Favourite Films

Gone Baby Gone

By
15/02/10

I promise to try to keep the film versus book review to a minimum in this review.

However, there will be a bit of it – I’ll try to keep it to this section. Gone, Baby, Gone, is a book written by Dennis Lehane. Lehane also wrote Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood and with a galaxy of stars. Gone, Baby, Gone was the directorial debut of Ben Affleck. If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably never seen it as it got a pretty limited release. That’s because the missing child in it looks a little bit like Madeleine McCann. Nevermind that the book was written in 1998 – I reckon that if The Two Towers came out now, it would also have a delayed release.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

By
15/02/10

Everyone knows the story of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If you haven’t seen the film or read the book, you’ve seen one of the parodies floating around – Spaced’s being the best one, in this reviewer’s humble opinion. The main character, Randle P McMurphy, draws everyone around him like a moth to a flame, dominating the narrative. Right? Wrong. The book’s narrator is Chief Bromden, the apparently deaf and dumb Indian revealed to be the eyes and ears of the mental hospital.

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Submarine

By
15/02/10

First off, I have an admission to do with this book. I know the author – we went to UEA at the same time and were in pretty much the same social circle. That said, I’ll try to write the review as if I don’t know the author (lovely boy that he is) so it’s as unbiased as possible. I just wanted to get that off my chest, and now I have – let’s carry on.

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Q & A

By
15/02/10

Q & A, by Vikas Swarup, is the story of the unusual orphan Ram Muhammad Thomas. Set in various cities in India, Ram/Muhammad/Thomas moves from family to family, trying to earn enough money to eat and be independent of his life of minimum wage work.

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Perfume

By
13/02/10

I actually learned how to create an umlaut for this review. I’ll probably forget as soon as I’ve finished, but there you go, at least I made the effort.

Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, has been around for a quarter of a century in published form. Although set in historical France, it was originally written in German, but handily translated.

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The Time Traveler’s Wife

By
29/01/10

I’ve read this book a dozen times, easily. I have at least four copies as I lend them to all of my friends in a bid to get the whole world to read it, and inevitably want to read it once my copy is visiting someone else’s house.

It reninds me of an argument I once had with a thankfully now ex-colleague. When I said I was in the process of re-reading Watership Down, he snorted derisively and said “Why bother reading a book more than once? Bloody English students”. His reaction really surprised me – coming from a family of self-confessed (or should that be self-obsessed? Arf) readers, it never crossed my mind that other people only enjoyed a book once. My answer was “Why not? Would you listen to a CD once?”, which I thought was pretty quick, even if I do say so myself. I find myself gravitating towards certain books time and time again – the aforementioned rabbit saga, A Proper Little Nooryef, Phillip Pullman’s saga, Black Beauty and a couple more that I’ve forgotten.

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Your Friendly Neighbourhood… Franchise Reboot.

By
29/01/10

When 2007’s Spider-Man 3 limped past its predecessors to surprisingly become the most successful instalment of the Sony produced franchise, the general consensus, backed up by a poor performance at the US box office, was that it just wasn’t as good as the first two films.

Can we embrace a new Spider-Man? Yes We Can!

From that moment on the future of the wall crawler looked precarious at best. I can’t have been the only one who was a little shocked when Sony announced that both Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire were on board for a fourth outing. Internet buzz seemed to suggest that both were a little disappointed by the third film and were hoping to put right a few wrongs before clocking out.

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Cage Fighting: Kick Ass Preview

By
28/01/10

It’s a widely accepted facet of the Hollywood status quo that Nicholas Cage gets first dibs on any superhero project in early development. Having watched Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider I’m sure I’m not the only soul grateful that only one such project has clawed its way out from development hell.Whether you love a bit of ‘Cage’ action or not, his star prowess is noticeably absent from the early promotional material for Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass. The cynic in me would suggest that this is a conscious effort by the film’s producers to distance Kick-Ass from recent box-office dead weight like Ghost Rider however, the fan boy in me hopes that it is in fact an attempt to let the product speak for itself.
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How To Film The Unfilmable

By
22/12/09

So the undoable has been done. Captain Blue Cock, Inky face and the rest of the ‘Watchmen’, after 20 plus years of trying to find a way onto the big screen, have finally landed with a big kaboom and almost everyone seems pretty happy with the result. Like ‘American Psycho’ and ‘Perfume’ before it, the naysayers were saying it just couldn’t be done. Which begs the question is anything ‘unfilmable’ anymore?

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