Paul

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Ringo and Bingo

In the middle of their usual chaos and surrealism, I’m always a bit floored and intrigued by two things about my dreams: how occasionally a bit of really solid, structured narrative comes through — which reminds me of the fact that William Rose claimed that the entire plot of The Ladykillers came to him in ...

Made of ticky tacky

Here’s a great marketing wheeze, clearly conjured up by advertising types who Don’t Have To Do It Themselves. Erect a small estate of perspex cubes, perhaps ten or so of them, each perhaps seven or eight feet in each dimension, along the pedestrianised shopping drag at 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. ...

“That lot over there in Santa Monica”

Of which, I suppose, I’m now one, but Peter Preston’s funny and perceptive piece in the Guardian about the transatlantic miscommunication inherent in Match Point gets my vote, at least for the first half of the film — which is really the whole of his thesis. Up to somewhere around its mid-point, Match Point is ...

Seeped into the brickwork

Film is everywhere in LA, both blaring transiently from billboards and seeped into the brickwork. Beetling bus journeys a couple of days ago took me past the Grand Olympic Auditorium, where the final fight scenes in the first Rocky film were shot, then past the Shrine, from which King Kong escaped before rampaging across a ...

Reuters giveth, and Reuters taketh away

Obviously this is a spectacular ruling — not least because of the Judge’s apparent excoriation of the ID bone-headed activism. But the Reuters hack then steps in a huge pile of dinosaur poop: Intelligent design holds that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must have been the work of an unnamed creator ...

Building a world without holes

The accepted wisdom with Rowling is that her world-building skills trump her thin characterisation and flat prose and make them irrelevant, but I think that’s a myth. She’s actually not all that good at world-building. What she’s good at is ideas, but in practice they don’t really fit together to ...

Best

Considering how relatively few — relative to a truly committed fan (my excuse being that I’m a Middlesbrough fan) — football matches I’ve been to in my time, an oddly large number of them have had a significance beyond their immediate competitive stake. I was at the game at Wembley on a chilly night (though ...