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The Secret in their Eyes
Okay, so I’m slow to catch on. El Secreto de sus Ojos (The Secret in their Eyes) already won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and here I am only now recommending it to you. And I saw it on a plane, which is hardly the cinephile way. Quality issues apart, imagine two hours of reading…
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Origin
I’ve been waiting for a hook on which to hang a mention of Danny Stack’s slick, thoughtful and entertaining short-film debut, and it now arises in the form of screenings at Jersey’s Branchage Film Festival on September 26th and at London’s Raindance Festival on October 7th. Danny’s Scriptwriting in the UK blog has been a…
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This Island Rod
A recommendation – while googling for something else (I’ve forgotten what) I came across this film blog written by Roderick Heath, who describes himself somewhere as a film school dropout (I’ve forgotten where I saw that, too) and is based in Lithgow, New South Wales. It’s only been up for a couple of years but…
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Of Girls, Swedes, and Dragon Tattoos
If you’re interested and you get the chance, try to see Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before you hear much more about the planned David Fincher remake. That first adaptation isn’t a perfect movie by any means, but as screen mysteries go it’s a very good one. A…
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Quiller and Quiller Again
Last night, in a collision of whim and a weekend sale by the good folk at Network DVD, I watched The Quiller Memorandum for the first time in a number of years. (Pause for a quick shout-out to my daughter Ellen, singing at the Bloodstock festival today with the band Neonfly. Check out the site…
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You CAN Go Home Again
Okay, I’ve been tagged, and this time I can’t dodge it. On his blog Between the Pavement and the Stars, Piers Beckley has listed those films that he’ll watch any number of times, and challenged me, Danny Stack and Jason Arnopp to do the same. It’s not supposed to be an objective greatness list, or…
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Disappointments and Discoveries
Two things to talk about, here. One, a movie I had some expectations for, the other a novel reminding me that literary fiction need not be the turnoff that so many literary novels have made it into. By which I mean the kind of literary novels you get when bad poets have access to too…
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Happy Birthday, Uncle Ray
Ray Harryhausen is 90 today. It says so on my Simpsons calendar and my Simpsons calendar don’t lie. There was a suitably ‘star-studded’ tribute at BFI South Bank – formerly the NFT – last week, and there’s a cracking Harryhausen exhibition titled The Fantastical Worlds of Ray Harryhausen at the Academy building on Wilshire Boulevard.…
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The Artisan Thriller
“Walking into her apartment, both of them laughing at something he’d said, the man made a mock bow for her to precede him, his eyes already seeing the room, darting around it, looking for something to kill her with.” So begins Tony Kenrick’s Neon Tough, a novel published in ’88 and set against the backdrop…
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For Virtual, read ‘Nothing There’
Back when I was working on BUGS we grappled with several ‘virtual reality’ story ideas and none of them ever worked out. We finally concluded that they never would; an action show is about real perils, not perils that you know are merely perceived. When you send your characters into a virtual reality you’re essentially…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
