Matthew 5:11

We Don't Go Back #43: The Serpent and the Rainbow (1989)

Two things about today's entry: I have been privileged to have spent the week in London, enjoying the kind hospitality of Jon and Gina, and it's been lovely, a time to catch up with some of the people I know in London, but sadly not all because there are only so many people you can see in three days. Anyway, the second thing is that one of the many highlights of this week has been the chance to accompany Jon to BFI South Bank to see a showing of Wes Craven's 1989 film The Serpent and the Rainbow, so if there's a scarcity of screenshots, that's because you can't put one of the National Film Theatres into your laptop.

On a Thousand Walls #7: Repo Man (1984)

(This post is also #1 in I Blame Society, a new, occasional series where I'll write about things I have liked since I was a kid.)

So I'm the sort of person who shows movies to friends. Inevitably I'll get round to showing them my favourite films. Because you do.

And when you love a thing, you become a bit blind, a bit deaf. When a new batch of international students moved into my house in September last, I showed a couple of them Excalibur, and at the end there was an exchange with one of the lads went like this:

Thanat: Yeah, that was good. So, uh, you've seen that film a lot of times?
Me: Um. Was I joining in with the dialogue?
Thanat: A bit.

And I don't know, there are some films I have just loved since I was a teenager and I've adored them so profoundly over the years that I am blind to their flaws.

We Don't Go Back #42: Casting the Runes (1979)

I wrote this post with MR James's help.

Reintroducing Room 207 Press

So the title of this blog has changed.

We Don't Go Back #41: Winter's Bone (2010)

I suppose what I need to say when I say some of the things I'm going to say about the USA in writing about Winter's Bone, is that it doesn't come from any place of imagined superiority. If there's anything we've learned in the last two years it's that the faultlines in British society are fully as deep and ragged as those on the other side of the Atlantic; they're just in different places, and when Liam Fox said the other week that we're the only Western nation who didn't have anything from our last hundred years of history we needed to sweep under the carpet, this was only because we've been so good at having already swept it under the carpet. Britons are profoundly ignorant about their own history.

But the faultlines are different.

We Don't Go Back #40: Midwinter of the Spirit (2015)

This isn't the first adaptation of a novel I've covered in this series, nor is it the first adaptation of a book I've not yet read, but I suppose Midwinter of the Spirit, the television serial, first broadcast in October 2015, is the first example I've looked at of an adaptation of a currently running genre series that has committed fans.