Recent Posts

• January 04, 2026

  Resolutionary Road

  Another year has happened. I didn’t do a resolutions or plans post at the beginning of 2025 so I have saved myself the necessity of going back and reviewing it, so apologies to my future self in 2027. Here’s what I want to do:

• December 30, 2025

  Writing in 2026

  Here’s a thing I’m going to do. In an effort to write more fiction, I’m going to try and post something, anything, every Monday for the year 2026. I’m setting a minimum word count of 500, but nobody’s going to come and arrest me if I slip under it a little. Doing it at speed will, in theory, stop me from endlessly noodling around. Some stuff will be terrible, some might be ok. I’ll also try and squeeze in time for some longer stuff that’s already in progress.

• November 19, 2025

  Scarface (1932)

  The kind of gradual rise and abrupt fall you’ve seen before, but probably worth crediting this for doing it first, or at least the earliest version I can think of. Hawks would have lost his mind over Goodfellas. The Scarface in question is Tony Camonte, who starts out as a second in command for mob boss Johnny Lovo, but he’s really one of those guys with initiative, who gets things done, like killing many, many people and starting wars with the north side of Chicago to try and take over their territory.

• November 15, 2025

  Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

  Second Howard Hawks movie in two days, and the third in about a week. He’s going to pass out my Altman run at this rate. I had no idea what this was about going in, and it sets itself up a little bit as a straightforward romance with Jean Arthur running into Cary Grant shortly after arriving in some remote South American port where he runs an air mail service.

• November 14, 2025

  The Big Sleep (1946)

  Very glad I read the book of this recently because it’s very - famously - convoluted. At least Marlowe always seems to know what’s going on, in contrast to the Elliot Gould Marlowe from The Long Goodbye. They changed some bits and pieces for the movie, but as far as I can tell there are three crime scenarios that overlap in various ways.