The Machinist’s bleached steely grey cinematography succeeds in preventing the audience from placing the film in time and Bale’s epic weight loss is something of a feat. Yet, while remaining watchable, it fails miserably as thriller. The riddle really is as obvious as it seems from the start.
An effort wasting 3 out of 10.
Director: Brad Anderson……Starring: Christian Bale……Jennifer Jason Leigh
Hotel Rwanda……Maria Full of Grace (Maria llena eres de gracia)

Scrawl graffiti over this »

Much amused to come across this alternative report of the Conservative Way Forward event at which Howard Flight admitted the Tory pledge to spend £35bn less than Labour in a couple of years, should read ‘at least £35bn less’, via Mathew Turner. In this alternative world, the gaff that got Flight sacked was heard as refusal, ‘to agree to more radical tax plans or even consider them’. Oh dear. As Mathew suggests, a career in real world journalism does not beckon for poor Andrew Iain Dodge.

Yet it’s an easy mistake to make if you’re a libertarian Conservative in libertarian Conservative company: you believe in a smaller state in principle and that any pledge to cut spending is a very good thing. But such people have failed to recognise their own minority position within the Conservative Party, the majority of whom are traditional social conservatives: some might even favour a theocratic junta. Tory house paper the Telegraph has warned Michael Howard of the dangers of opportunism in the past, but an opportunist he is. He’s happiest jumping on hate fuelled bandwagons.

The blue rinses may have been happy to let libertarians run the economy under Thatcher (looking down on them as mere technocrats) but those days are over. Traditional, pragmatic Tory fudge is all Michael Howard has to offer.

1 graffito, scrawl more »

Way back in October, I had a bit of a whinge (how unlike me) about City Life’s makeover, how the focus group I’d been in had been ignored and how the editor attacked a reader on the letters page (anybody would think he was writing a blog, not a magazine). Yet I have to admit that while the letters page – which is for readers, not hacks, to let off steam – continues to absent itself for weeks on end, recent issues have seen a marked improvement. It’s like the new regime has found its confidence and the magazine is maturing rather than dumbing down.

And the improvement isn’t something I can put my finger on: a good thing. There has been no obvious reversal of editorial policy. That ignored focus group saw signs that that City Life aimed to become a mono-cultural Heat for Manchester, unable to represent the full cultural experience. It had mourned the death of the old Archisnap column, which I read, but never rated that highly, and more importantly the Citizen, which represented a smidgen of politics. Now Archisnap’s Phil Griffin has been brought back for the odd column and there’s a bit of a news section near the front, but that alone isn’t what’s turned things around. Pagination’s grown, the design is cleaner. The magazine still (rightly) celebrates a young Manchester lifestyle, but it hasn’t lived up to fear that it would forget that the only useful listings magazine is a comprehensive one. City Life hasn’t dumbed down after all and should still build circulation at the margins populated by allegedly high-brow cultural pursuits… it can still do literature.

So. I was wrong. (Although the website is very poor and orphaning a gossip column thing amongst the listings is rather odd.)
City Life’s lobotomy
Britney Spears Do Somethin’: I was wrong#2……REACH & animal testing: I was wrong#4

Scrawl graffiti over this »

It looks like Jamster failed to place its own Chick Sweety ringtone (which you can buy here, if you must) number one for Easter Sunday. It’s a failure few will mourn, especially as Crazy Frog has held on to his position. But it did get me wondering whether all the hype (which dates back at least as far as 2003) that ringtones will outsell singles one day was up to anything.

It looks like even