Good for fans of Steve Coogan or Rob Brydon. Not particularly edifying for those who have read Tristram Shandy.

Possibly of some interest to film students, or those interested in postmodernism or intertextuality.

Funny enough in parts to be worth watching.

I’m not sure that I find David Sedaris’s writing funny so much as poignant and incisive. There are moments when I did laugh out loud (such as when his brother sticks a note to his back saying “Hi! I’m gay”) but I was moved by the way he portrays himself as a flawed human being: looking at the Anne Frank house as a great buying opportunity for example. It’s a very dry, gentle comedy but it’s the subject matter and the commentary which is engrossing.

I encourage everyone on the planet to watch this film.

I had assumed, as Al Gore mentions, that there were differing opinions on global warming, but he shows quite effectively that this is a view created by the media and those with a political or financial interest in creating misinformation.

The facts presented here are quite awe-inspiring and genuinely frightening but there is also clear guidance on how the approaching climate crisis can be avoided.

Watch the film. Then visit www.climatecrisis.net

Quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It took me half an hour before I realised that Susan George was doing an American accent. There were parts where Peter Fonda almost acted. Adam Roarke who played Deke the mechanic was actually a good actor but he was portrayed as a bit square in what seemed to be a movie about hippies on the lam. The dialogue was so bad it went beyond bad into funny and then back into bad again. No wonder Dennis Hopper hates Peter Fonda, he must have watched this movie.

One of the most moving parts of this film for me was when the family are being held in a walled area waiting to be taken to the concentration camp and the two children who were left behind suddenly arrive and for a moment everyone is happy, even though this means they will all die together. It was strangely uplifting.

An excellent and creepy thriller. You’ll never go to the dentist again.

This is a very literate look at what it means to be “educated”. There are moments of subtle conflict between characters but the real question seems to be, should we study to enrich our minds or to pass exams?

You can hear Alan Bennett’s voice in each character to a certain extent which can be jarring falling from the mouth of an eighteen year old boy. What was surprising though, was how well he captured the mindset of a teenager and their concerns.

Beyond all this, it should be stated that this film is very funny indeed.

This book does very little to explain what NLP is or how it has developed. The difficulty in describing NLP seems tied to the fact that it is an unrelated bag of psuedo-psychological techniques presented without foundation or on anecdotal evidence.

This book is in fact a self-help manual lacking in rigourous ideas. Nevertheless, there are some valuable pieces of advice, although sorting these from the speculation and guesswork is a thankless task.

This is one of my favourite albums.

Grails are an instrumental band straddling the genres of folk, rock and metal but never extending themselves over 12-minute drone fests in that way that post-rock artists tend to.

The only band I can think of as a comparison is the Dirty Three, but Grails are a little darker and their songs are more eclectic.

This was a bit of a disappointment for me. I would say I’m a Johnny Cash fan but this film didn’t sit with my idea of him, in fact it didn’t say much at all. I didn’t get any real insight into him as a songwriter or as a person, and the story seemed told in a predictable biopic way. Joaquin Phoenix was good, but not really anything like Johnny Cash, Reese Witherspoon was excellent as June Carter but the script was abysmal and superficial and the direction was nothing special, almost made-for-TV style.

The music held my interest, what little there was of it, but didn’t capture the spirit of the originals. I kept thinking that if this had been what he sounded like, he wouldn’t have been famous at all.