I saw Kiss Of Life on Saturday afternoon. There were three other people in the cinema. Which may seem an indictment of the state of the British Film industry, until you guess how many people actually liked it. I don’t think I am assuming to muc[…]

Seeing Waiting For Guffman at the NFT made me dwell upon the mockumentary form. It is clear that it is a subsection of parody, but what is often unclear is what is actually being parodied. Is it the overly referential tropes of documentary or the sub[…]

In light of Shelob in Lord Of The Ring: Return of The King, I am considering updating Six Legs Good, Eight Legs Bad. Finally a giant spider, albeit a fantasy one, that is actually unsettling and frightening. In the light of the Spider-Man 2 trailer I[…]

Obv when v.small the key to survival – during sermons, lectures, recorder concerts, nativity plays and the like – is to find a way to teleport yr wee brain elsewhere: my game, which I recommend to one and all, was to gaze up into the vast[…]

Lordy. Finally it is over. The last ever Only Fools And Horses. Please this time let that be true. Ending again with a birth, a couple of discarded old plots, a deus ex machina and the creekiest David Bowie joke I have heard in a long time (Ziggy Saw[…]

David Thompson, in his discussion of Carl Franklin as a director in his Autobiographical Dictionary Of Film, mentions how good he is a directing multi-racial films without drawing attention to this aspect. Out Of Time is another addition to this cano[…]

Critics have been moaning that the new live-action Peter Pan dwells far to much on the burgeoning sexuality of Wendy. What the fuck do they think Peter Pan is about if not the horror and fear of adulthood and all that this entails? Other critics have[…]

The one saving grace of C4’s Top 100 Worst Singles programme (apart from it being compulsive point-and-shout watching, bah) was the way the director was clearly on the side of POP against the mealy-mouthed mutterings of SMUG BASTARDS. Almost ev[…]

Why is it that when mainstream Hollywood wants to show rebellious teenage girls, they are always in punk bands? Jamie Leigh Curtis in Freaky Friday would have been a prime age for punk the first time round, and now her daughter idolises the Ramones. […]

DO YOU DEE? Weighed down by its own “ironic” shtick and dreary self-awareness, DEE CONSTRUCTION: THE SIMON DEE STORY (C4, Dec 29, 10pm) nevertheless contained some gruesomely fascinating moments – almost all directly involving the s[…]