Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 66

Popular Prose And The Public

I have always been fascinated with the physical acts of reading books. It’s something we don’t much discuss. Critics often seem to regard ‘readability’ as a bad thing, something to sneer at, but what is wrong with wanting to communicate clearly? Popular non-fiction can become academic and abstruse, littered with notes and references. But Jason […]

Which Witch?

Today’s story proves that I don’t make up my stories. Don’t you hate it when people thrust flyers at you outside the station? When I come out of the tube at King’s Cross I get energy drink samples, magazines, mad stuff about Jesus and requests for cash. When I come out of the underground station […]

Ad Absurdum

A postscript to yesterday’s review on the subject of ‘serious’ SF. (I had written that piece hastily in a Jamie Oliver airport cafe balancing my laptop beside a badly heated poached egg which I didn’t have time to send back again; no wonder he went broke.) ‘Ad Astra’ fell at the first hurdle here because […]

Ad Astra: Lost In Space

No Spoilers As one critic said; ‘Brad Pitt. In space. You got me.’ And so it would seem. The Venice Film Festival adored James Gray’s space epic, the first serious SF film out of the gate in a long while, although there were rumblings of discontent. Now, having seen it and heard Gray talking about […]

Collecting The Obsolete

I have a terrifying film collection, cobbled together over a quarter of a century of working in the film business, including hundreds of rarities and a lot of very obscure British movies, and now it’s all obsolete. Or is it? With the swapping of DVDs for Blu-rays a collectors’ market has been created. But most […]

A Response To Giles Coren

Last week the TV presenter and feature writer Giles Coren wrote a column in the Sunday Times complaining about the awful pretentiousness of authors who thank others in their acknowledgments. Now, Mr Coren is a highly personable, light-hearted writer who takes after his genial father Alan, whom I’d seen and heard many times as an […]

From The Mouths Of Londoners

‘In the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.’ – ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf ‘Garden-silks, ladies, Italian silks, […]

The Saturday Song

It’s been a week of such depressing news that I can’t even refer to the weather as glorious because it’s part of the global emergency. So let’s have a song from Pogo that will make you feel warm inside. (That’s Pogo’s logo.) Part of the fun with Pogo is guessing all the movie samples. This […]

Coming Soon: Your Shopping Hell

With the high streets in trouble and shopping malls not always proving to be as exciting as we’d hoped, corporations are punting around for ways of making it interesting to shop again. London’s vast King’s Cross Coal Drops project (ie. fancy mall) is in the press for the wrong reasons. This POPS (Privately Owned Public Space) […]

Favourite Soundtracks No 4.

What’s that? You don’t remember Favourite Soundtracks 1, 2 and 3? Just run a search and you’ll find this was a series I started in 2015 and then…just forgot about. Film scores have always interested me because they ameliorate narrative. Some composers overpower visuals (John Williams, Michael Nyman), others are too generic (sign of a […]