Author Archives: Ben Gould
Screaming “DRAGO!!!” at the top of a Pentlands’ hill wasn’t as cinematic as I imagined.
Because I looked up and saw a bigger hill. But I couldn’t be bothered spending another two hours moving my legs. I got a semi-decent snap out of the endeavour, though. ‘Z for Zachariah’ came to mind, the only book from school I can ever remember that was about something. I don’t wish to read it again as it will probably turn out to be total shite, like much you revisit from yesteryear.
World War Two on … YouTube.
This is the best thing on YouTube and exactly what the internet is for.
I’m not here to plug the channel and I don’t know anything about the production or its team at all but the show is so well put together it needs to be shared. The depth of research is up there with your contemporary historians and, rather than a simple retelling, the makers actually dig into everything and ponder the what-ifs. I’d take this form of accessible media over a dry academic piece any day, and it’s the intro for anyone interested in the topic; back in the day, all we ever had was the same old insipid, badly researched and produced textbook material regurgitated on the BBC.
We’re up to winter 1941 now and even to this day it’s utterly shocking how close the Wehrmacht made it to Moscow despite all of the setbacks. It’s the greatest and worst event in history. The age of extremes, aye.
Who is this?
Just off Glimore Place, Edinburgh. I don’t know who it is and it is starting to vex me.
Mank (2020) is absolute scenes.
A time machine quality swirls around this flick. Whether it’s the throwback cinematography that apes Gregg Toland or the peculiar sound recording that could be lifted straight from the seminal Citizen Kane (1941) or merely the endlessly fascinating subject matter – Kane’s production history, its bonkers cast and crew. The movie was a joy to watch. It captures ‘Old Hollywood’ like no other; not that I was there, but it’s how I’ve always pictured the era. The sleaze, the smoky rooms, the shameless greed, the debauchery, the magnates and barons mixing with screenwriters and journalists, a glorious melting pot with movies the rarefied outcome.
It’s not just a portrait of an untouchable epoch, though. The … tribute is married to actual human stories, the individual struggles that inspire and spark creative output, the roman-à-clefs that writers as omniscient as Herman J. Mankiewicz soaked up like a sponge. When you read into types like this – Ben Hecht also comes to mind – you can’t help but admire the way they dipped into Bohemian Grove.
This might also be the most unusual movie David Fincher has made. I will have to view it again for I did not detect any ‘Fincherisms’.
Further reading:
Stannis could have been up there with the gods.
But they ruined him. It’s another example of writing ‘jumping the shark/sofa’. He did a terrible deed – burning your kin is not the best move – and no one believed the sincerity of it for a second. It sums up how appalling Game of Thrones got in its last two pathetic seasons. It was ghastly, infected with bizarre vignettes that went NOWHERE.
The actor Stephen Dillane is the best in the show and he nails the character – absolutely and totally miserable, consumed with hatred. Even if he sat on the Iron Throne I can imagine he’d be bored to death and questioning his life role. That’s my kind of human. His quotes are incredible.
The crème de la crème: “A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.”
Fucking hell. Fancy a pint?
Ernest Bloch’s quote about ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ is just glorious.
I’ve never read a more vivid and correct description of a painting:
‘This picture is one single mosaic of boredom, a masterful rendering of the disappointed longing and the incongruities of a dolce far niente [idleness] …. The painting depicts a middle-class Sunday morning on an island in the Seine near Paris. Despite the recreation going on there, it seems to belong more to Hades than to a Sunday. The result is endless boredom, the little man’s hellish utopia of skirting the Sabbath and holding onto it too; his Sunday succeeds only as a bothersome must, not as a brief taste of the Promised Land.’
Brilliant.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is a slog.
Saw this for the first time in decades and bloody hell is it dull. It’s just so boring, which I find rather mental because it’s about UFOs and all that, and Spielberg is a master craftsman. It’s shot here like a TV movie, its depiction of suburbia painfully tedious. Even when the weird-looking critters arrive at the end it’s underwhelming. The only curiosity to be found is the casual appearance of François Truffaut, who is eminently more interesting than those around him.
Something else bothered me about it. It’s so naive, with government agencies portrayed as even being benevolent. What a weird decision, this just after the twin calamities of Watergate and the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Never watching it again and I do not understand why it’s lauded.
