Christmas Links #11


Goodbye angels, hello Ozempic needles – what’s behind the boom in bizarre Christmas baubles?
"This year’s most-wanted ornaments include weight-loss syringes and favourite foodstuffs. When and why did Christmas trees become so commercialised?"

"The multiples and chain stores have been growing since the beginning of the century, and in the past 15 years they have grown very fast."
Editor's Note:  Another brilliant upload to the BBC Archive YouTube Channel, this looks at where Tesco and WH Smith were in 1970.  Smoky boardrooms filled with men shouting over women, brutalist concrete shopping centres, retail floors where hygiene is anathema and sales meetings in which the livelihoods of producers and authors are shot down on a whim.  Watch out for the very TV Creamy cameo at a store opening.

"Knowsley food aid organisations have been badly hit by the demise of the Knowsley Foodbank distributer. We are raising ££ to help the Stockbridge Village pantry give people a nicer Christmas."

"The double-bill premiere saw the military organisation UNIT forced to deal with the arrival of an ancient species..."

"Since breaking into their convent near Salzburg, Austria, Sisters Bernadette, Regina and Rita have been busy."

"Kylie is the biggest challenger for Christmas number one 2025. Her new song XMAS, was recorded for the 10th anniversary edition of her Kylie Christmas album."

"Mariah Carey has lodged a record-tying 19th week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” rides the holiday wave back to the top of the charts."

"Writer Billie Schwab Dunn doesn't live in the same country as her family, which can make the holiday season a tricky time of year."

"Spokesperson for the city says 9-metre Christmas tree should be back up mid-week."

"For many Swiss, the Christmas tree is part of the Christmas tradition. According to the Forest Owners Association, around 1.7 million Christmas trees are sold every year. The Nordmann fir is by far the most popular."


on Monday, December 08, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #10:
Doctor Who at Christmas.


Editor's Note:  Since it's Doctor Who night on the BBCs this evening, here is a collection of free festive tales from across the official websites and other places too.

The First Doctor


"As he strolled through the foggy streets of London’s East End he became aware of the footsteps following him and immediately wondered if it was them. He began walking faster. The footsteps – a soft pad pad pad pad – remained close behind. Now, straining to hear them, the old man caught something else. A low, velvety snarl."


The Sixth Doctor


"The Doctor, Peri and Joe land on the planet Naxios, where they discover the body of Father Christmas.  Who killed him? The strange individuals dressed in Shakespearian costume or the talking animals wearing waistcoats digging in the tunnels?"


The Eighth Doctor


"In the small alpine village of Verbier, there is a museum for things that shouldn’t exist."


The Ninth Doctor


"My name is Sally Sparrow."

“Doctor! What’s happening?”

"The engines roared, and time roared back, washing over the hull of the TARDIS in waves of icy blue and burning gold. Reality unfolded for the spinning wooden box, funnelling it through a storm of seconds, then folding back into place as neat as wrapping paper."


The Tenth Doctor


Editor's Note: This was published on the Sunday Times website and is behind a paywall.

"'I haven't been ice-skating since my seven hundred and twenty-first birthday,' muttered the Doctor to himself, as he raced to the other side of the console to pump the vortex loop."

"The boy's name was Tom Wake, and he was nine years old. And perhaps because the year was 1920, or perhaps because he was the sort of boy who liked to believe in things until there was a reason not to, he believed in Father Christmas."

"The first thing the Doctor heard when he woke was the sound of something tapping at a window."

"'What do you think?' Beth Summers turned round and burst out laughing as her grandma brandished a bright red feather boa around her shoulders. 'This used to belong to my mother,' continued Beth's gran as she jiggled her hips, causing her 12-year-old grand-daughter to laugh even more."

"It had been nearly four hours since Mason Valentin managed to convince his mother to let him stay home from school. Every moment since then seemed to tick away with the weight of eternity. He wasn't sick exactly. His fifteen year old heart though was very sick. Love sick, that is. Staring out the bay window, his thoughts wandered to Ana Comparetto, the American girl who'd only just transferred that year."


