We watched two films this weekend.
Crank is High Concept: hitman Jason Statham has been poisoned, and the only way he can stay alive long enough to exact revenge is to keep his adrenaline level up by whatever means necessary.
It’s ridiculous — it’s as if the script was written by a load of drunks, and [...]
After last year’s enjoyable evening in the company of Godfrey Salter and his Invisible Ducks, I was pleased to see the return of the Flatpack Film Festival. On Friday, this year’s equivalent event was entitled “Hocus Focus”, and promised an odd Czech dream-onset-of-puberty-witch-vampire film, some live music and, er, more.
I previously mentioned that I’ve been reading about Russia. Specifically, I got Robert Service’s A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Putin from the library.
It’s not clear whether what’s happening in there is racism or merely extraordinary rudeness.
I’m hoping for the eviction vote to demonstrate that the British public doesn’t like either of those things.
It looks as if Cake has a new rarities compilation coming out later this year, entitled “Rarities”. Ironically the rarities will be rare no longer!
If you go to their homepage this week, you’ll hear a snippet from their version of Black Sabbath’s marvellous War Pigs, and if you go to their MySpace page, you [...]
Do you remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer helps Mel Gibson make his film more interesting by replacing the villain with a dog? A dog with shifty eyes, so you can tell he’s evil? It seems like Gibson learned something that day. The baddies in Apocalypto leer and grimace and cackle and [...]
Debbie bought me the book Lost Cosmonaut by Daniel Kalder for Christmas. It appears to available in three editions already, despite being first published in 2006…
Daniel Kalder is a Scotsman living in Moscow, and in this book he decides to become an “anti-tourist”, deliberately visiting mundane places for their authenticity (no doubt he would [...]
Last night I watched Channel 4’s “The Trouble with Atheism”:
“Rod Liddle argues against those who turn to atheism for a rational and moderate approach to today’s problems, and says that atheism has high priests and dogmatic beliefs, just like fundamentalist religion.”
(Repeated 2:20am next Friday morning)
As I watched it my blood gently worked up to [...]
While we’re on Guardian columns, Saturday’s Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre was particularly good.
Normally, this column takes pot shots at easy (but deserving) targets, but this week he explains a fiddly bit of maths with remarkable clarity, and lends real insight into a topical issue. Read it!
Mark Kermode keeps going on about Switchblade Romance, so I recorded it from FilmFour when I got the chance.
Deep breath. It is a very well acted and directed French slasher film, with gore aplenty early on, and the helpful sense that it’s not a Hollywood film, and therefore you can never be quite sure [...]