A Weekend Out

Tokyo Story
The 50s Tokyo = 30s America theme extends to the pastoral music, all strings and harps. I hadn’t thought about the harp as such a classic “domestic bliss” signifier, but that it is.
Lost in Translation
Bil[…]

Shout out to our foreign reader(s)! Is that Korean? ON WITH THE SHOW!!
I love Judge John Deed. Don’t you know what it is? It’s a courtoom CRIME DRAMA on the BBC. That, along with the repeats of Room 101 with Jonny Vegas are worth the lice[…]

Timeline is a thoroughly entertaining lousy movie. (okay, lousy movie Monday has finished, but there are just too many lousy films in this world to just fit in one day). Hacked back to life one imagines in an edit suite by someone who has no interest[…]

As part of Do You See? lousy movie Monday I bring you, a lack of appreciation for Scary Movie 3:
How much to you enjoy watching people being hit? This is the question Scary Movie 3 poses, because as far as I could work out about the only joke in the […]

On Paycheck

Paycheck exists entirely in ActionMovieWorld, where software engineers have martial arts training as part of their job, and CEOs pack guns.
It’s a little unsettling to watch Paul Giamatti in this directly after seeing him inhabit H[…]

Hey, hey OSCAR!!!! Over here!!! Look at me. I’m a serious film. Look I’ve got Oscar winning Anthony Hopkins in me. Not only that but Oscar winning chart topping Nicole Kidman (and hey, like you’re going to give an Oscar to The Last […]

Clarification: (since I’m being misunderstood in this thread) I have no problem at all with the use of pop hits to soundtrack documentaries – great idea and can be very effective. I have a problem when those pop hits are chosen solely on […]

Strike!: C4’s documentary on the Miners’ Strike was entertaining. I’m not sure if a docu on the strike should have been entertaining, but there you go – as a primer it pretty much worked (I was 11 in 1984 and the strike took p[…]

Very interesting post about machismo and ‘favourite films’. I don’t like those films either, not so much singly but as Kathleen says presented as a group, a way of filmmaking, a canon if you like. I’m not sure it’s the p[…]

What is the importance of Tokyo in Ozu’s Tokyo Story? The disaffected kids of the Hirayama’s live there, but is the film suggesting it is Tokyo that has made them a pain in the arse? It is a suggestion that Hanif Kureshi filched in The Mo[…]