The Eleventh Doctor


"Something was wrong.  David Kershaw looked down the station platform and was left open-mouthed by what he saw.  Not just a little bit wrong, but a big fat what on earth is going on? wrong."

"‘Lost satellite reception…’ Geoff Bluth glared at the GPS device on the dashboard of his car. It was late, he had been driving for hours and all he wanted was to find his hotel, have a nice hot shower and collapse into bed. And now it was snowing.  Terrific. He pulled over to the side of the road and called the hotel. "

"‘Oi! You lot! Yes, you lot! Now pay attention, that’s it, and look up. Yes up! Right up! Into the sky. That’s it…."


The Twelfth Doctor


"Ceri was reading a magazine in the backstage lounge when the shadow appeared."

"I wake up. And I’m cold. It’s dark and I’m cold."


Spin-Offs


"Deep under the sea, Nessa, Freng and Strong are trying very hard to be nice. Because if they are naughty, then Santa won’t come and give them presents. And they do want presents very much. But what does Santa really want from them? And what does being nice *really* involve..?"

"Lucky you! You're on Mr Colchester's Christmas Card list. He brings tidings of comfort and joy and a terrible warning. Whatever you do, open this card first. Season's Greetings."

on Sunday, December 07, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #9


"Three Christmas editions were released: Christmas Story Teller 1 (1983), Christmas Story Teller 2 (1984) and Christmas Story Teller 3 (1985). Each had a “bumper 64 pages”, roughly the equivalent of two normal Story Teller issues. These three special editions had a fantastic mix of festive stories and popular carols."
Editor's note: Beautifully designed website which allows you to listen to the cassette audio whilst reading the book, as nature intended.

"In 1843, a festive tradition was born in Shere. Simon Furber visits the Surrey village to discover who was responsible for the humble Christmas card." 

"A Christmas tree has been lit in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Many people gathered for the lighting ceremony on Friday and reflected on peace."

"A Christmas drone show - previously blasted by angry visitors as "shockingly poor" - has been cancelled again."

"Who better to sort the mush from the lush than our in-house perfectionist Felicity Cloake and our resident baker Benjamina Ebuehi?"

"A mock trial for charity featuring celebrity actors, academics and lawyers will argue the case for the Bard’s sense of humour – or the lack of it."

Simon Guerrier: "First published in hardback and paperback on 21 October 1976, this novelisation opens with an attention-grabbing first paragraph:  “The tall white-haired man lay still as death. The girl leaning over him could find no pulse, no beat from either of his hearts. His skin was icy cold to the touch.”

"When a blank space under the Christmas tree is the ultimate flex."

"The autumn has delivered an exceptional display of colour, and the trees have been laden with generous gluts of fruit. We have been truly fortunate this season, with traditional store cupboards now struggling under the weight of chutney and jam made from the abundant harvest."

"Shelby Lack at North Devon Hospice explains why she does all her Christmas shopping in its charity shops."
on Saturday, December 06, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #8


"A school Christmas concert audience couldn't help falling in love with a boy who went on stage as Elvis Presley instead of Elvis the Elf."

"Christmas has come early for an Auckland man who's been reunited with his cat who went missing 14 years ago."

From The New Yorker: "Our critics rank their favorite movies of the year."
Editor's Note:  Here's a Letterboxd list.

"These events are meant to make Christmas magical, and while many do, a few fall spectacularly short. Here, in no particular order, are some of the worst offenders."

"Michelle Pfeiffer’s familiarly overworked, taken for granted mom stands out from the typical holiday fare."
Editor's Note:  I loved it.  It's a bunch of actors who usually spend their time in costumes and indie dramas or both having a marvellous time making a Hallmark movie with high production values.  Come for Felicity Jones's American accent, stay for Chloe Grace finally playing her truth.

"A festive exhibition at the Museum of Cambridge is taking a look back at Christmas 100 years ago.  Tom Jackson spoke to engagement officer Alex Horn about the most wanted gifts of the 1920's."

"The Mari Lwyd is a Welsh tradition in which a group of people carry a horse skull mounted on a pole — draped in a white sheet with the operator hidden underneath — to your door at Christmas and demand entry through song."

