Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 325

Re:View – ‘Sightseers’

Ben Wheatley’s follow-up to ‘Kill List’ was always going to be tough. That film melded Mike Leigh’s approach to naturalistic acting with Hammer supernatural shenanigans to great effect, and it’s much better on a second viewing. This time he seems to have taken on another ghastly/funny Mike Leigh play, ‘Nuts In May’, and combined it [...]

January: The New Silly Season!

Yes, it’s that time when we all go a bit bonkers and put on stupid clothes – erm, except it’s not, it’s miserable out and the only laugh you’re likely to get is from going along to London Fashion Week for Men and seeing these ‘hot’ upcoming clothing styles. The first designers have this to [...]

Another London Walk

I’m researching the next Bryant & May novel, and decided to set it around a misunderstood and less visited part of Central London. It forms a rough square from Chancery Lane, along Holborn and up to Roseberry Avenue, and is the home of London’s gold and diamond merchants, so it’s Clerkenwell/Holborn/Hatton Garden.

For a long time [...]

The London Quiz

Okay, here’s one for the new year – where in Central London will you find this little chap?

The Critics VS The Public

‘Ah, critics, frightful people I know, but so necessary…’

So said a colleague when I raised the topic. But are critics really needed anymore, now that we can take an aggregate of opinions both biased and unbiased from online resources? Okay, I wouldn’t trust Tripadvisor with the purchase of a bag of nuts, let alone a [...]

Loving The Movies

In 1999 there were 550 cinemas in England. In 1944 there were 4,036, and they could seat a tenth of the population in one sitting. Manchester alone had 122 cinemas.

In the 1970s, in a widespread attack of what can only be described as criminal damage, a great many of these elegant art deco buildings were [...]

Moving The Audience

In a giant pop-up theatre in the Dutch countryside, there’s a new kind of entertainment experience. Nazi soldiers and beautiful women, singing and dancing in a huge glass-walled brothel. On the right two Dutch resistance fighters scramble over colossal sand dunes. Ahead is abeach with real sand and real water beneath a vast sunset.

The Nazis [...]

Re:View – ‘The Girl’

Poor Toby Jones. First he gets to star in the other version of Truman Capote’s story in ‘Infamous’, and now he gets the other Hitchcock biography. But where Sasha Gervasi’s ‘Hitchcock’ retold the making of ‘Psycho’ with elegance and élan, journeyman director Julian Jarrold’s ‘The Girl’ is a one-note hatchet job that works hard to [...]

Things I Don’t Want To Read About On January 1st

I counted down to midnight in Barcelona, where it’s traditional to give your partner red clothes and to scoff twelve grapes on the twelve chimes without choking to death in order to get good luck for the year. Now I’m heading back to flooded-out London, having missed the fireworks.

Never mind; 2012 was an interesting year; [...]

The Best Places To Set A Suspense Story

Before I embark on the next Bryant & May novel, I’m submitting the outline of a supernatural suspense thriller which would be the first in a proposed series. As a consequence, I’ve been researching un/usual places to set such a story and have drawn up a shortlist of a few favourites. In no particular order, [...]