Ghost Hunting With Girls Aloud

By parts both hilarious and genuinely unnevering, it’s a televisional classic… pull the other one indeed.

Bleep

20 years of Warp Records

Short Radio One documentary on Bleep

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Grim brothers - Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is from that sub-genre of crime, the heist movie; in this case the robbery of a ‘mom and pop’ jewelry store. Ironically mom and pop are going to be robbed by their own sons. Harking back to noir traditions, it all goes terrible wrong and the film plays out the consequences of the failed robbery for each of the various parties involved, interspersed with flashbacks showing how the robbery came about from the different perspectives of each of the characters.

Andy, the oldest son, is played with dead weight solidity by the always brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman. He’s mired in the middle of middle-aged depression, with a failing marriage, a stultifying job and drug addiction. The only time he was recently happy was on a holiday in Rio and he desperately wants to get back there with is wife – the ever gorgeous Marisa Tomei -permanently. So he lures his brother Hank into a plan to rob their parent’s jewelry business. They’re insured, nobody gets hurt right? Hank, played with a jittery edgy by Ethan Hawke, doesn’t need much persuading. He’s several months in the hole with child payments to his ex-wife (plus the kid needs and extra hundred bucks to go an a class trip to see The Lion King). And he wants to get away with his lover too. Who just happens to be Andy’s wife…

The Steep Approach To Garbadale by Iain Banks

Snakes and ladders

For me, with writers, there’s Iain Banks and there’s all the rest. Other writers I’ve developed obsessions about – Tim Willocks, for instance – but with Banks the obsession is deep and total. So a new Banks coming out is a major event. Especially when there’s hasn’t been one for a while, with the author deciding to slow down from the one-book a year (alternating between sf and lit fict.) of his earlier career, and the latest being delayed by events in Banks’ life (getting divorced if you didn’t know already).

Whilst in his ‘M’ guise, Banks sf output has remained high in turns of quality, there’s a general consensus that there’s been somewhat a dip with regards to his ‘M-less’ output: Whit being somewhat uninspiring, The Business and especially Dead Air being distinctly underwritten (or as a friend of mine said, more succinctly, ‘shit’). Only the literary but bleak A Song Of Stone, based on a long poem Banks wrote years ago, stands-out in the non-sf novels since the glory days of his early years finished with Complicity – although even then he still turned out the odd clunker like Canal Dreams. So is A Steep Approach To Garbadale a return to form? Well, judging by most of the reviews, no; although I think differently…

The aXXo Files

“If you already know his name, chances are you’ve been doing something illegal.” The Independent on aXXo, the movie pirate king.