Blogs

Australia is a country, a short arsed continent and now a movie! Baz Luhmann’s (2008) epic Australia, starring Nicole Kidman as Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman as ‘The Drover’. Epic means, of course, it takes a longer time to get to Australia, than watch the actual movie, give or take the odd 15 or 16 hours. I didn’t have that kind of time frame, so I watched the first half hour before the ad break on Film 4. Australia had a cartoon feel as if it...

Buddha in Suburbia BBC 2 7pm, but only in England. BBC 2 Scotland had Dad’s Army, you know that programme they put on when they think nobody is going to watch this, so we’ll put it on, anyway. Buddha in Suburbia was, however, well worth watching. Not many families have the eleventh Lelung Rimpoche, one of Tibet’s three highest Lamas, living in Ruslip, in their garden shed. The Dusek’s have. It beats having a tortoise, but, of course, there are...

Whistleblower starring, you guessed it, Rachel Weiz. A whistleblower is someone who informs the public or tells someone in authority about dishonest or illegal activity (lawyers always put in alleged before dishonest/illegal) that has occurred, or is occurring in a Government department, a public or private organisation, or a company. What Whistleblower shows are there is no real distinction between any of these categories. The corporation is...

Two Days in Paris (2007). Not only is it written directed and starring Julie Delpy, she is also bilingual. The Human Genome Project has shown that people who are bilingual begin life in the womb with two heads. Later when talking to you, they can pause, and talk to themselves in a foreign language and laugh at you using there other head. Ha. Ha. Ha, Ha (in French). Julie Delpy makes very good use of this. It’s a comedy so we must play along and...

BBC4 Legends: Doris Day was on the cusp of the adult watershed because she was so risqué that she sometimes cussed and wore men’s trouser most notably in Calamity Jane (1953) her best remembered movie, because I can remember it. To be fair, which I never am, it is shown somewhere on Earth every other day. Two weeks ago it was shown here and I started watching bits and pieces. Doris was born to an immigrant farming family. She learned to shoot a...

An appropriate adult refers to an adult who acts in loco parentis for a child, or in this case an adult, Fred West, who claimed to have some degree of learning difficulties. Emily Watson plays Janet Loach, Fred West’s appropriate adult. The case initially being investigated is the killing of his daughter Heather, which in the police interviews he freely admits, but later retracts. Fred West played by the appropriately named Dominic West, quickly...

Savage Grace (2007) directed by Tom Kalin, shown on BBC 2. In many ways this was more compelling viewing than ‘Appropriate Adult’. Perhaps that had to do with expectation. I read the blurb about a mother trying to save her son from homosexuality. At once my mind jumped ahead and thought of some kind of religious angle: beatings, prayers, the kid getting locked up and berated for having such ungodly feelings and failings (c.f. Jeanette Winterton’...

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) shown on BBC 2, and directed by Mark Herman, is based on an adaptation of the book-which I have not read- written by John Boyne. Asa Butterfield plays eight-year-old Bruno, the son of a concentration camp commandant. Jack Scanlon plays Schmuel, a Jewish child of the same age, who is interred in the camp. An unlikely friendship develops. This is the fulcrum on which the story turns. Only, for me, it doesn’t.

The Field of Blood is a novel by Denise Mina, set in early 1980’s Glasgow, adapted into two one hour features for BBC by David Kane, who also directs. The cast list comes straight from Still Game. They play the kind of reporters on a Daily rag that you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night: hard drinking, free smoking, no good fucks who think compassion is some kind of new drink. In other words, spot on. Peter Capladi is lurking in the back...

Is Bill Nighy the new Dame Judi Dench? Any film that requires a British actor requires a Nighy in the same way that any female role requires a Dench. Stephen Poliakoff’s (2009) Glorious 39, recently shown on BBC2, had a Nighy, as did David Hare’s Page Eight. As any passing numerologist or cabbalist will tell you the relationship between 39 and 8 leaves a 7, which is the number of creation and of a pieiad. * 8 is also the number of goals that...