Double retro as I blog a link to an essay about The Changes (the 1975 kids telly drama) on Robin Carmody’s Elidor that was put up over a year ago. Sorry to Robin for not checking his site often enough ”I remember he e-mailed me a while ba[…]

I am not sure if I have ever seen a film as inconsequential as Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World. I have certainly never seen a film as inconsequential with such a long title. At the start of the film we are told that it is some time du[…]

Omigod it can’t be it is it’s ___________!!! On the C4 doc just now finishing abt some WW2 commando raid, complete with mined ship smashing into a German dry-dock in the Loire, the old fellow with a slightly florid nose was naggingly fami[…]

Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Look the letter S looks a bit like the number five. A bit like the letter V looked nothing like the number 7 in Se7en. (A friend who works in publishing told me how much that little slight of han[…]

I need to know’ Is she my grandchild? Don’t get rid of our baby’ I’m no cheat. And my personal favourite, Wife ‘ Stop Disappearing. All recent subtitles on Trisha, which is followed on ITV2 by the far superior Trisha Ext[…]

Not much to add to what yer (other) man Farrell said here about interMission. Except what is it with that typesetting. It is almost as if the word Mission ought to be important to the film. It isn’t.
A more pertinant question might be to ask ab[…]

Split screen has been around for years but when did it stop being arty-n-clever and just become part of the routine grammar of the TV documentary? It was used in BBC2’s The Week that Shook The World: The Last Days of Hitler and it was used in t[…]

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. […]

(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 […]

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[…]