"Made of more than 160 traps, it's the second year of a new holiday tradition for Prince Rupert."

"The architect, whose work included the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, died after a brief illness."
on Friday, December 05, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #7


 
"It's a "huge job" that takes weeks of organising."

"An international visual guide to every motion picture film format, soundtrack and colour process ever invented."

"Every year for Christmas since my husband and I started dating we’ve done Christmas Day at his mom’s house. My family is very chill, whereas my husband’s mom is a little uptight so it was never worth the argument."


"If you were seeking an idiosyncratic choice of Christmas gift in 1986 (in Canada), you could find it."

"All the brutalist sci-fi, cockeyed cunnilingus, and sequel horror you need to have seen this year."

"For more than 30 years, residents on Auckland's Franklin Road have decked out their properties with Christmas decorations for the rest of the city to enjoy."

"From morning drinks to nolo suggestions for the non-drinkers, and from stocking fillers to showstoppers and after-dinner port."

"School children in Limerick are getting into the festive spirit and helping to protect the environment by swapping their Christmas jumpers."

"The bronze monument depicting the eponymous star of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi satire was installed Wednesday, nearly 15 years after a viral tweet."
on Thursday, December 04, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #6


"A giant plastic gorilla that was stolen from a restaurant entrance prompting a city-wide hunt has been found 50km away by vigilant police."

"From a cranberry katsu curry to a dozen thickly glazed doughnuts, the biggest chains are getting Christmassy. I found out which seasonal meals will leave you carolling and carousing – and which will leave you cold."

"An Italian mayor has apologised to the family of opera star Luciano Pavarotti after the town of Pesaro encased a statue honouring the late singer within a Christmas ice rink."

"The Post can also reveal the Serious Fraud Office is investigating Knowsley Foodbank."

"My tree is ornamented and my mantel is garlanded, but I have yet to realize my holiday-outfit vision. There are a couple of contenders, but I’m still searching for the right accessories to take each potential look to the next level. I don’t think it will require much — just a pair of tights and some festive shoes — but they have to be special. Here’s what I’m considering."

"To honour the winter break on the horizon, Letterboxd crew and contributors share twenty underseen holiday favourites: where Christmas and Hanukkah deep cuts and surprisingly festive noir and stop-motion delights all have a seat at the table."

"Because there’s nothing magical about burnout."
on Wednesday, December 03, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Manchester Trafford Centre

 

Film  For Now You See Me: Now You Don't.  Adequate film well screened.  Was originally a UCI and judging by the layout (six screens on one side, the rest on the other) has been expanded since.  The IMAX was added in 2013.   The Trafford Centre is a really horrible place to shop.  Frederic Jameson would have loved it (history link).

on Wednesday, December 03, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #5


"2025 BFI Fellow Laura Mulvey presents a programme of films that both influenced her filmmaking and reflect her thoughts on cinema."
Editor's Note:  For those of us outside London, I've made a Letterboxd list.

"…and a couple of Doctors too, as Doctor Who: Christmas - It’s a Wonderful War and Other Stories is released today, featuring four brand-new stories set across the Whoniverse. "

From Stephen Gallagher: "This year’s stocking-filler chapbook in aid of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) is The Adventure of the Seven Unnatural Women, a Sherlock Holmes story written at the invitation of J R Campbell and Charles Prepolec, editors of the Gaslight series of Holmes anthologies [...] Whatever it makes for MSF, I’ll match."
Editor's Note:  I've already bought my copy.

"The twinkling lights on a Christmas tree at Toba Aquarium in Mie Prefecture, central Japan, are getting their power from an unusual source... live electric eels."

"As Christmas nears, towns and cities across Aotearoa are hoisting their giant trees into place — symbols of the season that, for many, now come with a hefty price-tag."

"Have you ever wondered where to send your Czech Christmas wishes to? It’s not to Santa Claus at the North Pole, but instead to little Baby Jesus (or Ježíšek) whose “official” Christmas address is the post office in Boží Dar, the highest-located town in Czechia."

