Specimen Days

One Magic Christmas is a 1985 American/Canadian Christmas fantasy film directed by Phillip Borsos. It was released by Walt Disney Pictures and stars Mary Steenburgen and Harry Dean Stanton. It was shot in Meaford, Ontario with some scenes in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. Harry Dean Stanton was one of my favourite actors who sadly died in September combine that with Mary Steenburgen and I had to watch this rather old Christmas film. Ginnie is not in the Christmas spirit at all and you can’t blame her, her husband has been out of work for six months, they are being evicted from their home after Christmas and she works as a checkout assistant in a supermarket where she has a miserable boss. Money is tight and she sees other people struggling without the wherewithal to make ends meet. Lurking in the background is an angel tasked with bringing her the spirit of Christmas. Enter, Harry Dean Stanton looking more like a serial killer than an angel. The children in the story are like so...

 The Magic of Cinema For as long as I can remember films have enthralled me. The first film I ever saw was Tom Thumb in 1958. A decade before that one of my all time favourite films was made and twenty five odd years before I saw Tom Thumb some of the most amazing films ever made at played to audiences. In 1946 a book was published in the USA that was a runaway best seller and a two years later the film version was on our screens. It was to be the third and last pairing of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in the charmingly gentle, “Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.” It’s seldom shown these days and hard to track down at a reasonable price on DVD. Remastered and released in 2004 it has been a treasure in my collection that never fails to reward me. Stifled by a small apartment in New York they buy a ruin in Connecticut and are gently fleeced by the country folk. Not a great plot but the house is finally built. By this time Myrna Loy was ceasing to be a draw at the box office, ...

If they locate Hell in a kettle in Hull and discover two plus two makes £50 then you will get some idea of the asinine concept of the film “Upside Down.” A long time ago in the Golden Age of Cartoons they invented a rule called the plausible impossibility. This allows a cartoon character to run through wire and then fall apart like sliced bread. That’s a plausible impossibility. You can’t just do anything and get away with it, it has at the very least to make some sense. Many decades ago I was at a film club and we were watching a Jean Luc Godard film. After a reel change everything was upside down in long traffic jam. For some fifteen minutes a character walked from car to car with no dialogue, such strange cinematic effects are perfectly possible in Godard film it was only when the subtitles came on everyone realised the film had been inserted upside down. There is no such excuse for this film. I watched it because it said Sci Fi, romance, star crossed lovers and starred Kirsten...

Sometimes I can be very stupid and stubborn, I get an idea into my head and won’t budge. I guess I take after my Grandfather who long before I was born insisted he didn’t like tomatoes till it was discovered he had never tasted one. After his first bite he fell in love with them. And so I have to confess for thirteen years I have refused to countenance watching The Polar Express. I didn’t like it. Quite how I can justify that opinion having not seen it is best left to others to explain. I sat down and despite frustratingly numerous interruptions I saw it all over four hours, more than twice as long than the actual film. At its heart is a simple moral tale of a young boy learning about himself on Christmas Eve when he is on the cusp of not believing in Santa Claus.  Tom Hanks plays numerous roles in this strangely filmed story, a mix of animation and live action filmed as animation. If that sounds weird watching it will make it clear. The train journey to the North Pole and...

There is something great about being able to watch a British Christmas film as they appear to be few and far between. If you throw in a bit of porridge and Jim Broadbent then you have an enjoyable film called Get Santa. The plot is delightfully playful with Santa (Jim Broadbent) crashing a new sleigh in London and ending up behind bars. This innocent old man has to survive. However help is at hand! Rafe Spall recently released from the same prison manages to get the barber, the excellent Stephen Graham to offer help to Santa while he is inside. The results are hilarious. Meanwhile Rafe Spall and Kit Connor (his on screen son) set about trying to get everything sorted out. I’ll tell you no more about the plot except to say it works well and is delight. When you have children it’s hard sometimes to know whether they ought to watch such a film if they still believe in Santa. This is a safe film totally watchable from that point of view yet hugely enjoyable for adults as well. Unl...

Three things I didn’t know this time last week. Nantucket is the name of an Island. Whale Oil was what once lit our homes. Moby Dick was based on a true story. I’ve never been interested Herman Melville’s story, Moby Dick, nearly 900 pages is long slog of a read when the story doesn’t interest you. In 2000 Nathaniel Philbrick published his non fiction book “In the Heart of the Sea” which tells the true story that inspired the novel, Moby Dick. This film is about the true story of the sinking of the whaling ship, Essex. It was rammed by a sperm whale and sank and what follows is a horrific story of the struggle for survival that ensues one thousand miles from land. The story touches on the horrors of surviving, of cannibalism and courage. For once the emaciation you see is real as the actors survived on between 300 and 600 calories a day in order to get their bodies to look like skeletons. The acting is superb. The visuals of the sea, the storms, the whale are breathtaking. It ...

