Been So Long: My Life and Music
The autobiography of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is now out in paperback, a book so beautiful it quite literally attracts butterflies. Been So Long charts the musician’s journey from […]
Monthly Archives: May 2020
Starter for 10
Pencil-necked pushover Brian (James McAvoy) is a quiz-obsessed working class kid whose dreams come true when he gets on Bristol’s University Challenge team and meets not one but two generic […]
Red Heat
A Russian officer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a Chicago cop (Jim Belushi) team up to bring down a drug kingpin (Ed O’Ross) in 1988’s Red Heat. There are parallels with Rocky […]
Shivers
All this business with Dominic Cummings has got me thinking about David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Movies about viruses were spreading in the early ’70s (George A. Romero’s The Crazies and Robert […]
On iPlayer: Paint Your Wagon
Clint Eastwood heads westward in 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon AKA Purty Harry. In a possible attempt to rebottle the success of Oklahoma!, Lerner and Loewe’s (My Fair Lady) musical […]
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
As these are “unprecedented times” (by which I mean a year without Eurovision), here’s a book review: the new novel by the great horror writer Grady Hendrix, in which a […]
Collateral Damage
Arnold Schwarzenegger ends the war on drugs and starts the war on terror in this largely forgotten effort from 2002, in which a firefighter (Schwarzenegger) uses his CIA connections (?) […]
Curse of the Golden Flower
As the chrysanthemum festival approaches, trouble is brewing in the Chinese royal household as the Empress (Gong Li) plots revenge against her manipulative husband (Chow Yun Fat). Zhang Yimou, director […]
The Red Violin
In Paris a rare violin is up for auction – the last work of legendary violin maker Nicolò Bussotti (Carlo Cecci). This is the story of how it got there. […]
Ginger Snaps
Brigitte and Ginger (Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle) are goth sisters who spend their time hanging out in their prison cell of a bedroom, staging their own deaths for school […]
Screen Goblin 