The Devil Wears Prada is a pretty toothless satire of the fashion industry. So toothless that it is almost an apologia for it, instead heaping most of its scorn on its cruel fictional villain***. What is much more interesting in this tug between prin[…]

“As in JR Ewing? Sorry, you must be sick of hearing that.” Not especially, to be honest – the sudden fame of my surname in the early 80s pleased me more than it hurt me. For one thing, there wasn’t an awful lot of playground […]

SOME THINGS WE HAVE LEARNT:
i. Notts Forest is in SHROPSHIRE! (proof = they visited clun and knighton)
ii. The Awesome Power of RobEmoWatch! (proof = first words spoken to Maid Pieface = “Nice Pie! Give us a KISS!”)
iii. a merrymen calle[…]

One of the DEPARTURES of the film THE DEPARTED from its source material – Hong Kong thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS – is a DEPARTURE from the TIMELINE* of the original. Not only does the undercover cop character changes his whole identity in IN[…]

I could go on at some length about how New Police Story, Jackie Chan’s return to Hong Kong cinema, is all about fathers. From Jackie’s surrogate fatherhood of his sidekick, to the villains main motivation being to piss off Pater: this is […]

Click is a basic Faustian story. It is Faust done as a comedy, but because Faust is a pretty dark tale all told, a few tweaks have been made. Instead of the Devil we have Christopher Walken (some say the same thing). Instead of a contract we have a c[…]

This was going to be an Index piece, but it got a bit long. This Sunday, 29th October about 8:30pm, the annual mystery film expands to 50 screens (and one assumes different cinemas). Why not go see.
What I really mean by that is, to what extent is ou[…]

after two intro eps that were vanilla to the core — no one died and the SoN’s threats of tongue-cutting were camp gesture — RH shifts upsettingly up a gear or two: this is fun mid-evening hokum in which CHILDREN AND INNOCENTS CAN DI[…]

A film which has polarised many viewers. Some love it, find something magical about the long arcs of nothingness, the occasional random thoughts subtitled on screen and the clarity of this singular vision. Others see it as a glorified time and motion[…]

Last night’s Ghost Whispererer conformed fairly closely to the formula I described yesterday, thankfully. If it hadn’t, I’d have looked like a proper Charlie.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping to tidy up some of[…]