I’ve moved…

…doon the road to wordpress.com.

You can find me at http://grantcollinson.wordpress.com

Enjoy.

Googletastic!

Imagine the scene. You need to find something, an intelligent companion of yours suggests you get on your computer and “Google it.”

“Yes, I know what you mean, use the popular search engine Google to find what I am looking for. Very clever.”

Sometime ago google became a verb, perhaps marking its complete dominance of the web.

A trade name becoming the word for what it is just one of many commercial products for is impressive, sure.

Unless you present Blue Peter you don’t sticky-back-plastic something, you sellotape it.

I have never met anyone who has vacuumed in their lives but we all, from time to time, hoover.

However, Google has gone one better. [Read more]

The Last Station or the wrong train

To open The Last Station director Martin Hoffman (best known for his 1999 A Midsummer Night’s Dream) makes claim to Tolstoy as the greatest author of all time, a claim he perhaps hoped would carry his film at its weaker moments.

Based on Jay Parini’s 1990 novel, The Last Station is the story of the twilight years of Tolstoy and his relationship with his wife. It is also the story of the development Tolstoyanism, a movement based on Tolstoy’s religious thinking, founded by Vladimir Chertkov, friend to Tolstoy.

These two narratives are drawn together by James McAvoy’s Valentin Bulgakov, practicing Tolstoyan and newly appointed private secretary to his hero, Christopher Plummer’s Tolstoy. [Read more]

Un Prophète

Jacques Audiard, whose The Beat that my Heart Skipped won the foreign language Bafta in 2006, has received a similar nod from the Oscars this year with this prison drama. A Prophet follows the progress of 19 year-old Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) as he is admitted into a French prison and becomes embroiled in mafia life through mob boss Cesar Luciano (Niels Arestrup).

At 155 minutes, the film at times seems over-long, not because what is on screen is not enthralling, but sometimes [Read more]

The 82nd Annual Expensive Piece of Crap Awards

If you you do something that costs a vast amount of money you should make sure everyone is agreed it was worth it.

That seems to be the thinking behind the 82nd Academy Award nominations for Avatar for anything other than special effects. After all if the industry spends that amount of money on making a film they’d better, not only acknowledge it, but try to convince everyone it wasn’t a huge waste of money.

I wonder if that is James Cameron’s business model – get Hollywood to chuck millions of dollars at him and they pretty much have to say whatever he makes is the best thing [Read more]

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