Sweeping Strings

It was the end credits before I was able to properly identify Beverley D'Angelo. Safe to say she's had a LOT of 'work' done.

Is it a time-travel flick? It's 1975, and yet she's clearly about to take a selfie with her smartphone here. lol.

Violent Night - if you're looking for something to cut through the seasonal schmaltz a bit, this sweary and bloodily violent festive action-comedy might be right up your chimney. David Harbour stars as Santa, who (when he arrives at a fancy family home as a robbery is taking place) steps up, action-hero stylee. Also starring John Leguizamo and Beverly D'Angelo.

As someone born in Belfast in the early Seventies and who still lives there, it seems like an ... odd source of inspiration, to say the least. Still, a joke I made on FB in the comments on the article ('Darth Vader has strenuously denied he was ever in the Empire'), parodying an oft-repeated claim made by Gerry Adams has gone down well (153 likes/lol reactions so far).

Well, it certainly looks like fun. Which in the wake of the gloomiest outing for Bond to date is, frankly, extremely welcome.

Don't have Disney+ so am not watching, but read something today in which Gilroy said that the inspiration behind a funeral scene in one of the episodes was inspired by 'those epic, mad Provisional IRA funerals there used to be'. Erm ... OK then.

I'm reminded of the 'Top 25 Most Played' playlist on the iPod. My No.1 was U2's Vertigo, if memory serves.

Will hopefully catch up with that on BBC Sounds ... finding myself listening to a lot on there lately (a 1968 adap of The Day Of the Triffids, dramatisations of Dan Dare stories and Bulldog Drummond read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, amongst others).

He's great at 'lighter' playing, as amply evidenced by Logan Lucky and the Knives Out movies. Some more of it during Bond would've been welcome. Maybe it's not insignificant that the parts in those flicks have him tackling different accents.

And he ended up with a producer's role, and remains the only Bond actor to date to have seemingly had the ego to have his movies be a standalone arc and to have him die. Too much power, IMO. Personally, I hope the next one is just there to play the part.

On the one hand, it's from the notoriously unreliable Sun. But on the other, he does fit EON's statement that they're looking for someone in his thirties to play him as an already established agent.

Am I right in thinking that Netflix productions/co-productions don't tend to get physical releases (because presumably streaming platforms see them as counter-productive)?

It's having a week-only cinema run before being available on Netflix from Dec 23rd ... not sure what that'll do to its chances of being the mobile cinema's next offering? I also don't 'do' Netflix, hence the cinema trip.

Glass Onion : A Knives Out Mystery - Daniel Craig returns as 'Southern gentleman' private eye Benoit Blanc, this time pitching up on the private island of Musk-esque tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) along with his closest friends for a proposed murder-mystery weekend. Naturally, things turn out to be far from that straightforward. Rian Johnson has plenty of fun at the expense of social media influencers/'disruptors' (this is often a very funny film) whilst also delivering a properly knotty, twisty murder mystery. At the head of an excellent ensemble cast (including Kate Hudson, Janelle Monae, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hahn and Leslie Odom Jr) Craig is (again) clearly having way more fun as Blanc than he was allowed to have as Bond. I enjoyed this a lot.