"Signs were posted along route for Santa Claus parade in Brantford, Ont." (related)

"A village has been robbed of some of its Christmas cheer after thieves stole a giant nutcracker model displayed outside a festive house."

"In a span of two years, Angel Trees have gone from spreading online joy to fomenting offline suspicion."

"Janet’s wishlist, which ran in Leeds Mercury, and letter from Hampshire girl in 1898 unearthed in newspaper archives."
on Tuesday, December 02, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #4

 
"It can be the greatest pitfall of the social year. And it can be followed by a 12-month hangover. If your boss hasn't spoken to you since, it's a fair bet that you had a good time at your office Christmas party. Traditionally, it's the one night of the year when the firm's hierarchical structure, that normally so rigidly holds sway, totters towards anarchy. [via LMG]"

"A new documentary explores the booze-soaked and vomit-slicked gathering’s radical roots."

"Some foods can interact negatively with certain medication while medical moisturisers can make clothes more flammable."

"Belgian authorities are mystified over a brazen theft over the weekend from a Christmas Nativity scene of an icon of infant Jesus Christ that had been widely scorned online."

"People who travelled to a Christmas drone show in West Sussex are demanding refunds after describing the event as "awful" and "shockingly poor."

"A fairy-tale image captivates millions: a festively lit Christmas market, framed by stalls, strings of lights, and a magnificent tree–right in front of the world-famous Buckingham Palace. The images quickly spread on social media. But anyone tempted to travel to London by this scene was bitterly disappointed. This Christmas market doesn’t exist."

"There are almost certainly worse holiday songs than Paul McCartney's 1979 "Wonderful Christmastime." But in a genre famous for cheesiness, it stands out as among the most polarizing. And it's notable for being written by the same Beatle who penned "Let It Be" on the band's final album."

"Eco-fir trees are a clear niche in Germany, one of the main suppliers of Christmas trees in Switzerland. Artificial trees are not necessarily sustainable either."

"Solstice and yuletide celebration food traditions have changed over time but some nuances have persisted. Ancient beliefs say we should eat plenty to bless the next year."

"Warsaw’s metro rolled out its annual Christmas-themed train on Monday, adding a splash of festive cheer to the city’s two-line underground network."

Editor's Note:  It came second which is still too fucking high (previously).
on Monday, December 01, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #3


"Luxury advent calendars mash up tradition and modern consumer culture. But with exorbitant prices come high expectations — and sometimes spectacular PR disasters, such as Chanel's infamous advent calendar."

"Notes and Queries: The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts."

"A Christmas display which covers an entire cul-de-sac and includes 100,000 bulbs has been put up by one of the residents."

"Vilnius, Klaipėda and several smaller Lithuanian towns lit their main Christmas trees on Saturday evening, marking the start of the holiday season."

"The writer-director talks about the art of dialogue, his love of marital fight scenes, and how his new film, “Jay Kelly,” helped him rekindle his affection for the medium."

"NPR's Scott Simon speaks with actor Denis Leary about his role in the new Christmas comedy "Oh. What. Fun.""

"A company in southern Poland specializes in creating unique Christmas decorations for clients like Swarovski and Harrods. GlitterLab’s process is entirely manual, making each piece unique and its owner hopes the ornaments will bring joy to customers all year round and not just during the festive period."

"Huron Ridge Greenhouses grows and sells 23 varieties of poinsettias."

Editors Note:  No pull text so here's a bonus TIFU which ends quite sweetly: "TIFU by buying everyone an AncestryDNA kit and ruining Christmas."

"Busses stop and children come running when Shiloh, the last dog on Christmas Island, takes a walk."
on Sunday, November 30, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #2


"Want to give and receive less stuff without being a scrooge? Experts offer their tips for enduring presents that sleigh."

"There is a strong sense of dissatisfaction about the town's festive offering this year."

"Families gather to craft Christmas ornaments bearing the faces of their missing loved ones."

"From shops stocking mince pies in September to festive songs entering the charts in November, festive ‘creep’ is on the rise."

"As supermarkets battle to rake in profits over the ‘golden quarter’, in-store staff face chaos and abuse. They say their bosses aren’t helping."

