Category: Longform
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Clue, 1985 - ★★★½
This was daft, but quite fun. A film based on a board game. Specifically on Cluedo. Which in America, strangely, seems to be called 'Clue'. Why would you not use such a great, clever name as 'Cluedo'? Unless they don't have Ludo there? But that seems impossible.
It's probably the second-best thing I've seen Tim Curry in. Hmm, he was in Times Square, wasn't he? I remember enjoying that, but not much about it. Right now I'd have to but this ahead of it. He plays the butler, and since one pair of characters turn up in the same car, and it's a stormy, rainy night, I was getting serious Brad & Janet vibes. I was disappointed when they had an umbrella on getting out of the car, instead of a newspaper.
The writers had to struggle a bit to fit the conventions of the game into an actual story, but they did OK. There are shenanigans, murders, betrayals, multiple endings. All in all, not bad.
Books 2025, 13: No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod
This was published in 2000, and my partner’s parents gave it to me that year or the next. I have a vague feeling I also knew about it from somewhere else. Maybe just saw it in a bookshop and thought it looked interesting. Either way, I never got round to reading it till now.
It’s the story of a Scottish family — clan, almost, and certainly they’re referred to that way in the Gaelic terms that pepper the book — that migrated to Canada some time after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s 1745 uprising. It’s simultaneously the history of that migration, and the story of a present-day descendent of the family, now a successful orthodontist in Ontario; and his older brother who is in less successful circumstances. And most of all, of how they came to be that way.
I decided, since we were taking a trip to Canada, that now might finally be the time to read it. I started it on the way to the airport, but I don’t think I read any while we were still over there.
I’ve finished it now, though, and it’s pretty good. Nice use of parallel storylines, various bits about Scottish history and modern-day (well, actually the modern parts are set in the 80s) Toronto, and so on.
MacLeod came up in conversation while we were over. Not apropos of this; I just recognised the name. He was mentioned as a poet, I think, and I believe that’s how he’s better known. Still, he’s a decent novelist too.
Persuasion, 2007 - ★★★
Decent Austen adaptation. I haven’t read the book, which, I understand, many say is her best. I thought the ending fell a bit flat.
Crucial Track for 18 June 2025: How Was it for You?
"How Was It for You?" by James
Share a song that makes time feel like it's standing still.
I’m not sure this exactly fits the bill, but a chat at work today led me to play James’s Gold Mother for the first time in a while, and ‘How Was it for You?’ had me waving my arms in the air like I just didn’t care, or like I was back at the Brixton Academy in 1990 or so.
Sneakers, 1992 - ★★★½
Watched this on the return flight from Canada home. I feel like I’ve been hearing about it for years, as a not-bad early hacking/cracking type of thing.
Which is basically what it was, with an element of heist movie thrown in. Pretty good.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022 - ★★★★½
After watching this in Paris with French subtitles, I finally managed to to see it again. This time on a plane to Canada.
It holds up really well on a second viewing. The Air Canada seatback screens were pretty good. And this time I was able to get all the jokes and nuances in the non-English parts.
I love this film.
Farewell, My Lovely, 1944 - ★★★½
This appears as Murder, My Sweet, on Letterboxd, TMDB, and IMDb, but is actually Farewell, My Lovely. Apparently it was re-titled for the US market back in 1944, because there was a musical with the original name.
The original being, of course, one of Raymond Chandler's novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe. This is a really good adaptation, with what sounds like most of Chandler's dialogue (I mean, why would you change it?).
It's proper, classic noir. But/and there's a scene where Marlowe is captured by the bad guys, drugged, and interrogated, that feels more like the mind-control paranoia of sixties films like The Ipcress File. The visual ideas for suggesting that kind of thing go back a long way, obviously.
Books 2025, 12: The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
This is a strange wee beastie. The edition I have was published in 1998, and I must have bought it then or not long after. I vaguely remember reading a bit of it and finding it amazing, really powerful. And I obviously started it, because I had a bookmark in it, a few pages in.
