celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002w9wy/the-iron-claw I chanced on this film. Supposedly based on the Von Erich brothers. Wrestlers handed a poisoned chalice by the domineering dad Fritz on their Texas ranch. Fritz’s signature move while wrestling was The Iron Claw. Hence the movie’s title. But Fritz never got to be the heavy-weight world champion. His boys would be and he wasn’t going to let them forget it. Their lives were to be shaped...

Vermiglio (2024), BBCiplayer, screenwriter and director Maura Delpero. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002xkf7/vermiglio Vermiglio is a place and time. Towards the end of the Second World War, 1944-45, two deserters came to hide in the remote Alpine village. One is a local boy. The other Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian deserter. They are hid among the chickens. At the centre of village life is the Graziadei family — Cesare (...

Pierre Lemaitre is a winner of The Prix Concourt Award. I’ve no idea what that is, but I’m suitably impressed and he’s also an international bestseller. The Silence and the Rage is part of a trilogy that follows The Pelletier family. I’ve not read the other two books but have read (and reviewed) one of his other novels ((2018) Three Days and a Life ). Like Emile Zola, he can pull the reader into historical events and have you rooting for his...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002zljp/monster ‘What is truth?’ Pontius Pilot is alleged to have asked this kind of question before passing judgement. It may have seemed to him a sensible thing to do. For Judeans that was passing the bronze prutah. An institutional washing of the hands that predated Moses. Monster has a tripartite structure. It looks through the lens of the story from different points of view. Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō...

Most career criminals live in grey areas and not the eternal sunshine of the superwealthy. Some of us may know them. Paul Tait for example came out as The Bad Guru and offers redemption. I knew he indirectly bought and ran with his brother many legitimate businesses in Clydebank, such as The Horse and Barge. A Celtic pub. What interested me more from an authorial perspective were his links with the IRA and his ability to flit from country to...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030qjb/tuesday Tuesday is a stupid film. I don’t mind stupid. Sometimes I welcome it. It makes me feel smarter. I didn’t really get it at first. Some kind of scene in which a grime-covered, size-shifting macaw who listens to hip-hop, lifts its wing and people are at peace? It took me a while to realise this was Death. The plot is identical to (I re-read it to make sure) to Duncan Williamson’s short story,...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030fhy/monkey-man There was a time in Holywood when men were men. They had to smoke like a steam engine leaving the station. Drink like there was no tomorrow and break enough hearts to keep the tabloids busy inventing new kinds of innuendo. Some of them were singers, crooners or dancers. They had to shoot straight and have the innate ability to gallop away on any old horse when needed. Which brings me to...

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) was a political novel in much the same way as George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ray Bradbury’s most well-known novel was incendiary. Brave even, when all around were losing their heads over the perceived threat of the red menace and McCarthyism stoked the flames in the mass media, and was rewarded by even more attention and status in the media McCarthyites fed stories to. You wonder what either writer would have made of the...

Holy Ghost is ‘A Virgil Flowers Novel’. That may be meaningless. As it was to me. Although being brought up a Catholic, I know who the Holy Ghost is, or was, or ever will be. And I know who Stephen King is. When the cover gives a Stephen King blurb: ‘One of the greatest novelists of all time’, you’ve got to look, even though you know hokum when you hear it. I know now who Virgil Flowers is. John Sandford has written around 30 books. Many with...

I tried to remember. Names in which the subject describe the object. Mo Wilde and Wilderness cure. In real life, we call these coincidences aptronyms. A tutor of Creative Writing I once had was, for example, called Elizabeth Reeder. Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer is another example. Oscar Wilde’s (no relation to Mo Wilde) The Importance of Being Ernest played with that idea. A charactonym, loaded labels with hidden meaning, designed to...