Lets get a few things straight. A graphic novel is vastly more complicated than a cartoon strip. Compared to the 118118 adverts in the bottom of the Metro, Alan Moore is Dostovesky. Nevertheless we should not forget that all things are relative – compared to The Idiot most graphic novels might as well just be a 3 pane strip advertising a phone directory service. The 118 strips are piece of daily visual flotsam for any Londoner using the tube. For…

Anyone who read my previous post calling for a more intellectual approach to film criticism and felt a twinge of excitement or hunger should hunt down Michael Wood’s writing on film which regularly features in… yes, where else, the London Review of Books. Here is the end of his superb piece on Five Easy Pieces… “Dupea thinks piano practice is just practice, a form of avoidance, and claims to have played a certain Chopin prelude better when he was eight…

In the previous post I talked in a roundabout sort of way about the root of some of the quiet fears I have when people talk about introducing into British cinemas a quota of British made films. A quota such as this has been one of the most popular suggestions thrown up by the debate about the future of public funding in the British film industry and, fundamentally, I’m all in favour of it. Mainly though I’m in favour because…

The odd thing about the internet is people still treat it as if reverses normal logic, rather than magnifying it. This was one of the key problems behind the dotcom boom and, like radiation lingering long after the blast, echoes of this emotion are still with us today. That’s why I warned you at the outset that I wasn’t going to come any surprising or new revelations by examining the questions posed by online distribution. Putting films online doesn’t make…

Hey to everyone packing their bags for Edinburgh. Hopeless beast that I am I’m still struggling to remember that the film festival happens this week rather than in August. Though we have been asked to show some of our films at some event during the proper Edinburgh Festival which made me wonder if some rogue fringe film festival was about to spring up in the ground vacated… My brother Chris pays much more attention to the world and so he…

Last night I saw “The Killer Inside Me”. Well aware of all the hoo-ha and hoopla surrounding Winterbottom’s graphic portrayal of the central character’s misogynistic violence it hadn’t been top of my ‘must-see’ list. I’m not a fan of violence and have very little wish to see Jessica Alba get her face punched in. However I was out with friends and they wanted to see it and that seemed as a good a reason as any to quieten my qualms…

Since this is a story about me being a fool you’ll hopefully forgive me starting with a reference back to my own ramblings here on this blog. Some months ago I wrote a short piece that you can read by clicking here about my experience of watching the trailer for the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. At the time what got me more than the trailer and the deliciously unimpressed response to it, was the unnerving desperation of a pre-trailers…

I’m writing this on Thursday in the middle of my third three hour train journey in the space of a week. Today the ungodly hour sets my destination for Norwich rather than Paris, which at least gives you a glimpse of the bracing variety of March. One of the delights of my Paris trip was finally getting to meet Thomas Browne an actor turned director who’s controversial film “Spunkbubble” was screening at the European Independent Film Festival. I’d actually been…

So on Friday I was in an actual cinema with an actual audience of other people. It was the late afternoon and we were an odd bunch but never the less an interesting cross section of the ticket buying public and this trailer was one of the many to crash off the screen at us… And with perfect timing, just as it comes to the quiet bit at the end, the unnervingly loud voices of two middle-aged women broke through…

There are more films made every day than anyone could ever hope to watch. Mostly they are not even really worth the effort. Consequently I tend to operate quite a strict policy of avoidance, which means that there are a far few modern ‘classics’ that, much to the horror and amazement of my girlfriend, I have never seen. For instance, up until recently, I had never actually seen either “Pretty Woman” or “Dirty Dancing”. My reasoning was clear, both films…