Recent Posts

• August 02, 2025

  Ran

  Suddenly we found ourselves with an unusual amount of time in the evening, and neither of us had to get up in the morning, so finally, after many months of “I’d love to but it’s too long”, we finally got to watch Ran and it was awesome. I’ve seen most of the Kurosawa big hitters at this stage (but his back catalogue is deep) but this has been a long standing 2hr 40min hole. I think we did Seven Samurai in two sittings, much as I dislike doing that, but I have a job and children here.

• July 28, 2025

  Lorna, at the Heat Death of the Universe

  0. The End

• July 04, 2025

  I Accidentally Adopted a Baby Raccoon

  I got this app on my phone to identify birds, and it was all cool and fun until it became clear that there are precisely three birds in my general area: Sparrow, American Robin and Northern Cardinal. (Side: cardinals are cool and I think they’re great. Fat little red bastards). Yesterday morning I heard a new bird, and grabbed my phone to see what it was. Sparrow? That sounds nothing like a sparrow. This app is bullshit. Cornell will hear about this. I gave up and went back to work until I heard Jones going ballistic out front, and the bird noise getting louder and louder. Shit, he’s trying to kill it. I burst out the door, grabbed him and hurled him inside, and discovered that the bird app had not identified the noise because it was in fact a very distressed baby raccoon.

• July 02, 2025

  Funny Games

  I’m getting more and more annoyed by this movie in hindsight. The set up is a home invasion, two young guys tie up and traumatise a family of three in their holiday home on a lake somewhere. I came into this knowing at least the above, so when one of the guys keeps asking for eggs, and “accidentally” dropping them and then, oops, dropping the phone into the sink so it breaks, the path was clear. I had got the impression, though, that this was a notorious, hard to watch indictment of media violence while also having its cake and eating it by being extremely violent itself.

• July 01, 2025

  Blow Up

  So the “blow-up” here is not a bomb, but in fact a photo getting bigger. The “plot” is that photographer Thomas accidentally takes a photo of a murder while chasing a couple through a park, and catches it when he enlarges the photo. This plot takes roughly fifteen minutes of screen time. What else do we get?