A frankly awful horror flick. The words “based on a Stephen King short story” should have been a clue. It’s about a hack writer haunted by the death of his daughter who writes those ‘10 most haunted houses’ type books, who is lured to a New York hotel room which seems to kill its guests. As the LLF said, “Samuel L Jackson has been in some shit films, but John Cusack, what were you thinking?”
Entertainingly dark and dense take on Len Deighton’s grammar school secret agent ‘Harry Palmer’ and his attempts to staunch a brain drain. Not the anti-Bond it’s sometimes proclaimed to be, but more satisfying for its banality and austere locations. Michael Caine’s performance is good. Sidney J Furie’s direction is good also.
More Harry Palmer silliness, but this time focused around Cod War Germany and defection mania. Oscar Homolka is fun as an affable KGB bigwig. Guy Hamilton directs effectively but without any showiness.
Ken Russell takes the reins of the Harry Palmer franchise for a witty, silly adventure taking in nutty Texan anti-communist crusaders, Vietnam war satire and the dominance of Kennedy era technocrats. In silly fur hats and snowy Finnish locales. “Boom boom!”
It’s Del Boy’s signed immunity from Scotland Yard, from the episode of Only Fools And Horses when Slater the Slag was trying to get him to turn grass after fitting up Rodders. Too faint to read, though
The German term Schießbefehl (“firing order”) was the common term to refer to Befehl 101 (Order 101), a standing order that instructed border patrols of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) to “prevent border penetration by all means and kill the violators”…
The GDR border troops (Grenztruppen der DDR), who were not formally integrated in the regular armed forces (the Nationale Volksarmee), were instructed to follow a certain procedure when encountering persons moving illegally within the border strip:
First, to call out “Halt, stehenbleiben, oder ich schieße!” (“Stop, stand still or I will shoot”).
Next, to fire a warning shot; typically the border police carried Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles.
Finally, if the fugitive failed to comply, an aimed shot, preferably aimed at the legs, was to be fired to stop the person.
A reminder to myself to complain to Bristol City Council AGAIN – this time because I’m annoyed at BCC vehicles – like the van with the registration WR06 TXV – habitually parking either on the pavement or on double yellow lines.
The BCC van with the registration WR06 TXV managed to pull off the impressive feat of parking half on the pavement and half on double yellow lines when I thumbed this note – outside Wilder House on Wilder Street, home of BCC’s Parking Services Team.
Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk and Balliol College, Oxford but abandoned his university career at the outbreak of the First World War to join the Royal Flying Corps. At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny, one of many minor insurrections which went unnoticed in the period. He returned to Oxford, and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow, after which he returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International: a Communist Party. As the party formed, Wintringham graduated from Oxford and moved to London, ostensibly to study for the bar at the Temple, but in fact to work full time in politics.
In 1923 Wintringham joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1925 he was one of twelve CPGB officials imprisoned for seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. In 1930, he founded a newspaper, Daily Worker, and was one of the few named writers to publish articles in it. In writing for the Communist party’s theoretic journal Labour Monthly, he established himself as the party’s military expert. In LM articles and in booklets on the subject, Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for ARP precautions several years before Guernica. His arguments were the basis for the most successful of the Communist Party’s wartime campaigns, that for ARP provision, and shaped government policy on the issue in the years leading up to the war. Although at the centre of the CPGB organisation, he was often at odds with Party policy, believing in a communism of alliance and co-operation, rather than the dominant comintern ideology of class against class. Wintringham’s ideas became party dogma when the Comintern announced the ‘Popular Front’, a form of communism Wintringham was prepared to fight for.
In 1934, he became the founder, editor and major contributor of Left Review, the first British literary journal with a stated Marxist intent. Although published by Wintringham and funded by the CPGB, it embraced writers of all shades of socialism, regardless of their party affiliations. The journal established a pattern for what was to become cultural studies.
During the Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Spain as a journalist, but he joined and eventually commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades. Some socialist commentators have credited him with the whole idea of “international” brigades. He also had an affair with a US journalist, Kitty Bowler, whom he later married. In February 1937 he was wounded in the Battle of Jarama. While injured in Spain he became friends with Ernest Hemingway who based one of his characters upon him. He spent some months as a machine gun instructor. When he returned to the battalion the next summer he contracted typhoid, was again wounded at Quinto in August 1937 and was repatriated in October. His later book English Captain is based on these experiences.
