Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 376

Those Top Ten Choices

It's fascinating to see your picks for the Top Ten all time best films – and I have to say there were some serious wild cards in there, including the frankly barking 'Dean Spanley' and 'SWALK' (AKA 'Melody') which I remember as a very sweet film with a score by the Bee Gees, reuniting Jack [...]

How Do You Pick A Top Ten?

I've been reading Sight & Sound since I was eleven years old, when it was still called the BFI Monthly. The academic film magazine has been enthusing/annoying cinemagoers with its mix of pretension and erudition for a very long time, and every ten years it conducts a poll of the world's critics, programmers, academics and [...]

Visit England – Bring Jumpers

Yes, it's nice again today but come on! Some of the shots in this commercial from the English Tourist Board's big push for the year – like being waved at by a gaggle of old dears – catch the true ghastliness of tromping around villages looking for something to do, but the choices are [...]

Another London Walk

Dazzling spring weather today, so it was off to bumble about Bishopsgate in the City of London before seeing my artist friend Polly. Here are a few of the things I found. Some may enlarge if you click on them, others won't as I used different formats. The pics are rubbish, of course, because I [...]

Harry Potter Gets Another New Home

Between Harry Potter's website and his studio tour, a rather more humble spot is being unveiled – the luggage trolley that sticks out of the brick wall on Platform nine and three quarters has been shifted around lately as King's Cross station has been rebuilt. The problem is that wherever they stick it an immense [...]

The Start Of The British Pub Revival?

How did London go from having famously bad food to topping world cuisine charts? After the war, Associated British Cafeterias (ABCs) sought to provide cheap meals for those on rations and drastic budgets, because the government was concerned about malnourishment.

This is the period we now look back at with horror; when half a grapefruit with [...]

Re:View – 'Can We Talk About This?'

DV8, the risk-taking dance group that grew into a political theatre movement, are 25 years old now, and are currently appearing in a sell-out show at the National. In the last few years they've moved from sexual politics into a darker world arena. Their latest piece, like the last, is entirely constructed from verbatim quotes, [...]

Shakey On Celluloid

As I'm thinking of embarking on a horrific revision of a Shakespearian play, I settled down to try and watch as many versions of Shakespeare on film as I could manage. Shakey on celluloid turned out to be a long and often exhausting voyage.

Translating Will for the big screen presents a peculiar set of problems; [...]

More London Books…

Jason Hawke's stunning photographs above London continue to sell, while 'Vanishing London: The places, the people, the stories' is a lovely looking volume of photographs and tales from the recent past.'STORIES' is a volume about the history of King's Cross from Boudicca to Blur, lavishly illustrated, as they say, and 'Panoramas of Lost London' is [...]

London Burning

London rapper Plan B made a big switch from his down 'n' dirty first album to a musically stunning but safer second offering that gained him a wider audience. But now he's returned to his roots with the astonishing first single from the upcoming 'Ill Manors', which is a blast against working class demonisation and [...]