It’s the Overlook Hotel/the Dumb and Dumber (1994) palace with a surrounding … nature.
Great Outdoors Mission Accomplished.
Glen Clova getaway.
Author Archives: Ben Gould
Edinburgh Castle, January 2022.
Gunpowder, Treason & Plot (2004) is Robert Carlyle at his most Robert Carlyle.
For the exposition, I thought this one of the worst performances I’d ever seen. It was like Carlyle watched Richard III – play or any movie – and decided to limp about like Crookback for the duration of a gunpowder plot. And spice it up with a bit of Begbie. His James VI/I is a foul-mouthed little bastard with no grace or manners, an opportunistic cockroach who would murder an OAP for a bag of sugar.
I was thinking this and then I thought: this is 1603+. These creatures chucked one another onto bonfires and ripped their entrails apart. And the same sort would do the same today if they could. And then I got the genius of the performance.
Carlyle is keeping it real.
This is the only place I could find it. It’s very good, and with a young(ish) Michael Fassbender as Guy Fawkes:
Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables is the only coffee table book I ever want on a coffee table.
Just to be postmodern and stuff.
Hutchison House, Edinburgh – the Beacon of the Southwest.
There are two of these towers so the plural is more apt but I prefer ‘The Beacon’. It’s less daunting when you’re up close, like many a monument.
The Beacon is better seen from afar.
Cobra Kai season 4 bored me.
This season is unfortunately a bit stale and diluted, and the elements which could have salvaged it – the first season’s unrelenting reverence for the ’80s and its accompanying cheese, the dark humour and the amusing SJW bashing – are in short supply. Johnny Lawrence is just not as interesting as an upstanding nice guy as he is as a fish-out-of-water shambles lost in the wrong century. The staid version of Johnny is one without an edge, and it’s as if the show has been robbed of its biggest star.
Other things are annoying, from the constant switching allegiances, the pointless cameos from past characters that go nowhere, and the moments of catharsis that are simply not earned. It had some decent craic in it and the choreography was great as always, but this show should probably end now.
And I’m probably taking it all a bit too seriously.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 