Month: January 2008
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Kidnapped: And Other Dispatches
Alan Johnston’s kidnapping in the Gaza Strip was one of the more shocking moments of last year, and I think most people were relieved when he finally emerged largely unscathed – physically at least. This is his book, and unusually it’s not a full blown affair like those of other hostages. Nor is it an…
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I Apologise In Advance…
I know I shouldn’t be doing it. But I am. Yes, the Daily Mail has another of those DVD offers on, and it’s a good one. They’re giving away the quite wonderful Brideshead Revisited every day for 12 days starting from last Saturday. I know that there’s no excuse, especially from a paper that tries…
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No Country For Old Men
I saw this on a recent trip to New York, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while (I saw a few other films there that’ll I try to note in the next week or so). The Coen brothers are always worth watching, although recently their run of form has gone off…
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Hard Candy
In my review of Juno the other day, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the film that I understood to be Ellen Page’s breakthrough film, Hard Candy. Well now I have, having picked up a copy of the DVD. Wow – what a film. In essence, it’s about a paedophile played by Patrick Wilson, who…
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Screenplays
I moaned the other day about how Hollywood movie studios seemed more interested in awards than the piracy of their films – hence the existence of “Screener DVDs” which inevitably end up being made available on the internet. Anyway, one positive side effect of this scramble to win awards is that all the studios put…
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Lust, Caution.
You’ve got to love Ang Lee don’t you? He consistently makes some fabulous films. The first of his that I saw was The Wedding Banquet, but before you knew it, he’d turned his hand to Jane Austen and made Sense and Sensibility (now re-appearing in a new “sexed up” Andrew Davies TV production). Then there…
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Some More Decent Radio (and TV)
I missed one other programme that I should have mentioned the other day – this Saturday’s Archive Hours is called God, Pirates and Ovaltineys. “Sean Street investigates the history of the cultural battle between the BBC and commercial radio, which predates the pirate music stations of the 1960s by several decades.” That’s got to be…
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Juno
Like books, I’m behind in writing about which films I’ve seen recently. So lets try to catch up in reverse order, starting with the film I saw last night – Juno. I know quite a few bloggers saw it at a special screening that I couldn’t make before Christmas and the reaction to it was…
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Bad Language
Evidently a few people complained about the Christmas special of the Catherine Tate Show on BBC1 which was broadcast on Christmas Day. Their complaints were about the language, even though the programme went out at 10.30pm. My complaint would simply be that Tate is unfunny. She does have a handful of amusing characters, all of…
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US Album Sales Fall
I’m really not sure what to make of the news that US album sales fell by 9.5% in 2007, and down 15% on 2006. Digital sales increased by a whopping 45% but only 10% of them are albums. Basically, as we know, most people only buy the tracks they want and not the whole album.…
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How To Wear A Scarf
You know that there’s that “trendy” way to way a scarf – ideally a striped one? The picture above clearly explains why I’d never wear a scarf like that.
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Offline Blogging on the Asus EEE… Anybody?
Does anyone know of an offline blogging program that will run on the Asus EEE without the need for me to install a different OS? I’ve used Windows Live Writer on XP successfully in the past but would really like something that I can install on my EEE. And some instructions about how to do…