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There are people who captive the screen.
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— 12 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

There are people who captive the screen. You can pretty much point a camera at them and an hour and a half later most people will think they have seen a proper film (this explains Samatha Morton’s career over the last couple of years). My Summe[…]

TV Cream on Dr Who
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— 12 Nov 2004 Alan Comment

TV Cream on Dr Who and Bonkbusters
The Cream repays revisiting from time to time. The new item on Bonkbusters is a little summary, though they do get them ALL in there, even Joan Collins (largely bonk-free) masterpiece “Sins”. The Dr Who […]

You cannot just film any old documentary,
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— 11 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

You cannot just film any old documentary, put it on screen and expect people to kow-tow to your factual genius. Nothing will kill the current trend of on screen documentaries than badly argued documentaries. In many ways this is why the personality l[…]

Watch the closing credits of Kore-Eda’s Nobody Knows very carefully.
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— 10 Nov 2004 Pete Baran 1 comment

Watch the closing credits of Kore-Eda’s Nobody Knows very carefully. (Obv watch the whole film first, its pretty damn good, but stick around for the start of the credits even though its slight overlong running time might be putting pressure on […]

Biographers of film directors
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— 10 Nov 2004 HKM Comment

Biographers of film directors tend not to follow the example of their literary cousins in that intense examination of inner life is usual eschewed in favour of discussion of the director’s work itself. This makes perfect sense inasmuch as film […]

FT TOP 100 FILMS 11: CLUELESS
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— 9 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

FT TOP 100 FILMS
11: CLUELESS
Whodathunk that the highest paid alumnus from Clueless would be Brittany Murphy?
This plays in nicely to the pieces written about Mean Girls and Saved! over the last couple of days because Clueless is their loving parent[…]

How to tell a film is based on a book: 1: A Home At The End Of The World
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— 9 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

How to tell a film is based on a book:
1: A Home At The End Of The World
Lots of stuff happens. Very little of it makes any sense. The characters tend to be uncommunicative and quiet, you can tell there is shedloads of internal monologue going on in[…]

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of the game when you’re looking at the big picture,” he tells today’s Guardian. Not a sentiment you’d get from, oh, any remotely serious historian: the mystery is that Starkey is regarded as a a better fit for TV and stardom over anyone else. Maybe you have to really *want* it: get the agent, work the old contacts, I don’t know, otherwise I’d be doing it myself. Whatever, Starkey’s ideas would have seem antediluvian in Namier’s day, and teh Guardian’s l4ym0r inverse snobbery line — “He’s not some rent-a-gob pundit straight out of Oxbridge. Like them or hate them, his views are founded in academic rigour [unlike aanyone from Oxbridge…]” — is merely a symptom of the real dumbing-down both it and Starkey claim to deplore. The ‘trickle-down effect’ into TV from the serious historiography of the past 70 years (basically from the French ‘Annales’ school via the British Marxist group) would appear to have been decisively halted — whether this is or is not itself a result of ‘trickle-down’ from the corporatizing of publishing — which, of course, has made history so hot right now — I don’t know. Rockist? 4 life, beeyotch.
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— 9 Nov 2004 HKM Comment

Am I alone in finding David Starkey repellant? He’s history’s Carol Vorderman. “I’ve tried to eliminate the really crass errors but I’ve no doubt that I’ve made huge numbers of mistakes. That’s the name of th[…]

Macaulay Culkin is a funny looking chap.
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— 8 Nov 2004 Pete Baran Comment

Macaulay Culkin is a funny looking chap. Was he ever a cute kid? I’m not sure. His popularity may well have been more based on his resemblance to Edvard Munch’s Scream. Is it any wonder that the Scream horror franchise traded on this imag[…]

I think ‘Mean Girls’ is my favourite American film of the year
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— 8 Nov 2004 HKM Comment

I think ‘Mean Girls’ is my favourite American film of the year, and one of my favourite ever teen movies. Like ‘Cruel Intentions’ it has an 18th century feel which I probably why I also relate it to Eric Rohmer, whose latest, […]

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