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Screenwriter

Donald Clarke

Whingeing about cinema and real life since 2009

Moaning

Phoenix Magazine doesn’t get the joke.

All my writing life I have yearned to get into Pseuds’ Corner in Private Eye. Well, it looks as if I will have to make do with the domestic equivalent: The Hot Air Brigade in Phoenix Magazine. An entry in …

What’s the worst film of all time?

It’s not the silly season yet, so don’t take the question too seriously. Obviously, it’s always good fun to attach that title to something that people really love. If I want to annoy students, I generally suggest that the worst …

What’s wrong with 10 O’clock Live?

When Channel 4′s attempt at a satirical news show was launched, more than a few commentators urged caution before condemning it outright. After all, comedy takes a while to settle in. It is well known that the initial reviews of …

What’s wrong with young people (part 126)

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with young people. They won’t watch old films any more. I thought about this recently when I was compiling a list of (how quaint) Christmas TV movies for a radio broadcast. My notion was to …

Has cinema hit an all-time low?

The question is prompted by comments made by Billy Bob Thornton in a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph. The former Angelina-squeezer suggested that “In our current state of affairs, especially in the entertainment business, we’re living in a time when …

On the Guardian’s list and lists in general.

One of the selling points of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was the author’s investigation of the contemporaneous urban male’s obsession with best-of lists . Fifteen years after that book emerged, the observation seems so banal it is hardly worth articulating. …

I like sneering facetiously at well-meaning posters. Do you?

Okay, let’s get the preliminaries out of the way first. I delight in the changes that immigration has brought to Irish society.  Ireland of the 1980s looks ever more like a monocultural backwater when set beside the diverse country it …

A quick lament for the reference book.
  • Moaning
  • September 26, 2010, 22:01

The new edition of The Time Out Film Guide has just popped through my spacious letter box. If you’re interested, this is, by some margin, the best such guide available. Okay, it’s not as comprehensive as Leonard Maltin or as …