In 1938 the Communist Party condemned his wife as a Trotskyist spy but he refused to leave her – he quit the party instead. He came to mistrust the party’s subservience to Stalin’s Russia and Comintern.
Back in England, Tom Hopkinson recruited him to work for the newspaper Picture Post.
At the outbreak of World War II, Wintringham applied for an army officer’s commission but was rejected. When the Communist Party promulgated its policy of staying out of the war due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he strongly condemned their policies. Because of the appeasement policies of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, he also regarded the Tories as Nazi sympathizers and wrote that they should be removed from office. He wrote for Picture Post, the Daily Mirror, and wrote columns for Tribune and the New Statesman.
In May 1940, after the escape from Dunkirk, Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers, the forerunner of the Home Guard. On July 10, he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park, London.
Wintringham’s training methods were mainly based on his experience in Spain. He even had trainers who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti-tank warfare and demolitions. He also taught street fighting and guerrilla warfare. He wrote many articles in Picture Post and the Daily Mirror propagating his views about the Home Guard with the motto “a people’s war for a people’s peace”.
The British Army still did not dare trust Wintringham because of his communist past. After September 1940 the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley and Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined. Wintringham resigned in April 1941. Ironically, despite his activities in support of the Home Guard, Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation himself because of a policy barring membership to Communists and Fascists.
Tip o’ the titfer: Paul Stott (“At Ian Bone’s Christmas piss-up yesterday, I was disbelieved when I stated that one episode of Dad’s Army contains a Spanish Civil War character, brought in to teach the men guerilla warfare. Captain Mainwaring is particularly wary of our Spanish comrade, fearing he may be an Anarchist… More seriously, the political nature of the Home Guard, and in particular one of its key figures, Tom Wintringham, is often forgotten. A reappraisal of Wintringham by modern Socialists is long overdue. If you get any book tokens this Christmas, can I suggest you spend them on Hugh Purcell’s study of Wintringham The Last English Revolutionary?”)
Boring, slow adaptation of the Martin Cruz Smith potboiler, with William Hurt as Moscow cop Arkady Renko. A shame, seeing as it’s written by Dennis Potter and directed by Michael Apted (usually bankers), with Lee Marvin, Michael Elphick and others adding oomph to the screen.
Awesome, comic book-style shenanigans with Sam Raimi directing from a Coen Bros script. The LLF thought it was boring, but I found it as entertaining as I remembered it being on first seeing it nearly 20 years ago. Bruce Campbell, Bryon James and Paul L Smith are all superb.
More Sam Raimi, more comic book-style photography and framing, this time laid over Western tropes, with Sharon Stone a woman-with-no-name entering a shoot-out contest in a frontier town.
Excellent late 60s treatment of the Truman Capote proto-new journalism book, as recommended by the LLF. Two bottom-feeding hoodlums commit incompetent, heinous crime, and are caught. Robert Blake (the short chap from Electra Glide In Blue) is good. Writer-director Richard Brooks approaches the material with imagination and creativity.
Ten years before joining the cast of MI5 recruiting ad Spooks, RP-J turned up in HBO’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s Nazi specfic Fatherland, featuring opposite Rutger Hauer as young SS cadet Jost. Such a pout! Such blush cheeks!
Sticking with Dead Set, here’s the aforementioned Patrick squeezing out a vol-au-vent-laden turd into a litter bin whilst barricaded in some production unit office with a zombie Davina MacCall scratching at the door, much to the horror of squealing BB evictee Pippa (Kathleen McDermott).
Weirdo Big Brother housemate Joplin (Kevin Eldon) tries to have a wee whilst obnoxious TV producer Patrick (Andy Nyman) is chained up next to him in Charlie Brooker’s zombie holocaust dramedy Dead Set.
Two Saturdays ago, Greek cop Epaminondas Korkoneas – assisted by colleague Vassilis Saraliotis – shot and killed fifteen year old Alexis Grigoropoulos.
The insurrection in Greece continues.
(Image taken from slackbastard’s account of a Melbourne demonstration in protest at the murder of Alexis which took place a week after his death.)
“A photographer documenting the persecution of Irish travellers in the UK was herself subjected to police intimidation…on UN Human Rights Day.
“The NUJ has condemned the abuse of the police’s stop and search powers after they forcibly took photographer Jess Hurd’s camera from her and detained her for 45 minutes under S44 of the Terrorism Act whilst she was covering a traveller wedding in London Docklands, part of a long term documentary project on the persecution of travellers.
