Petites Couperes has ominous music, constantly hinting that something terrible is going to happen. In many ways something terrible does happen, namely the film. But that is too glib a dismissal of what is a pretty entertaining if pretty vapid movie. […]

Formicophilia is a fetish involving having bugs and worms crawling all over one’s body. For some reason, the few case histories concerning this have been reports from predominantly Buddhist countries. Perhaps investing all my savings in export[…]

Warrant – Cherry Pie
It’s kind of like being one of the best dinosaurs ever, and then a comet hits you.
Warrant were the last great pre-grunge cock-rock, hair metal bands, and combined all the best elements of luminaries such as Poison, […]

(More films I saw two months ago). If The Italian Job 2003 tells us one thing, it is that the new Mini is not a patch on the old one. They should never have put an old Mini in the first half of this film, it makes the new ones look clunky. The other […]

The country music station plays soft/
But there’s nothing really nothing to turn of
Dylan, Visions of Johanna
There are two country stations in Edmonton, and both of them tell us something about the way chart country is moving as a genre. Abo[…]

This piece from The Observer is slightly provocative but seems to be coming along the same lines as what I posted below; the overall thrust is that the goose which laid the golden egg is slowly being killed; death by a thousand short-term decisions t[…]

Rule one in writing a film about conmen. Name it after a name for conmen. Hence Confidence, The Grifters and the somewhat implausibly titled Matchstick Men. Unfortunately no Matchstick Cats’n’Dogs in attendance here – though there i[…]

The world of very low alcohol drinks is a strange hinterland, an unloved section of the world of booze which pleases neither the boozer nor the abstainer. All manner of crimes are committed in the name of reducing the alcoholic content of That Which […]

Saturday morning’s “Ever Wondered About…” regularly features the same chilled soundtrack of Lemon Jelly and Zero 7 (even now), but when they kick in to their “here’s the culture” montage, it turns over to tun[…]

What are the limits of dramatic license when editing together yr footage in a documentary abt animals? In Natural World (Sunday 30 November, 6.25pm BBC2), “Monkey Prince” told the glum tale of Bobo, an existentially tormented fellow with […]