The Guardian does it again

I generally like The Guardian. It’s my paper of choice. But for some reason, a good proportion of its film coverage is written by people who don’t know or care anything about films. The assumption would seem to be that the readers don’t know or care about films either, but if that were true, why would they be reading?

Check this out, if you feel like getting cross. Feel free to weigh in with comments. My own favourite moment is right at the start:  “There are lots of reasons to love Hitchcock, of course: the style, the guile, the pace, the pitch – I realised that afresh when watching a box set of all his films, in preparation for a talk at the Southbank Centre on Sunday.” Of course, there is no box set of Hitchcock’s 52 surviving feature films, because that would be a very large box set indeed. So the author apparently doesn’t know how many films the director actually made… which is not particularly hard information to uncover, in this day of space tubes and computerized brain cups.

The fact that the author, Bidisha, (yes) is going to be taking part in a discussion about Hitchcock on the stage at the Southbank Centre is just terrifying.

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The Unexpected #4

I slot in a VHS tape of TOMBSTONE CANYON, a B-western starring Ken Maynard and Tarzan (Tarzan is his horse), and this is what I see, first image up? It was certainly unexpected from my point of view, and I felt I should share it.

Ah, right, yes, that’s much better. Puts the whole thing in context. Yes, I’m definitely no longer trying to claw my way backwards through the couch. I am wondering, however, why the World Wide Lady’s torso seems to extend straight down from her shoulders, maintaining a constant width, like a, well, tombstone with a head on top. And two large, er, globes.

Even though TOMBSTONE CANYON is, technically, a pre-coder (from 1932), nothing else about it suggests an era of license, or licentiousness. It’s a cute little B-western where everybody drawls slow and draws fast, but not as slow/fast as Ken Maynard. Of sex there is scarce a whisper. The logo stands alone in the desert, a big-boobed Ozymandias.