Spielberg’s monster shark movie is 35 this summer. Favourite film? No question about that. I saw it at the tender age of six and sat nervously in the cinema with no idea of what I was about to see. I remember that the fabric the screen curtains were made out of also decorated the walls. [...]
It’s Saturday night and I’m one of the 19 million watching the Britain’s Got Talent final. Having previously missed every second of this year’s BGT, I find the whole 150 minute spectacular an unpleasantly entertainment-free experience akin to cleansing one’s urethra with an icepick. The ‘talent’ seems never-ending. Pudding-bowl boy soprano Liam McNally sings a note perfect Danny Boy. Ant & Dec ask him how he slept [...]
This week, Flora sent me an email about a new show on Five, Family Food Fight. This is the kind of cosmic thunderbolt that can send you into a spin for a week. Not, of course, because of the actual programme. At a guess, the producers didn’t decide to find a family with unresolved issues, [...]
And so my introduction to Italian Horror Cinema finally concludes with Dario Argento’s supposedly seminal ’Suspiria’, released in ’77 and the last film ever to be processed in glorious Technicolour fact fans. It’s a companion piece to ’Inferno’ in that it deals with the last of ‘The Three Mothers’, Mater Suspiriorum, The Mother of Sighs, who we find exacting vicious [...]
So. Let me get this straight. Gene Hunt is the patron saint of the police force. Literally. He is The Guv’nor of a purgatory in which any copper can right the wrongs of their compromised lives and/or deaths before passing on to the next plain, which is Heaven if you’re a good boy, or Hell if you’re [...]
He may only have made a handful of great films and directed just one of them, but George Lucas deserves a 14th of May, birthday greeting anyway. I know he likes going back and tinkering with stuff that geeks the world over hold close to their hearts. Like I know that the last Indiana Jones [...]
“Hi, I’m Robert Downey Jnr – and I’m Gwyneth Paltrow – and we’re here to tell you about ‘Iron Man 2′ – it’s great! – yeah, she’s right, it’s great. Did I say great? I meant ‘magnificent’. We’re talking, errrr – personally, I think it’s twice as good – yeah! – as the first one [...]
It goes without saying that the general series of glamorous extended ads for Lord Andrew Fat Wobbler’s latest ventures are the campest thing on TV, except for the presenter, Camper of the Year, Graham ‘Camp is my middle name’ Norton. However, they’ve upped it a notch this year with ‘Over the Rainbow’, the search for [...]
I was going to reserve judgement on the new Doctor till the end of this series, but last week’s episode was so weak I now feel the need to speak out just to break the jinx. I suppose it didn’t help that the series opened on such a high. The critical buzzword on‘ The Eleventh Hour’ was ‘assured’, but [...]
Remember the good old days? When there were only five channels? The two Beebs, ITV for stupid people, C4 for clever people and five for Hitler fans? Ah, simple times, good times. Well, Channel 4 remembers them too, and has decided to get back to their roots. Only, being a channel for clever people didn’t [...]
