A Pub Shoe, Innit?

Tonight's Culture Show on BBC2 featured Mark Kermode playing pool with Danny Boyle, and a trailer for next week when he's going to play darts with Shane Meadows. I hope Michael Winner's getting better, they'll needing him at the fruit machine the week after, I expect.

Why are so many British filmmakers so bad? As fars as true greats go, wll, we've got Edgar Wright and Lynn Ramsey and... Garth Jennings... (of course, how could I forget Garth Jennings... doh!)...

Er... Um... there's always Richard Curtis. How many of you are going to agree with that? I love Curtis, but I know he's not a popular choice amongst bloggers and blog readers.

Some of the greatest directors of all time came from the UK: Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Mackendrick and Alan Clarke (The Three Als) are amongst the very best from anyplace, at any time. And now?

I suppose there's Terry Gilliam. He's forfeit his US citizenship, so I think we can claim him now.

Maybe the fact that there's almost no film industry in the UK is part of the problem; maybe the fact that the prevailing British film culture is one of imitation is another.

All Aboard The Grindhouse Bandwagon

As previously mentioned in these pages, the world has gone grindhouse crazy…and it seems that the lowly exploitation flick isn’t the only area of low-culture ripe for reappraisal. As the Guardian’s resident nostalgiaist John Patterson points out in today’s Film and Music section the ICA are finally screening the documentary Midnight Movies, which seems to have been languishing in distribution limbo for quite a while now. For those who have missed this fascinating - if somewhat slight - documentary, it traces the history of the midnight boom in cult movies throughout the 1970s, exploring how underground movies went overground and what effects this had for the average film punter. Well worth checking out, if only for the occasional glimpse of Jodorowsky, Waters et al in the (ahem) prime of their youth.

Patterson will also be getting all rose-tinted about Grind House itself in tomorrow’s Guide supplement. Whatever next? Maureen Lipman on video nasties? Richard Littlejohn re-appraising Soho porn cinemas? A Michael Winner retrospective at the NFT? God forbid...