Silly boys but we could do with more Frankie, frankly

Pumpkin time and still talking

Shanghai flight takes off again for Susi

David Thomson on George Clooney

"Good Night, and Good Luck seemed daring - low-budget, black and white, all about paranoia - but in hindsight it is full of craft and empty of risk." writes David Thomson

Forgive me David but all one can say is, what a profoundly stupid comment that is. Sadly, it's only the most inaccurate in a thoroughly churlish and deeply perverse article. It's the critical theory version of the Romans speech in Life Of Brian ... ok, APART from Confessions, Syriana, Three kings, Good Luck & Good Night, O Brother Where Art Thou, Michael Clayton and a version of Solaris, what has George Clooney EVER DONE for cinema?

My response to David Thomson's piece about George Clooney in The Guardian

Be Kind Rewind

Expected to hate it. Wrong. Loved it to bits. Who'd have thought it ... Jack Black and Mos Def - the Judy Garland / Mickey Rooney 'let's do it here' pair of our age!

Marianne Moore had a point

I am not Pablo Neruda,
which may be a statement of the obvious
but it helps me to explain why
I am less than poetic
about a lemon
or the streets of Castille, which
I have
neither walked upon nor seen.

I’m not Billy Collins either
so I’ve never really given thought
to the many reasons
it’s best not to have a gun
or considered the blindness of mice,
although (to be completely honest)
I have
beaten to death one or two poems in my time.

And yet ... here again,
with even more of my words
arranged in lines of varying lengths,
with the stress on some syllables
rather than others
and with an almost total disregard of rhyme
I have,
it seems, not abandoned hope entirely.

The secret of the grain

Too long, needs an editor (cut an hour), misanthropic, faux cinema verité of the worst kind. decent acting overwhelmed by absence of direction, pretension, clichéd revisionism. It was no way to spend a Tuesday evening. Four members of the sparse audience gave up and left. A wise choice.