"A Grade I-listed manor house which has been closed for almost two years due to flood damage will reopen this weekend."

"Christie's expects the Winter egg, one of just seven of Peter Carl Fabergé's creations still in private hands, to sell for more than £20 million when it lands on the auction block Tuesday."

"Every so often, when struggling to analyse what I love about a TV show, I reach for the phrase “a complete comedy”. It’s a bit of a shitty, half-arsed idea. Let me at least try to explain what the hell I mean."

"Playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, a four-time Tony winner for his plays “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia” and an Oscar winner for his script to “Shakespeare in Love,” has died, according to The BBC. He was 88."
on Saturday, November 29, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Christmas Links #1

"From picking your guests (always add a random) and your outfit, to coping with drunks and nudity, this is what you need to know."

"Mental-health experts offer practical strategies to help make the season calmer and more manageable."

"An English city council’s decision not to host an official event to switch on Christmas lights has been misrepresented online as a decision to scrap the illuminations."

"Christmas lights will not be put up along the high street of a mid Wales town this year because of a cost dispute."


"The countdown to Christmas is on and it’s feeling pretty cold when that northerly wind blows. But will we get a White Christmas this year? Here’s what you need to know if you fancy a flutter on festive snow."

"Michael Bublé, Kelly Clarkson, Reba McEntire, Vanessa Williams and Johnny Mathis have all recorded versions of the Christmas classic."

"Ok. This comes up a lot and I kind of covered this topic in my Winter in Tokyo with kids blog post but it’s time I talk about christmas on it’s own.  Japan for Christmas can be special BUT you kind of need to put in the effort to make christmas feel christmassy in Japan."
on Friday, November 28, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Deadly Strangers.

Audio  Hello.  We'll get to the one(ish) line reviews in a moment but your writer has been trying to get to grips with what we're supposed to consider series or lines at Big Finish in recent years.  Here follows a rant about numbers.  The Eighth Doctor Adventures are now covering three distinct eras: the gap between Seasons One and Two of the original Monthly releases, the continuation of the story thread which began with the Lucie Miller adventures, continued through Dark Eyes and the Time War.  Except the spine labels on the boxes flow between the first and second eras and even then without really making much sense.  

Here's a rundown (which could be a list but I don't want to mess up the blog's formatting).  They begin with the stand-alone Liv and Helen stories apparently set in the final moments of Stranded (between the TARDIS leaving and returning), What Lies Inside? (1) and Connections (2).  But then there isn't a new sequence for the new strand of Audacity and Charley stories.  Audacity and In the Bleak Midwinter are given (3) & (4) presumably because they share the same release months as the previous boxes.  But then Echoes (more Liv and Helen) which came out the following May is (5) and finally Deadly Strangers and Causeway are (6) and (7).

All of which means if you want to keep the boxsets in continuity on your shelf, you're left with a number sequence which is all over the place and equally, if you stick to this number, the Doctor's portrait on the top shifts between TV Movie and Dark Eyes faces.  Us Doctor Who fans (and U.S. Doctor Who fans) are quite used to spines on media releases not matching (apart from the BD releases so far which still sport the Whittaker logo despite us enjoying a whole new era in between) but this feels like a very weird choice, especially since they're being created by fans for fans.

Unless both strands are going to dovetail at some point.  Despite the pictures on the box, I'm still not unconvinced that these stories aren't going to be revealed to be set after The Charlotte Pollard Adventures with Eighth and Charley reunited somehow.  As I've said before, she sounds more mature and there's a moment in one of these stories where they talk about Ramsay the Vortisaur as though he's a distant memory which doesn't make sense given the context in which he's mentioned in the second original series.  Something very strange is going on here.

Puccini and the Doctor

Which could just as easily have been called Unfinished Business since it's exactly that for both the Doctor and his writer for this adventure, Matthew Jacobs, who wrote the TV Movie with the Pertwee logo, oh so long ago.  It's a celebrity historical in which the Time Lord meets the composer again before he's written some of his greatest operas and comes face to face with a creature who wants to steal and destroy humanity's creativity.  Just astonishingly good.  Jacobs had apparently only heard Chimes at Midnight before taking the gig, but caught himself up and then wrote this which despite using a similar method, AI never could.

