- You Have Been Watching (TV Special) …The Field of Blood Last Sunday and Monday night saw a cracking period drama on BBC1. No change there then, but the period was the early 1980s in Glasgow. The Field of Blood may have done nothing to disuade people of the idea that Glasgow is No Mean City, but when the writing, direction and acting is of this […]
- You Have Been Watching…(TV Special)…Down Among The Big Boys Peter McDougall is a bit of a forgotten man these days, but, for a few years in the 1970s, he pretty much was modern Scottish drama. His TV plays Just Your Luck, The Elephant’s Graveyard, Just a Boy’s Game and especially the controversial Just Another Saturday, which included real footage of an Orange Walk and […]
- You Have Been Watching…The Driver’s Seat Here’s an oddity. An adaptation of Muriel Spark’s terrific and troubling novella The Driver’s Seat. It stars the late, great, Elizabeth Taylor as the enigmatic and troubled Lise, Iain Bannen as a man obsessed with macrobiotics and sex, Italian idol Guido Manneri and, in an unexpected cameo role as an unnamed English Lord, it’s only Andy Warhol! This […]
- You Have Been Watching (TV Special) Limmy’s Show & Burnistoun Scottish comedy is on a real high at the moment after years where barely a smile was raised, at least in terms of TV. The second series for Limmy’s Show!, Burnistoun and the still underrated Gary Tank Commander proved that their initial successes were not flukes and that things are on the up.
- You Have Been Watching… Soft Top, Hard Shoulder Soft Top Hard Shoulder was Peter Capaldi’s second screenplay after Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life which he also directed. Although it hasn’t quite got the magic of Bill Forsyth’s best work, which it is clearly inspired by, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder has bags of charm and is a lovely way to spend an hour and a half.
- You Have Been Watching… Orphans After professing that Scottish cinema needs more light to accompany the shade, it may seem that I’m labouring the point by looking at Peter Mullan’s début feature Orphans. At first viewing Orphans may seem like more grim and gritty Glaswegian fare, but to think that would be a mistake. This is the blackest of comedy, and where that often means simply […]
- You Have Been Watching… Red Road I’ve been having a few conversations recently about how Scotland’s current cultural reliance on grim and gritty urban (and increasingly rural) fiction has reached the point of overkill. That particular alcoholic and violent shark has been well and truly jumped. If Scotland’s cultural palette becomes brighter as well as broader then that is surely a positive thing, […]
- You Have Been Watching…Gregory’s Two Girls This is a real oddity. Bill Forsyth is my favourite Scottish film-maker, a man who can do little wrong, and that little is Gregory’s 2 Girls. It’s not terrible, no matter what you may have heard, but even I can’t claim that it’s very good. It’s all over the place, as if Forsyth started to make […]
- You Have Been Watching (Glasgow Film Festival Special)…You Instead Movies and music can make for uncomfortable bedfellows when that relationship moves beyond soundtrack duties. For every This is Spinal Tap, Hedwig and the Angry Inch or La Bamba (hugely underrated) there’s a Hearts of Fire, a Breaking Glass, a Rock Star and a Fear of a Black Hat. David Mackenzie’s You Instead, which premièred at the Glasgow […]
