Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Category: movies

  • The Boat House

    Here’s the publisher’s original flap copy for the novel: a longer piece on the story is coming right up. When Alina first appears in Three Oaks Bay it’s clear that her frail, luminous beauty is going to cause some ripples on the quiet surface of the peaceful resort town. For Pete McCarthy, the local boat-repairer…

  • What’s Entertainment?

    I have to admit that, for entirely positive reasons, I was hoping that NBC’s new zen cop show Life would tank and that its leading man, redheaded Brit Damian Lewis, would have to come home to the UK. Well, I call them positive reasons. But only if you’re prepared to view it in a selfish,…

  • Frodo and the Camel

    So my cousin Josh is working behind the bar of The Elusive Camel, when in walks Frodo. (I have family in Australia, on my dad’s side. To avoid complication we all refer to ourselves as cousins, regardless of generation or degree of actual relationship). Josh was over here for a few years, working and touring…

  • Well, it works for me

    Sometimes it doesn’t take much to brighten my day. For all I know this may be common knowledge. But it was news to me when I heard it and made the connection a couple of weeks ago. Michael G Wilson, stepson of Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Executive Producer and sometimes co-writer on the Bond movies…

  • The Count of Monte Cristo

    I just watched the 6-hour Gerard Depardieu version of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO over four nights, and I think I maybe found some useful lessons there. The special power of the story lies in the way that Edmond Dantes remakes himself as a machine for vengeance and then reappears to engage with his enemies,…

  • Future Proof

    It’s not quite as bad as the days when companies were destroying assets to save themselves tape and space, but a certain short-termism still dogs the business. Richard Mitchell, who composes music for film and TV, told me, “A dubbing mixer recently explained that the UK TV industry has dug itself a hole which the…

  • More Bones from the Kingdom

    Tastes vary. I can remember going to see an afternoon show of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks with a group of friends and realising that, out of all the fellow-cheapskates and pensioners who made up the rest of the meagre discount-ticket audience, we were the only ones laughing. Looking around and seeing all those stony faces…

  • Because we’re all out of Piano Players

    Did you hear the story about the British director Mike Figgis? He arrived at Los Angeles airport on his way to take up a TV job for Fox/Sony. When asked the purpose of his visit, he supposedly said, “I’m here to shoot a pilot.” As the story goes, it then took him five hours to…

  • Only in France

    I went onto Amazon’s French site to source a link for the DVD of Bertrand Tavernier’s brilliant police thriller L.627 for inclusion in a forthcoming post, and here’s one of the books that came up amongst the site’s featured home-page recommendations. No, it wasn’t a recommendation based on my past purchases. I wasn’t even logged…

  • Birt Acres, Pioneer of the Cinema

    I’m doing some story research (well, that’s what I call the hours spent wilfing around the internet) into the early cinema pioneers. One of them is American-born British resident Birt Acres. Acres was an engineer, photographer, designer of the Birtac amateur camera, and plenty more besides. I was immediately put in mind of Alan Burt…