celticman's blog

I didn’t go out expecting to meet Jimmy Reid, after all he’s been dead for over a year, maybe longer. It was a cold but sunny day and I walked down the canal path into Dalmuir. My mind was on the next thing that I’d write and I’d already decided on a title ‘God Made Me Ugly for a Reason,’ an autobiographical look at my early upbringing. I’d already begun jotting down memories. I went into William Hills to put a football line on. I’m still not...

Written and directed by David Michod and loosely based on the Melbourne based Pettingill family and the 1988 Walsh Street shooting of police officers. In a brilliant opening scene 17 year old Joshua ‘J’ Cody (James Frechville) phones for an ambulance whilst watching the histrionics of contestants on a quiz show as they try to win more money. In a flat voice he answers questions. The camera pans back. The emergency relates to his mother, who is...

Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Ridley Scott’s adaption Bladerunner set in a Los Angeles of 2019 follows a similar storyline. Deckhard (Harrison Ford) a former cop is told he must retire six replicants that have escaped from the Tyrell Corporation. Retire is a euphemism for kill. Killing replicants is not an offence because a machine or android cannot be killed. Replicants are property in the same way...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Channel 4 27th, 28th, 29th December, produced by Yellow Bird, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. Based on Stieg Larrson’s posthumous Millennium series and staring Noomi Rapace as the eponymously named Girl (Lisbeth Salander) and Michael Nyqvist (as Mikael Blomkvist ,) publisher of the Swedish political magazine Millennium, who in the first scene is...

Richie Cottan's new thriller. The double spread advertisement in The Observer had Peter Mullan, who plays Richie Beckett, in a triangle with his two sons behind him, against a backdrop of a pier with Fear in red lights. It reads ‘the criminal mind is a fragile thing’. Well it is if you’ve got Alzheimer’s, or dementia or you’re just fragile with a criminal mind. Peter Mullan playing a gangster, whether on a horse or in the street, is none of...

I’m getting in my heterosexual credentials right away. Stacey Dooley is super-hot. As for the girl that ‘reads’ BBC 3 new. She’s supernova. I know this is a sign that I’m secretly gay, because if you keep banging on about how hetero you are it’s a sign that you’re really homo. But according to gay conversion therapy there isn’t really such a thing as homosexuality. There is same sex preference, but gee whiz, that can be changed. It’s a...

When I was little more than a larrikin in my granda’s eyes, we used to say things like white man speak with forked tongue. Geronimo speak with forked tongue. Adult speak with forked tongue. Until we got sick of it and shot up everybody that disagreed, including ourselves, but we refused to be dead. We were in such good health that putting us to bed was the equivalent of the massacre at wounded knee. What has this got to do with inventing the...

This isn’t any old apocalypse, the four horsemen racing across the sky; this is a Derren Brown, apocalypse. Notice the word ordering. Derren Brown comes before the apocalypse. Derren Brown is the apocalypse. We know he can do anything, but this is just one more little thing in his armoury. But the reality is rather disappointing and voyeuristic. I don’t like big brother type shows. I don’t like listening in on innocent folks going about their...

An alcoholic salesman for a father, whose family lived in poverty and they were saved from destitution by Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan goes onto become a life guard and saves 17 lives. He becomes a radio announcer, the lead actor in Hollywood B movies. He moves into politics and becomes the president of the screen actors’ guild. He doesn’t give names before the Senate investigation into un-American activities. In fact his refusal to give names...

BBC 2, director Sam Mendes, adapted from a novel by Richard Yates. I’ll come clean. I haven’t read the novel. Shame on me. I’m putting it in the first 100 must read novels and to the front of the queue of the 6 752 should read novels. The last time Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslett were together Celine Dion was standing backstage warbling her heart must go on and on and on and on. And it did. Racking up millions of sales and making Titanic...