Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 315

Dark Visions

Several people have asked me about the picture on the wall behind me in the ‘Film Freak’ photograph. It comes from the excellent Wanrooj Gallery in the Netherlands and is by Pepyn Langedijk. His works are often darkly humorous, and feature wolves, sharks and other creature in strange, atmospheric locations.

The one I bought is his [...]

Freak Alert!

Oooh, ooh, there’s nothing as nice as getting the first copy of your new baby…’Film Freak’ is rolling off the presses right now, with its sexy spot-gloss cover and my head stamped over Alec Guinness’s body. It’s a sort-of memoir thatcontains Mild Nudity, Lying Producers, Drunk Actors, references to Michael Winner and Lots of Foolishness. [...]

The Devil In Detail

A reader gets in touch to tell me there’s a mistake in an early Bryant & May novel – Chessington Zoo was shut by the time one of the books came out. Readers are usually tolerant enough to wave a certain amount of nonsense through the logic checkpoint but there’s a natural slippage in books [...]

Is This The Worst Film Ever Made?

There’s a moment sometimes when you realise that the Hollywood film you’re watching is specifically aimedat troubled, violent children with learning difficulties.

Last night I had to attend the premiere of ‘GI Joe: Retaliation’. The cinema had the desperate air of having been papered up, with an unusually large number of ad agency runners and girls [...]

This Is Where I Came In 2

Rio Ferdinand and Gilbert O’Sullivan may not seem to have much in common – jobs, decades, singing ability – but dressing like your grandad is the ubiquitous Hoxton look.

Walking into the Electricity Showroom in Hoxton it’s sometimes hard to tell if you might be in an achingly hip joint or just surrounded by people who [...]

Re:View – ‘Side Effects’

NO SPOILERS

If Steven Soderbergh follows through on his threat to give up directing, Hollywood will have lost its best player, certainly on the evidence of this, his supposedly last film.

It starts as an ominous long-take character study of a tormented woman. Rooney Mara’s husband spent four years in prison for insider trading and seems likely [...]

This Is Where I Came In…

I said this to my press agent Lynsey recently and she asked me what I meant. I explained that it referred to double-billed movies. A lot of people have expressed surprise that that films were ever shown in double bills. Indeed they were, right across the nation, remember, older peeps?

As we’re prepping the launch of [...]

Dead Rise On London Streets

Wait, the streets of London are meant to be paved with gold, aren’t they? Instead it seems they’re full of plague victims. A swidely reported this morning, more than a dozen skeletons thought to be victims of the Black Death have been unearthed in the City of London, although how they can tell that straight [...]

London’s Other Clubland

The RAC, the Liberal Club, the Pall Mall Club, the Garrick – these old-world London clubs occupy grand terraces and have illustrious roll-calls, even if they are now filled with shrieking toffs and hedge fund managers. But Soho always had a separate clubland of its own.

The Colony Room Club – was it a Bohemian paradise [...]

Towards More Colourful Language

My father would use the expression ‘a right old barney’ to describe an argument conducted in the public – usually a pub. A ‘barney’ stems not from rhyming slang (Barney Rubble=Trouble) but from 19th century terminology suggesting that the Irish liked a fight, hence also to ‘get in a paddy’, Barney being another common Irish [...]