“Whilst clearly photographing a wedding, the pictures of which appeared in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper, Jess was detained under s44 on the grounds she could be carrying out hostile reconnaissance for a terrorist assault.”
NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “This is yet another absurd misuse of the s44 powers which are designed to allow the police to detain those actively involved in carrying out a terrorist activity not to stop press photographers carrying out their legitimate business.
“Despite the government’s warm words about the right to photograph in public and new Home Office guidelines it appears the routine abuse of these powers goes on.
“How ironic that those documenting persecution and intimidation on UN Human Rights Day should be subject to such abuse and intimidation”.
For the full story see photojournalist Marc Vallée’s blog (from whence the mp3 was taken).
Anthony Hopkins turns the ham up to eleven. At least Ridley Scott has a sense of humour about it all. Julianne Moore is a refreshing change from La Foster. Gary Oldman and Ray Liotta are enjoyablly camp, and there’s that fellow who was the obnoxious state governor in Oz too.
Impressively bad Hannibal Lecter prequel, with a previously hidden element of Bushido and all that. The wartime Lituanian stuff is mildly diverting, and there’s a sort of a 51st State reunion.
Breezy but inconsequential lightweight stuff about a caribbean island police chief (Denzel Washington) investigating a murder in which his best friend is prime suspect. Plays up the Lilt advert stereotypes.
Overdone American skinhead melodrama. Edwards Norton and Furlong are watchable, but it’s much less good than I’d been led to believe. That fat scientologist friend of Jason Lee is an extraordinarily unlikeable rocks-for-brains nazi.
Brian De Palma melds Blow Up to The Conversation by way of The Parallax View, JFK conspiracies and Chappaquiddick tittle tattle. Nancy Allen is hugely enjoyable. Travolta is wooden. John Lithgow is a very scary bad guy.
My former publisher, Mainstream, have finally pulled out of publishing The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, intimidated by libel threats made by notorious mercenary commander Tim Spicer.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/Schillings.pdf
I have therefore decided to release the full text free on the internet on 12 January 2009. I do hope more people will learn about the truth about Spicer that way, than they would if Schillings had not intervened. I am very much hoping that I will be able to make some copies of an actual book available at the same time. But you should of course be aware that if you read it you will cause Tim Spicer “profound anxiety and distress”, according to Schillings. Possibly less, however, than that caused to the families of those killed by his mercenaries over the years.
Meantime, here is the epilogue to the book. You don’t get the full force of it unless you have read the history of British involvement in Sierra Leone in the book, but you still might find it interesting.
You’re chance to shout “I’m Spartacus!” Volunteers are wanted to post a PDF of “The Catholic Orangemen of Togo” on 12 January. UK volunteers are very welcome, but as many jurisdictions as possible are helpful.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/Schillings.pdf
The downside is that you may have your collar felt by Schillings, and be disliked by some rather unfriendly mercenaries. OK, that’s a big downside. The upside is that you’ll get to read the book before everybody else.
The guy who shot the boy isn’t someone I know, but his nickname “Rambo” explains it all. I don’t want to know a person like this, but policeman around the world probably all know a co-worker who is (what do you call it?) irresponsible and trigger happy. All professions everywhere have bad people.
It is a tragedy, and I understand why people are mad. All the MAT are paying for him, whether he is guilty or not.
…I didn’t feel good before, but these days I feel worse. On one hand, I can understand that people are mad and want justice, but I don’t think violence is the answer. It just makes things worse.
…Regardless of what I think, I am hated and used for target practice all day long. That’s my job, to be a target. Isn’t that great?
…The government needs to stop talking and start doing something, not just with riots but with everything and fix this country. That’s the real reason for the rioting. The country is broken.
Today (Friday), the assembly of the occupied Athens Polytechnic decided to make a callout for European and global-wide actions of resistance in the memory of all assassinated youth, migrants and all those who were struggling against the lackeys of the state. Carlo Juliani; the French suburb youths; Alexandros Grigoropoulos and the countless others, all around the world. Our lives do not belong to the states and their assassins! The memory of the assassinated brothers and sisters, friends and comrades stays alive through our struggles! We do not forget our brothers and sisters, we do not forgive their murderers. Please translate and spread around this message for a common day of coordinated actions of resistance in as many places around the world as possible.
In May 1940, after the escape from Dunkirk, Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers, the forerunner of the Home Guard. On July 10, he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park, London.