Women's Day Off

Whilst highlighting a moment in women's history I shamefully wasn't previously aware of in which all of Iceland's women went on strike for a day in October 1975, McMullin's script plays not unlike something from The Sarah Jane Adventures as a young girl finds herself infused with magical powers which she can't control and the TARDIS team can only see disparate elements of the mystery in their own parts of the story until everything neatly dovetails at the end.   Thoroughly entertaining, especially hearing the time ship's translation circuits giving Icelandics various UK regional accents rather than the actors affecting Nordic vowels.

 The Gloaming

Almost as Route One Who as it gets, The Gloaming features an indomitable group of human survivors in suspended animation being threatened by an alien intelligence which is trying to spread itself across the galaxy.  But in choosing the Mara, the writers have found the perfect monster for audio, especially the dream world which becomes two voices, one threatening, the other scared, voiced by the same actor demonstrating their range.  Because the victim can't awaken without outside help, they're simply trapped there, the evil presence using their own anxieties against them.  Chilling. 

Placement: Between In The Bleak Midwinter and Invaders from Mars.  For now.

on Wednesday, November 26, 2025 0 comments Labels: ,

Little Miss Can't Be Wrong.

Film  The Guardian has a piece today about Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite in which Mike McCahill says various things about the film, but like a lot of critics he doesn't seem to have found the virtues I found in how the story is structured and particularly the climax, which I won't spoil for those of you who haven't had a chance to watch it amongst the firehouse of stuff released every day.

The number of film writers who've missed the point of A House of Dynamite are worryingly large.  It's not a thriller, it's a character study.  The repetition is the point.  We're seeing the calamity through the lenses of much smaller and less knowledgeable groups as the decision on whether to retaliate ends up on the shoulders of someone who even less qualified than they are.  At a basic level, don't give human beings world-ending weaponry.  It's bad.

On each iteration we hear exposition and dialogue and then discover their significance as the narrative elements repeat.  In the first couple of rounds, the President sounds Trumpian and incompetent.  But when we finally meet him, he's an affable, smart person who is then handed the worst decision in the world at a moment's notice and has a series of near or total strangers advising him.

Which is utterly disturbing and in sharp relief to something like Fail Safe (both versions) and most of these kinds of films, in which almost all Presidents are portrayed as some kind of academic and diplomatic paragon in a fantasy world in which someone is elected based on how smart they are, which has *rarely* been the case.  Unlike those films, the heads of state wouldn't immediately be on the phone with one another.  The contact takes place way below the chain.

There's a terrific article in Slate by Fred Kaplan (ht, Allyn), a Pulitzer Prize nominated author of a book about just this subject which offers much greater depth on how realistic the film is and if anything it's even less terrifying than the situation we're in now when all of the key positions shown in the film are filled with people whose only qualification is they're willing to tell the President what he wants to hear all of the time.

But my overall point is that a lot of critics have missed that it isn't a traditional Clancyesque thriller.  They've gone in expecting The Sum of All Fears or By Dawn's Early Light (which shares a similar story) and been disappointed.  It's an "art house" film wearing the trappings of a mid-budget Summer blockbuster which asks the viewer to make a psychological leap beyond what they expect it to be into what it is.  

on Wednesday, October 29, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Harrogate


Film  For Regretting You.  Not much to report here, other than it's the first occasion that I've noticed an Odeon serving alcohol and so bought myself a non-alcoholic beer and had tremendous fun during the screening because I was one of the few people chuckling with the film which triggered further laughter from the teenagers in audience at me.  It's one of the few Odeons I've encountered which has its own Wikipedia page, presumably because it's a Grade II listed building and nearly identical to what was once the Sutton Coldfield branch.
on Tuesday, October 28, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Glasgow Quay


Film  For Good Dog.  Some way out from the centre of Glasgow, a bus or metro ride away, this unusually has a timeline on the wall which describes Odeon's presence in the city, Which began on Renfield Street in 1934.  It's a history of the enshittification of cinema architecture and (possibly) photography from the beautiful to the functional.









Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959) is a real film.  It was a critical and commercial failure (which is probably why you don't hear much about it now).  Film Ink rake over the ashes here.  I really miss proper billings on the front of cinemas telling you what you'll find playing inside.  These days you either have to have an app or squint at a tiny screen behind the refreshment stand as you can see there was some overlap of about ten years between the two cinemas before the Renfield Street shuttered in 2006.  It's quite strange from this distance to see the 80's Odeon logo atop the current building.

Either way it's a pretty standard Luxe affair which prioritises smaller audiences in more upscale comfort and having spent much of the day getting to Glasgow and visiting the cathedral, reader, I fell asleep.  Fortunately, Good Dog is not a complex film, mostly consisting of the titular canine looking slightly perturbed towards the corners of its owner's house so even though I missed a good fifteen minutes, I caught up pretty sharpish for the finale.  As I gathered my things, the man sitting behind me said, "Bag of shite" in a broad Scottish accent, which is presumably what the filmmakers had to collect a lot of during production.
on Thursday, October 16, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Coventry


Film  For The Strangers: Chapter Two.  As you know, I like to start with a picture of the cinema's frontage but Coventry's Odeon doesn't have a definitive entrance, so I decided to go with these two, neither of which is satisfactory.  Once again, we're gifted with a reminder that their slogan used to be "Fanatical About Film" because a sign would be logistically difficult and probably too expensive to replace.  For the record, I prefer this to the current tagline, "Make Movies Better," because, as is the case with The Strangers: Chapter Two, seeing it well projected with decent sound did not make up for its shortcomings.  There were about ten of us in the screening including a couple sat at the back talking loudly even after the film started.  Reader, I complained and the ushers did somehow convince them to be quiet.  The cinema began operating in 1999 along with the arena it is attached and judging by these photos of the opening night, doesn't look like it has changed much since.

on Thursday, October 02, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Worcester


Film  For Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.  This was one of the occasions when it felt like I was seeing the decline of cinema-going in real time. Downton was the week's big release, and despite this being Worcester, which would seem like the ideal audience, and despite it being an early evening showing, there were only two of us in the largest screen: myself and a woman sitting at the back. The hugely attentive staff puzzled over the slightly muted, probably mono sound coming from the speakers, eventually comping both of us a free ticket. The manager is clearly very proud of the seven-screen cinema and the fact that it's one of the few surviving city centre originals. Cinema Treasures says it originally opened in January 1950 with a screening of Anthony Asquith's The Rocking Horse Winner, with the director in attendance. Frankly, it's probably my favourite Odeon so far, not least because the toilet is through a door directly in the auditorium, which meant I could still listen to the film whilst taking a whizz.

on Thursday, September 18, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Crewe


Film  For The Bad Guys 2.  One of the few occasions when I've had to wait for the cinema to open before visiting (in the bar of the bowling alley next door).  Watched the film alone in a large drafty auditorium with some broken seats.  As you can see from this photo it originally opened as part of the Reel Cinema chain in 2005 and hasn't changed much since, right down to the yellow decor on the refreshment counter.  According to the usher, this was apparently covered in Odeon blue industrial fablon after the takeover in 2011, but immediately started peeling off so they just removed the whole lot and just left it, blinding audiences as they walk in.

on Thursday, September 04, 2025 0 comments Labels:

Odeon Birmingham New Street

Film  For Together.  In my memory, I stood across the street from Odeon Birmingham New Street and took a photograph, but neither my Bluesky feed or Google Photos have the image, so here's another cathedral instead.  The last time I visited this Odeon was back in 1996 for Alan Parker's Evita and although it's been through a refurb since, it's still much the same place that I remember, a proper city centre cinema.  Opened as a Paramount Theatre in 1937, it was sold to Odeon in 1942 and in the sixties, most of the art deco features were removed and became a eight screener in the late eighties and early nineties.  Cinema Treasures has more details.

on Tuesday, August 26, 2025 0 comments Labels:
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