Pun based title, when I think of one

I like this particular poster for The End of Oak Street . At a glance, it's just a typical drone shot of a suburban street. Then you notice some damaged roofs, scarred lawns, and a footprint...  Film makers have always wanted to contrive ways to bring dinosaurs and humans together on screen . Especially if the odds can be evened out a bit; after all, dinosaurs are going to lose in the end if we humans have any access to modern weaponry . In the early days, when not every last bit of the earth had been explored, the standard approach was to find dinosaurs surviving in remote spots, ' lost worlds ' etc. Moving on - and taking inspiration I think from a famous Ray Bradbury short story - Hollywood (and other science fiction writers) would often employ time travel as a way to meet dinosaurs, usually by going back in time, but sometimes by bringing them into ours. Science moves on, and as genetic science and awareness of DNA came into prominence, Michael Crichton did the inevi...

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey , seen in Manchester a day or so after it opened in the UK. And then again, a week later, because a friend wanted to go and see it. I loved it . Might as well be open about that, since it's been so weirdly divisive among commenters online.  I'm mainly referring to YouTube, now flooded with an exceptional number of highly opinionated posts. Even before most people had actually seen the film. Apparently it's been very successful . Perhaps it makes a difference that, unlike the earlier critics who might not have seen the film but were familiar with the story and had scanned the cast list etc., most of the audience were at best hazy about the particulars of the story. Though a fair portion would have reckoned themselves to have some knowledge of its background, having seen the recent similarly star-packed film Troy, not that long ago. The Odyssey is indeed a sequel to the story of the Trojan War, told originally by the same semi-mythical...

I want to say that cinema's going to pot, but maybe it's just me that's jaded. I only went to an actual film theatre once, and that was to see the latest Alien film, much of which was a retread of the first Alien film I saw um over forty years ago I believe. It wasn't a total waste of time; at least it sidestepped the pointlessly distracting mythos of mankind's foundation which was introduced in Prometheus and Covenant .  I used to rely on Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode's film reviews on Radio 5 for new films to investigate, but since they decamped elsewhere I've been left with Empire magazine for reviews which I don't trust so much. The basic point is about just knowing what new films are out. But these days they merge films tv series and even games into their star reviews section. So book reading continues to dominate my cultural mindscape. There were three books which made an impact on me this year. The first was  Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks ...

Writing one of these again? A sort of end of year review ? More a sign of nothing better to do I might think. I don't think I bothered last year. But I am pleased with one or two cultural glimmers from the last 12 months, and I never wrote about some of them, so here's a series of barely connected reports about films and books and; not much else actually. Films - off the top of my head, I saw barely three films. But at least I have been getting to the cinema. The thing is, for reasons of circumstance, the cinema means Manchester, which entails an unfun car journey, or what used to be a train journey I was quite happy with, once. But the train services have been getting poorer in the North West in recent years. It's all a matter of slow deterioration, but the little losses make a difference. In my case, the loss of a particular afternoon train from the timetable meant that for most films of typical blockbuster length, I could no longer get home off peak. For the first film...

Watching Napoleon has left me feeling a little sad. It's also left me feeling violently shaken, but more about that later. As it says on the poster, this is a Ridley Scott film. I can't claim to have seen all of his films, but I have seen many of them, in the cinema, and the fact that he was the director was usually the main reason I went and parted with cash, to see a film on the big screen. I'm certainly drawn to science fiction, so Alien and Blade Runner are the films of his which figure most prominently in my mind. But I've enjoyed his work in many other genres as well, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator and so many more. I'd barely heard about Scott before I saw his first film, The Duellists (who are Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel), which made a big impression with its spectacle and its rendering of its almost Shakespearean theme. Interestingly, it also has the Napoleonic Wars as its background. I got to wondering how many times I'd seen Napoleon Bon...

Lists here, lists there, lists everywhere on the World Wide Web. They're ridicuous. The value of a 'best ever' list ends as soon as you've read it. Your taste isn't the same as the person's who devised the list. And when we're talking about pop culture, what could be more disposable? However, here is a list of favourite music videos. Mine, just mine. Its main purpose is to remind me of them - then I can go straight to YouTube and watch them. They're all there. You may have noticed I have a 'Desert Island Discs' page. But this isn't really appropriate for that. Partly because of the inevitable confusion with the 'favourite music' theme. A lot of 'best ever videos' lists I've seen are clearly lists of someone's favourite music, when they've simply gone and found the video made for the various songs. Not here. These are film pieces . True, they are all for songs I like. But in my humble opinion, with each one, a film...

Quite. The apocalyptic wish for a giant asteroid, sure, does reflect emotions I find it hard to let go of about 2021; however, it sort of spins off one of the most hopeful things all year which has just occurred, namely the launch of NASA's fab new space telescope . Some will nitpick forever about projects like this, especially the money, but it offers a prospect of discoveries even more wildly amazing than Hubble, and that can retire happily with all that it achieved for human knowledge. So, despite an inclination to get down about what I 'only' managed this year, let's talk about some worthwhile cultural things which I did or enjoyed, despite some tough stuff which happened. I actually saw two films in the cinema . This isn't enough to pretend to comment on 'the year in film' or anything like that, but it meant a lot to me, having that experience which I enjoy a lot. I saw Dune in one of the new little boutique cinemas, the sort where they bring food to y...

