I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but haven’t got round to it. Last week I stayed in Edinburgh overnight and was able to catch a couple of Fringe shows with a local Haggis-eating Irn Bru enthusiast by the name of Adrian. Really.
Firstly we saw Justin Moorhouse’s show, Justin Moorhouse’s Ever Decreasing [...]

I went to watch The Dark Knight at the IMAX in Manchester this week and it was bloody amazing.
There was a bit towards the end, though - involving two boats - where I knew what was going to happen in advance because they gave it away on Newsnight Review last Friday. I watch this programme [...]

Here’s Sharon Stone spouting forth on the Chinese earthquake. Sharon, you see, is a friend o’ Lama and believes in, like, karma and shit.
I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else… I don’t like that. I’ve been concerned about, oh, [...]

Can there be anything more depressing than the new British film Three and Out? I haven’t seen it, of course, because it’s shit. How do I know it’s shit if I haven’t seen it, you ask. Well, just look at the poster (I reply) - in fact, just look at the font used on the [...]

Nicolas Cage is not a dog thief and anyone who accuses him of being a dog thief shall be sued. Unfortunately, Kathleen Turner didn’t realise this. Nor did the Daily Mail, which reproduced extracts from her autobiography in which she falsely labelled Cage as a drunk driver and - uh oh - claimed he stole a dog. Consequently, they have [...]

I went out on Saturday night. I know. It was a revelatory experience. I went to the cinema (rather than on an acid garage-soundtracked Prodigy video-inspired junk binge) to see a creepy Spanish film called El Orfanato, or The Orphanage.
I was taken aback by three trailers that preceded the film, all of which were for [...]

As you will no doubt have noticed, this site looks a bit different today. I’ve got me a new super-minimalist theme called Stripped by Upstart Blogger. I’m a fan of minimal, functional design and, since the emphasis round these parts is on words, this theme is perfect because all the other distracting stuff is dumped [...]

Has any one else, like me, suffered psychological injury as a result of the trailer for the film version of hen night-friendly Abba-based musical shit-fest Mamma Mia!? There’s no warning before it comes on. This is despite the inclusion of a mysteriously orange Meryl Streep running round in dungarees and bursting into song; at which point I suffered a sudden ache behind my eyes and everything went [...]

Peter Bradshaw’s review of Lions for Lambs in the Guardian today (page 14 of the Film & Music section) confirms my suspicions. It says “pure fence-sitting liberal agony is all that’s on offer here”, that the movie is “shallow and badly acted” and that it’s “incredible” that the film could be “presented as a serious, [...]

Witness the power of hype. This mystery trailer has echoes of Blair Witch Project and is causing similar ripples. It’s a film that doesn’t even have a title yet but is sending YouTube theorists into a frenzy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Project Slosho/Cloverfield/1-18-08 as it’s variously known, is produced by JJ Abrams of Lost fame - a man [...]