Michael Brooke

My first draft got 1,250 words into a 1,500-word commission and he hadn't even left Czechoslovakia. I was *almost* tempted to end with "And then he went to the US and made some more films", in inverted homage to obituarists who similarly elided Forman's Czech period, but reluctantly cut it instead.

Taxidermia (LE) A taxidermist is determined to leave behind a great work of art when he dies in this disarming black comedy horror from writer-director György Pálfi.

And, with immaculate timing, the world premiere Blu-ray edition has just been announced.

You won't be at all surprised to hear that Norstein is not at all keen on the use of computers in animation on any level.

(“I don’t like computer images; they are too pure, too distilled, they lack the salt impurities and micro-organisms necessary for a person to develop resistance to diseases.”)

It's impossible to exaggerate how great this film is. I practically wore out my off-air VHS recording in the 1990s, a time when I'd never have dreamed of getting my hands on anything better quality.

In this particular case you genuinely don't need to have seen it: the mere description of it depicting the Obamas as monkeys is 100% accurate. So nobody should be allowed to get away with the "haven't seen it" excuse.

For 99% of politicians world-wide, this would be career-ending. And should be.

Ah yes, the time when Vance referred to Trump as the new Hitler.

And then decided a few years later that he was perfectly cool with that.

I started reading it thinking "Bet they're too snobbish to include Sharknado", and was very pleasantly surprised when I got to number eight.

It's a great post-Christmas British tradition; we don boxing gloves and fight our way into the sales. Followed, as I said, by copious spending, thus achieving full satisfaction.

Last time I bought a clock was after some copious spending in the Boxing Day sales.

Yes, it wasn't at all hard to see why it had been programmed! And since Bacon was still alive at the time, it may well have been his own personal selection.

I saw Le Sang des Bêtes without any advance warning as to its content as part of a series of free screenings at what was then the Tate Gallery in parallel with a Francis Bacon exhibition—it was the supporting short to either Battleship Potemkin or L'Âge d'Or.

It was, um... quite an experience.

"Withering sarcasm" and "playful banter" are one and the same thing as far as the British are concerned. As demonstrated by pretty much any random conversation between me and my wife (and indeed me and my daughter).

Surely it was withering sarcasm? I'd be amazed if pretty much any British person wrote something like that with a straight face. And the "withering sarcasm" theory ties in with the tone of the other emails as well.

To be fair, there are three proper crossings (the third being round the corner) within easy walking distance, and I can appreciate that they've been more conveniently sited in terms of balancing traffic and pedestrian needs. It's just that there's a quicker method for more daredevil types.

My regular walk to Tesco involves crossing a busy road. Do I (a) walk several hundred yards down the road and cross at the lights? (b) walk several hundred yards up the road and cross at the lights? (c) gleefully indulge in a thrilling traffic-dodging run straight across?

Take a wild guess.

How would they have known? And if they did know, given the story's obvious importance in the immediate wake of the 2008 crash, why did the news not emerge till now?

Starmer *was* warned that Mandelson was risky, but that particular subject didn't come up.

Starmer wasn't even an MP when the Mandelson-Epstein shenanigans were going on. And if Gordon Brown didn't know about them until just now, as he's just claimed, there's precious little chance that Starmer did.

The cover of the Vinegar Syndrope release of 'Piotr Szulkin's Apocalypse Tetralogy', featuring a helmeted individual whose face has been replaced by a spiral, and the entire artwork has been covered with 21 yellow silhouettes of rats.

See also the way that the perfectly adequate, long-extant "tetralogy" has been supplanted by the grotesque "quadrilogy". I had nothing to do with this box set being correctly titled, but I was thrilled when my contributor copy arrived.

This was one of the harder ones to record a commentary for because all the info I had going in was (a) that it was Norstein's first solo film as director, and (b) that he thought it was "complete rubbish", a comment made when he was trying to persuade his biographer Clare Kitson not to watch it.

Thanks for the warning!

I *can't* upgrade to Tahoe, or past Sequoia 15.1.1, because the subtitling software that I use daily won't work beyond that, and its sole developer died a couple of years ago. There'll be a time whereby I have no choice to upgrade, but I'm putting it off as long as I can.

It’s obvious why they’d still be angry about that—but then voting for the party with the most obviously inflationary policies (as they’ve duly turned out to be in practice) is perhaps not the most rational way of responding.

But that’s the problem with an essentially binary political system.

His eventual resignation was far from honourable, as he jumped rather than be pushed, in the form of a three-month suspension from Parliament for lying (which would almost certainly have triggered a by-election—aka special election—that he might well have lost), but at least the system worked.

In Britain, it's a longstanding convention that if you mislead the House of Commons, you issue a retraction ASAP, and if you knowingly lie, you resign. Boris Johnson tried to undermine that by repeatedly lying to the Commons and almost daring his colleagues to sanction him—but they ultimately did.

Ooh, that's *very* tempting!

Or that the Biden administration recovered from that inflation more rapidly and impressively than just about any other major western economy.

Had Trump done nothing and just let that recovery carry on, the US would be in a fair bit better shape than it currently is, and he'd have taken the credit.

And some local celebrities deliberately holiday in places where they're unknown, just to switch their anonymity back on. I was once on the Zlín Film Festival jury with a local TV star, and she told me that she did precisely that; she's head-turningly famous in the Czech Republic, but nowhere else.

Well, there are different kinds of fame, revolving around whether you can walk down the street unmolested. Bear Grylls might struggle, but Thomas Pynchon should manage it easily; the number of authenticated photos of him is still in single figures.

Because the people who are in a position to stop him are abject, grovelling cowards who have totally abdicated the responsibilities handed down to them by the original framers of the US Constitution.

We all know who they are, and by their individual names, and historians will not be kind to them.

What they're doing is claiming that "Trump was slagging off NATO as a whole; he didn't mean *our* brave boys".

Even though he blatantly did. If he'd meant to exclude British soldiers, he'd have said so.

I genuinely don't think it's heretical!