But every time I’ve had a look at it since, it hasn’t really grabbed me. Until recently, when I started it again.
And… I’ve no idea what I saw in it back then. It’s a work of surrealism, but it’s just wilfully obscure. Every sentence is grammatically and syntactically sound, but semantically meaningless. It purports to be a catalogue or almanac of a society, with sections titled ‘Sleep’, ‘God’, ‘Food’, and so on. And within them chapters, or short stories, called ‘Sky Destroys Dog’,‘Ethics of Listening When Visiting Areas That Contain Him’, ‘Hidden Ball Inside a Song’.
It can be strangely compelling in places, almost reaching the level of poetry. But mostly it’s a bit of a chore to get through. If I hadn’t had it and kept it so long I probably wouldn’t have bothered.
A very curious work.
Books 2025, 11: Blitzkreig Bops, by Alli Patton
I picked this up at a stall at the local market a few weeks ago. It’s a slim volume, taking its title from the Ramones' song ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and subtitled, ‘A Brief History of Punks at War’. Alli Patton is a music journalist from the southern US and this slim book takes a look at how punk, from the 70s through to the 20210s, has been used to resist war, and call for peace and justice.
She starts with Stiff Little Fingers and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and moves on through apartheid South Africa to Chile during Pinochet’s regime and punk bands in East Germany during the Cold War.
And then beyond that, decade by decade. There are always wars and oppression, and it seems there are always punk bands resisting and calling for peace.
Worth a read, and she includes a YouTube playlist of some of the artists she covers.
Waiting for Yellow Ribbons
Searching for the Man
The state of internet search these days is such that it can be hard to find things that — while you don’t know they’re there — you know must be there.
It’s as if the search engines give up after a bit and just show more links to the same videos. Or lyrics sites, in this case. I found myself at the Wikipedia page for answer songs, and idly scrolled through it. Mainly I wondered what they’d say about ‘Here Comes Your Man’, by the Pixies. If you’ve swum in the same pools of the indie/punk/post-punk floodwaters as me, you’ll have long realised that Black Francis must have written that song, in part at least, as an answer to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. (Note the formulation of the title from the first album; many people and versions characterise it as ‘Waiting for My Man’, since that’s what the lyrics say.)
There was no reference to the song on the page. Slightly odd, I thought. I looked at the song’s own page. No reference there to the Velvets or Lou Reed.
If you doubt the connection, just listen to the two songs. There’s the riff on the Pixies song, plus all the references to ‘waiting’ in it, as well as the obviousness of the title. Sure, it’s not only that, or even, really, about ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ in any sense. But it’s unthinkable that the one didn’t inspire the other. Let’s not forget Black Francis wrote, in another song, ‘I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed/I like Lou Reed.’
Others must have written about this, I thought, and started googling around. Well, I use DuckDuckGo, but you know. And I even tried switching to Google. Nothing came up, except for the odd little Reddit post saying, ‘Hey, this song’s a bit like that song.’ Yet you’ve got to imagine — it’s hard not to imagine – people will have written about it. Music journalists, bloggers… hell, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned it before now.
But nothing turned up. I’m sure those pages are out there, lost for now in the deep pools of the web. But the search engines just don’t want to go there anymore.
Tying Ribbons
I was looking into answer songs because I’d been reading the page on ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, and it mentioned there being an answer song.
I was looking at that page because we were talking about the origin of people tying yellow ribbons when they’re waiting for someone to come home. I thought it might have originated with the song. It was certainly the first time most of us here in the UK heard the expression. When Americans festooned buildings with yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage crisis, it seemed like a reference to the song.
But the page suggested the origin is much older, possibly going back to the US civil war. So much for that.
We were talking about yellow ribbons because people are displaying them again: waiting for the remaining hostages in Gaza to be freed.
Israel’s government is doubtless guilty of war crimes, probably crimes against humanity. And October the 7th was a crime against humanity. I’m all for freeing Palestine, but free the hostages too, and if you can get rid of Hamas too while you’re doing it, so much the better.
Free Palestine from Hamas.