stupid people can be quite interesting on reality TV. Despite playing an college English teacher, Meg Ryan’s character in In The Cut […]

I have not really got much to say about the film version of The Singing Detective, except that it feels bitty, as if it was badly edited from a longer piece of work. Which, of course, it is. It also seems oddly dated, part of the point in the TV seri[…]

I was always told off as a child for adding salt to fish when I ate it. “It swims in the sea, it is already salty” was the rationale. When I got older I managed to get a salt adding dispensation for trout when I managed to prove using an […]

Pleasing moment bought on by needless watching of Brazil / Peru in the pub last night. Yes, we wanted Brazil to get spanked because everyone wants the underdog to win. But we found ourselves more and more drawn to the good players of Peru. Was it the[…]

As insidious as the lumbering behemoth that the summer action blockbuster has become, is the summer quality film. Last year it was The Road To Perdition that was bigged up as the well crafted summer movie that will sweep all the Oscars, this year it […]