Blogs

Cabaret (1972) and Mrs Brown’s Boys. Cabaret (1972) was made a life time ago. But if it was made today I think it would still pick up all the Oscars and rightly so. Liza Minelli is not the prettiest of woman, but she shimmers and shakes and sings and dances as if the world believes it to be so. Liza Minelli is Sally Bowles and Sally Bowles is Liza Minelli. The rouged puppet like MC in the Kit Kat pulls the strings and the soundtrack lets the...

BBC 2. Christopher and his kind(er). Ok my German is crap, my English not much better, but luckily Isherwood’s looking back at his Germanic idyll, so wonderfully done with Cabaret takes a bit of a beating here. Auden with his war poetry hoped to save the world, but, of course, nobody likes poetry and they didn’t know about macrobiotic diets in 1930s Germany. They were all too busy stomping about speaking German/English with a suitable accent...

The film of Submarine - the novel by Joe Dunthorne that started life here on ABCtales - is getting rave reviews. If you haven't read the book, then do! And if you go and see the film then please leave a review here on the forums. It just goes to show how ABCtales can help you develop as a writer. Joe was a student at UEA when he started on here and he still posts from time to time as 'spack'. Find his work here: http://www.abctales.com/user/...

Georgia is a 14 year old schoolgirl that hasn’t done it-yet. She’s never kissed a boy or had a boyfriend. It’s all very trying. She has a mum that doesn’t understand her and a dad that’s going to New Zealand to work and possibly forever, which means she might be able to talk her mum around, and into having a fabulous birthday bash. Angus the cat has a cameo role, usually doing cute things with Georgia’s little sister. The Thong belongs to her...

Who said there’s no justice out there? Bully (2001) Larry Clarke film based on a book by Jim Schutze. I don’t know who these people are, but it’s an everyday story apart from the bully gets killed and those that did it go to prison. In between that there’s some sex and drug taking and the fragile ecosystem of teenage egos jousting for space and love and belonging. Every action builds on another action and is pitch perfect. The awkward outsider,...

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...