Posts

Is this the death of cinema?

2023’s Oscars ceremony was significant, as it may well have been the last time we see its kind. Because like the terrible idea to expand the football World Cup to 48 teams next time round, the rules are being changed by the Academy. See the press release here , which presents the most serious assault ever seen on the workings of the film industry.   Read it? Then I’ll continue. (Do please read it. It's horrifying. Yes, the Academy has been dodgy and corrupt for years, but this is a new frontier of awfulness.) It was of course a plan conceived in one of the worst years the civilised world has ever seen, 2020, when not only did the compassion fascists fulfil their dream of controlling people’s behaviour to the Nth degree (because of a disease akin to the seasonal flu), but the race obsessives/warriors/grifters fulfilled their dream of making people bend the knee to the great god of anti-racism (because of the death of a black recidivist), actions which did very little to halt the

Random thoughts 5

A selection of the comments I post on newspaper websites... (Most recent first) These ones are all lockdown-related. Upsides of lockdown: 1 POSSIBLY slowed the virus spread SLIGHTLY for a short time Downsides of lockdown: 1 Added to the mountain of national debt – each month we now spend more on servicing the debt than on defence 2 Caused immense psychological damage to millions – even now you see the odd person walking round outside in a mask 3 Had a terrible effect on other health conditions such as cancer – and in terms of YEARS lost of life, is vastly more than covid. In general public health suffered because people exercised less, drank more, worried more and felt lonelier 4 Damaged the socialisation and education of children – with effects possibly lasting a lifetime 5 The furlough scheme turbo-charged Brits’ belief in getting something for nothing, ie the government will pay you to do nothing – this will continue to have a devastating effect on productivity 6 Trust in public h

The sad decline of Sam Harris

It was the North By Northwest comment that set the alarm bells ringing. I’d listened to hundreds of hours of Sam Harris – and read a good deal of what he’d written – and I liked most of what he said, but a few years back he related on his podcast that he and his wife Annaka had walked out of a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest because they found it slow and boring. What?! I thought. Are you kidding me?! It's one of the Master’s greatest suspense thrillers, a brilliant film that harkened back to the likes of Hitch’s own The 39 Steps , while providing something of a template for the James Bond films. And for Harris to say that not only did he not like it, but he had walked out  of it, well, that’s a shocker!  So the warning signs were there. Fast forward to mid 2023 and myself, like many others, have given up on Sam Harris. He’s lost the plot. He’s discredited himself in a number of ways, including infamously telling Triggernometry that he wouldn’t care if

Paul is not dead

It’s crackers that in 2023 there are still people prepared to argue that Beatle Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and was replaced by a double, but this appears to be the view of journalist James Delingpole who, in the always entertaining podcast London Calling , frequently makes this point to Toby Young. James is, of course, wrong. Let’s look at some of the evidence that tells us that the James Paul McCartney who is about to tour Australia is the same person who was born in Walton, Liverpool, on 18 June 1942. In Peter Jackson’s Get Back , a documentary fashioned from early 1969 footage of The Beatles recording what would become their last-to-be-released album Let It Be , we drop in for hours on end on candid conversations between the band members. They frequently talk about their joint past, stuff only the four of them could know, and they jam songs that they used to play in their early days. This includes ‘One After 909’, that John and Paul wrote when they were teenagers, with the