I'm having to scratch my head a bit about any culture I enjoyed in 2019. One overarching factor was British politics which seemed to infect life with more and more depression as the year went on. We've just had an election which seems to have at last broken the parliamentary deadlock, but may prove to be a false dawn, once they get back to talking to Brussels. Me, I voted Green anyway, knowing full well that it doesn't force anybody to do anything. This is a safe Conservative seat. I'm one of those who think climate change is far more important than Brexit. I simply wanted to give a minuscule bump to the Greens' national percentage. I saw four films ! Stan and Ollie , Apollo 11 , Transit and The Irishman . Yes I certainly like going to the cinema but for circumstantial reasons that means organising a day around a train journey into Manchester. Especially because that's where the most prominent arthouse cinema is. All four films were good, and very differe...

I've been out to the cinema very little this year, despite a new Everyman opening up near me, and in general every inclination to see several good ones which came and went. The Irishman really wouldn't have been on my list, not that I thought it'd be bad, certainly not, but the thought, "Not another Martin Scorsese gangster epic??" Anyway, I went along with this choice, some other friends had recommended it and, what the hell. Some context for my half heartedness: no matter how honest these mafia films are about these characters and the world they inhabit, I feel the very fact that they are so well made gives them undue glamour. A case in point is Scorsese's  Goodfellas which I thought was a truly great piece of cinema, but which still featured somewhat sympathetic characters and made them look cool. I can't think that about The Irishman . With this film, Scorsese has stripped away all of the false glamour which might have attached to the mafia li...

Transit is a German language 2018 film from director Christian Petzold . It's about wartime refugees, principally Georg who is desperate to get out of France while the invaders advance. We see him first in Paris; he's about to head South to Marseilles with a badly injured friend, and then hopefully a boat to freedom, but first he's asked to take a letter to another would-be refugee, a famous writer . When he gets to the man's lodgings, he finds he's too late - the writer has committed suicide. Unsure what to do, he scoops up the scattered papers and heads for the railway tracks where he hops into an empty freight cabin with his ailing companion; who sadly dies as they arrive in Marseilles . He narrowly escapes the guards. Those two deaths seed the rest of the narrative. He becomes involved with his departed friend's family , the widow - who's deaf and dumb - and the son. He knocks about a football with the boy, and though it might have been no time ...

Books, films, music; but 2018 for me was mainly about books . The thing is, I've kept up a record of books I've read since childhood, in a succession of notebooks, and I noticed this year that - since even if I read little or no books, I still move on to a new page - I would run out of pages in a very few years. So, I bought a new fancy notebook and in thoroughly OCD fashion, copied it all out again. I made a few adjustments to correct various mistakes etc., but things are looking good once more. Especially since it led to a resurrection of my set of Rotring ArtPens, ie. my fountain pens . I ditched my use of disposable cartridges, and fitted them with refillable ones, and then a set of nice inks. Mostly blues and blacks but also red, green and so on. Some have been used to colour code types of book in the notebook - eg. blue for prose, purple for poetry. But more satisfyingly I began to write letters. I knew full well that only one or two friends and acquaintances were lik...

A Quiet Place is a science fiction / horror film which may have got your attention thanks to its USP of a monster which zeroes in on sound. In the poster pic right, star Emily Blunt is trying to keep silent while there's a monster in the house - and she's about to give birth. I don't want this blog to end up a movie review site, and hence don't intend to post about every film I see; I wouldn't have commented on this film, except that the premise has led to attendance at a cinema showing being an interesting experience . The film is very quiet for long stretches. Music and sound are used to heighten tension; but the main characters use sign language a lot of the time for obvious reasons, and for the most part we're listening to ambient sounds, suffering the tension of knowing that since this is a horror film, a sound is going to disrupt the silence at any moment and death is going to come running. So, by all reports I've heard, audiences have tended ...

Let's start with cards. Christmas cards . For information, I make a list each year, and end up giving or sending around 70 cards, to family and various groups of friends from past and present. I keep up with who I'm not hearing from, who I'm still in touch with, that sort of thing. But the stat I want to mention here is one which gives me weird amusement; weird, because it doesn't mean anything. It's to do with the subjects featured on the Christmas cards, and the apparent trends each year. As far as figures go, it's almost always Santa that wins, or else it's the Holy Family. In the objects or symbols category, I noticed quite a few wreaths this year. But the big perennial fascination is animals. I have no idea how fashions or trends would work on this one, all I can say is that it doesn't seem to be utterly random. Some years there really is a predominance of eg. reindeers, others, of robins. As a footnote, when I was checking out the Christmas po...

No, that isn't a spelling mistake. This really is about the Finnish in Blade Runner 2049 . There are a few spoilers in this, nothing big, but you may want to check out now. (NB - 2019 follow up comments in PS down at the bottom) I went to see the film a second time, primarily to immerse myself again in that world. Despite the intensely pessimistic vision it offers, its design and cinematography are wondrous and absorbing and I wanted it all again, while I could still get it on the big screen. And it was a big screen, a bigger and better one in Manchester. I went with a friend, which enabled some lively discussion afterwards. I'm glad to say she liked it too, and made several good points. The main one was about the 'glaring plot hole' towards the end (ie. how does so-and-so know how to find *cough* in order to effect a rescue): something's been cut out there, maybe only a bit of script, but something which might have explained it. There were other reasons t...