Blogs

Robert Douglas (2005) Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood. I wasn’t really looking for this book, but it found me. I’ve enough to read; too much to read, but I couldn’t put it down. It peaked out at me from the library stacks, beckoning me over. The opening: ‘If my father…had been killed in North Africa or Italy during the Second World War I know that for the rest of my life I would have looked at a few photographs of him and...

I’ve not worn the full set of rosary beads to bed since the last time I watched this film. It’s based on a true story that of Anneliese Michel a German woman who mysteriously acquired an American accent and went to an American College, and whilst there she heard voices. Her family didn’t know she was German and decided to beat it out of her. Aldous Huxley The Devils of Loudon is one of those books I read years ago and it also scared me. The...

‘The Ruins’ refer to a Mayan temple, a bit off the beaten track, so that only unwary tourists can find them. Two couples: boy-girl; boy-girl and two Germans; boy-boy, but not a couple, just German. My first guess was the brunette would get it first, because she’s trying to tongue the German dude on the beach. Playing away from home in a horror usually means, you are the next lunch. But, hey, we can’t always be right. We see the blond girl naked...

The Killing. I know it’s stupid, but I’ve been avoiding this because I loved Wallander. I sneaked a little look between watching something and watching nothing. It’s nothing like Wallander and something like Wallander. There is the same unhurried pace, which is no great surprise, to work out who the killer is and bag him takes 20 episodes. That’s 20 hours of drama. War and Peace would take probably about 20 hours to read and could be shown in...

Outcasts doesn’t have the menace of Eastenders in space. What it does have is a Mtchel who knows the president’s big bad secret and who has lines like ‘I’m going to shoot. I’m really going to shoot. You better believe me when I say I’m going to shoot. I’m going to shoot because I said I’m going to shoot and if you don’t believe I’m going to shoot then I’m going to shoot you.’ Goddamit, the bad Mitchel brother gets shot, although he’s not really...

Marchlands is written and produced by the same team that produce River City. I don’t really know what to make of it. It had three different families spaced odd twenty years apart all living in the same house ‘Marchlands’. You also had adverts every ten minutes. In between the adverts we know that a little girl has been killed, drowned, possibly murdered. We know this because there are endless shots of her running, which is recycled and used...

Nicole Kidman plays the eponymous heroine that takes her son to her sister’s wedding at their old family home. Margot has ulterior motives. She has a presentation of her work as a writer in the town and she has also, although we only learn this later, arranged to meet with her lover, a literature professor from the other side of town. It is he and his daughter that provides the catalyst for change. The literature professor baits Nicole at a...

P.S I Love You (2007) Hilary Swank is not the kind of name you could live with in Glasgow, especially if you were a guy. Gerard Butler recently of these parts walked around like a wardrobe, but with good hair, trying to act and with a strange accent. At first I thought it was Lulu/Sheena Easton Amercanism syndrome whereby they speak film language over there and talk shite over here. Then I realized ‘Fairytale in New York,’ The Pogues, he’s meant...

Alpha Dog (2007) is a crime drama written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, based on a true story. David Cameron is a young upper class dealer in political fiction, one of the smart set who have never held down a real job and make money by touting opinions and selling it as reality. When Cameron gets Brown axed from his job by ratting on him about owing money it results in a violent fight that Cameron’s gang break up. Cameron swears that he’ll...

Martin Scorsese likes to paint on a big canvas and Shutter Island (2010) is that, in a small way, with an isolated community of wardens and the criminally insane. It’s 1954 and Teddy Danson, who is really Leonard Di Caprio in a floppy hat and G-Man suit is sent to investigate the case of a missing patient, with his partner, who doesn’t really matter because he is not Di Caprio, and something has got to give. Rachel Solando, the missing patient,...