celticman's blog

Without You ITV is the first episode based on a Nicci French thriller What Do We Do When Someone Dies?’ I like the name Nicci French. It sounds like a bit of a thriller and if it were I’d cast Anna Friel as Nicci French as Ellie Manning whose husband is killed, but she still talks to him as if he was there and, guess what, we see him, or at least her vision of him. I hate that. Anna Friel is pig beautiful enough to carry many a series, but not...

Cypher (2002) was written by Brian King and an amalgam of Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the box office smash The Matrix. All you need to know, however, is it stars Lucy Liu. A general rule of thumb is if it stars Lucy Liu it’s a turkey. She was outacted by an animated baby in Ally McBeal. She was the ugliest angel that Charlie could have picked in a class that included the not overly pretty...

Mimic (1997) is one of those late night movies you expect to be completely rubbish, but is pretty good. I didn’t know the director was Gullermo del Torro which perhaps explains it. The story, as such, is a quite simple, giant insects eat people. The way it is done, however, is ingenious. The insects in the darkness of dusk look human. There’s plenty of scope for jokes here by turning the transformation around. But it does work. One of the early...

Feast of Love (2007) FilmFour is the kind of film that you can watch while reading the paper and patting the dog. If you haven’t got a dog, get a dog. One of the nicer scenes is when Bradley (Greg Kinnear) goes to get back the dog that he bought for his wife Katherine’s birthday. He needs the dog, because his wife has left him for another woman and well, he just needs that dog. Uncle Bradley, however, can’t get the dog because everybody in the...

American Nomads written and directed by Richard Grant. The narrator starts with property. He has a house in Tucson Arizona. Before he had a house he had the ground and the stars. He seeks out with a big butterfly net to capture his fellow contemporary nomads in America. First stop was the young homeless. They are always the most photogenic. And if they are travelling with a dog that just makes the most poignant scenes. Boy-girl-dog. The story is...

The Slap based on Christos Tsiokas’s novel, which I haven’t read, is the ripple effect in action. We are more than half way through the series now and I wasn’t sure at first, but now think it’s the best thing on telly. I wasn’t sure primarily because of the dreaded voice over explaining everything and nothing in an echoy voice. Because it is also big budget fare the voice over has pictures. Harry, the wealthy macho playboy, for example, imagines...

John Humphries begins with a very simple story. When he was young, and I’d put him about mid 70s, everyone worked. The Beveridge Report for the reform of the welfare state was based on that premise. Humphrey went back to his old mid-terrace house, working class-respectable- to get an overview of this notion. He pointed out the house of an old neighbour to a woman that lived across the road. She agreed the man hadn’t worked and it was thought a...

Every word is placed down in sentences that sing and paragraphs that burn and pages that brand themselves into your mind. Pitch perfect the action unfolds at the pace of ‘bony mules hitched to Hoover carts…slowly, but sure-footedly it builds up into a crescendo and just when you thought it was finished another flash of brilliance carries you that extra page. Scout, the narrator, Atticus her father, Jem her brother and friend Dill, dance like...

The Body Farm BBC 1 9pm. Forensic science is the new hairdressing and beautician kind of thing everybody kinda knows about and wants to do. We can’t all be Kathy Reichs, or the English version, Patricia Cornwall. The body farm is, as far as I can remember, a place in the US, where human bodies were left to rot, be eaten by insects and grow into the soil like any other piece of meat to see what kind of patterns emerged. With the added use of DNA...

Australia is a country, a short arsed continent and now a movie! Baz Luhmann’s (2008) epic Australia, starring Nicole Kidman as Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman as ‘The Drover’. Epic means, of course, it takes a longer time to get to Australia, than watch the actual movie, give or take the odd 15 or 16 hours. I didn’t have that kind of time frame, so I watched the first half hour before the ad break on Film 4. Australia had a cartoon feel as if it...