celticman's blog

The stories we tell ourselves tell us who we are. ‘I got George Bush elected…it wasn’t strictly legal, so I don’t want to talk about it.’ ‘I don’t want to kiss some old hag.’ David Seigal aged around 74, says of his wife Jackie 43. ‘She’s like another child.’ Jackie: ‘Seven [kids] by birth and one inherited.’ ‘My husband told me he was going to trade me in for two twenty year olds when I got to 40.’ ‘When I grew up I never knew you could have a...

The snooker was on TV and this kept getting put back until the session was finished. And at one point I doubted it ever would. My partner couldn’t stay awake to watch the film. She asked me the next day what it was about, and in a classical Freudian slip, I said , ‘trust’. Trust is the Janus face of doubt. Fling in the fairy dust of a little Catholic faith and, trust me, we have combustion. The best storylines are often reducible to a single...

Glen Campbell is the Doris Day of Country and Western, or indeed American Music. He’s the ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ who came from a humble background, musically a child prodigy that could make a guitar and most other instruments sing and his voice was good too. He’d the hunky wholesome good looks that spoke of apple pie and living the good life for Jesus. Sure he got lucky. It’s not enough to be talented. Even Doris Day before she was a virgin got...

Sir Trev tell us in voice over that Indiana State Prison is about an hour’s drive from Chicago and had around 1900 inmates. The average sentence is 52 years, so none of the prisoners are in for dropping bubble-wrap in the street. It’s advertised as he meets 12 prisoners on death row, but by my calculations 1900 prisoners are on death row. Tom Harrison is a case in point. He’s already spent 18 years on death row. He killed three people and...

Deceiving and conceiving, what’s the difference? I thought about this as I watched this slow moving chain of destruction, called The War Against Drugs by Nixon, wreaking havoc across America. Ginsberg’s Howl does not do it justice, because there is none, not for poor people. At first viewing this looks about race, the demonization of the non-white population. This was graphically shown, time and again, by a mandatory sentencing policy that even...

I didn’t go out expecting to meet Jimmy Reid, after all he’s been dead for over a year, maybe longer. It was a cold but sunny day and I walked down the canal path into Dalmuir. My mind was on the next thing that I’d write and I’d already decided on a title ‘God Made Me Ugly for a Reason,’ an autobiographical look at my early upbringing. I’d already begun jotting down memories. I went into William Hills to put a football line on. I’m still not...

Written and directed by David Michod and loosely based on the Melbourne based Pettingill family and the 1988 Walsh Street shooting of police officers. In a brilliant opening scene 17 year old Joshua ‘J’ Cody (James Frechville) phones for an ambulance whilst watching the histrionics of contestants on a quiz show as they try to win more money. In a flat voice he answers questions. The camera pans back. The emergency relates to his mother, who is...

Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Ridley Scott’s adaption Bladerunner set in a Los Angeles of 2019 follows a similar storyline. Deckhard (Harrison Ford) a former cop is told he must retire six replicants that have escaped from the Tyrell Corporation. Retire is a euphemism for kill. Killing replicants is not an offence because a machine or android cannot be killed. Replicants are property in the same way...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Channel 4 27th, 28th, 29th December, produced by Yellow Bird, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. Based on Stieg Larrson’s posthumous Millennium series and staring Noomi Rapace as the eponymously named Girl (Lisbeth Salander) and Michael Nyqvist (as Mikael Blomkvist ,) publisher of the Swedish political magazine Millennium, who in the first scene is...

Richie Cottan's new thriller. The double spread advertisement in The Observer had Peter Mullan, who plays Richie Beckett, in a triangle with his two sons behind him, against a backdrop of a pier with Fear in red lights. It reads ‘the criminal mind is a fragile thing’. Well it is if you’ve got Alzheimer’s, or dementia or you’re just fragile with a criminal mind. Peter Mullan playing a gangster, whether on a horse or in the street, is none of...