Sky Soundbox the first two  hours. Packaging is very superior on par with Apple products. Opening the box the first thing that strikes me is the weight of the Soundbox, wow. There is nothing here that gives a wow feeling it is just a big heavy black box. Everything you need apart from the box is cleverly packed away and is sheer joy as it unfolds as you pull it up to reveal all the connecting cables. Set up was simplicity itself. Take the pink HDMI cable from the back of the Q box and slot it into the back of the Soundbox, next insert the supplied HDMI cable into the other HDMI slot and back to the Q box. Next connect optical cable from box to optical on TV. Then switch on! The remote controls the volume but you can set up your Q remote to control the volume. Go to Home button>Settings>Setup>Remotes then choosing the Bluetooth remote it brings up the option for setting up the sound system, choose Sky and all is done. The remote has a source button and this...

I don’t know how familiar you are with farms and farmers, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that they work quite hard and their vehicles used for every day work don’t look as though they came straight out of the showroom. You might also make the assumption that a Christmas film might show some consistency in terms of leaf cover, so you don’t expect to see bare trees moving in the wind and then trees full of leaves in late December. Oh yes the farm is in trouble they haven’t paid their bills and the bank wants it’s money back, fair enough you might say, but for the farmers to then run a charity, yes charity, event to raise the money to pay off their business failure stretches the bounds of credulity. I don’t know how you define a crowd, but I think it amounts to more than twenty people at the big concert that is supposed to save the day, since good things happen at Christmas. Newly added to the Christmas film roster on Sky Premiere this year is “Christmas in the Smokies”. I am no g...

What do you get when you put Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ian Lavender (a very nice man in real life),Toby Jones, Bill Nighy, Tom Courtney and Michael Gambon together into in a film? You get Dad’s Army. The TV series was great fun when first broadcast and the constant reruns to this day prove what a timeless masterpiece of comedy it was. As part of my life on both Radio and TV since the 1960s, I was both drawn to and repelled by this cinema reboot of favourite characters. Over the years many sitcoms were made into films with but limited success when removed from the tightness of the thirty minute slot. To be honest they were turkeys. This of course was even more daring with the well known stars replaced by fresh faces. I needn’t have been remotely worried it was excellent capturing the spirit, warmth and humour of all the characters I have loved for so many years. The story takes place in 1944 just before the Normandy landings and revolves around the search for a Spy after a messag...

Where to begin? I had the pleasure last weekend of introducing my youngest daughter to one of the great classic remakes of all time. In 1940 a superb romantic comedy was released starring the highest of Hollywood royalty at the time, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. It was called the Philadelphia Story. Some sixteen years later they decided to remake it as a musical. There must have been many people shaking their heads. Still they managed to cast Grace Kelly in her last film before leaving Hollywood to become, Princess Grace of Monaco. They roped in the two top popular performers of the time, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and songs and music by Cole Porter. Then, as the icing on the cake they brought in Louis Armstrong and his band, playing himself. They moved the story from Philadelphia to the legendary Newport Jazz Festival on Rhode Island. And thus was born a truly classic film that far eclipsed the original and produced some the most famous songs of last century....

The Golden Age of television is just getting started. Opinion piece from  Gary Davey, Managing Director, Content Sky.  Originally published in  The Daily Telegraph   on Tuesday 7 November 2017. The golden age of television is just getting started. There has never been a better time for it. But not according to the BBC. In a speech on Thursday, Tony Hall, the BBC director-general, said the entire UK production industry was facing a significant threat thanks to the arrival of competition from streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon. If anything, the exact opposite is true. What he sees as a threat, I see as an opportunity. Yes, their arrival has shaken up the British television industry, but it has given customers more choice, and handed British writers, producers and production staff even more opportunities, free to make shows for a global audience. The pond may be bigger, but Britain is a very big fish - and it is still growing. The BBC's predi...

Sky Cinema will be the home of Christmas this festive season with the biggest blockbusters of 2017 plus three dedicated channels:  Sky Cinema Christmas ,  Sky Cinema Classics  and  Sky Cinema Musicals. Nothing brings people together like a movie at Christmas and this year Sky Cinema is offering viewers the biggest and best film choices. Airing for the first time on UK TV will be the number one box office movie of 2017  Beauty and the Beast,  as well as some of the year’s blockbuster highlights including;  The Lego Batman Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2, Boss Baby, Kong: Skull Island, John Wick Chapter 2  and Oscar-nominated  Hidden Figures. With a new premiere every single day and over 1000 movies available On Demand, customers can enjoy the best films of the year, whilst also delighting in their favourite Christmas and all-time greats with  Sky Cinema Christmas  and  Sky Cinema Classics. Sky Cinema Christmas , avai...

Perhaps you aren’t old enough to remember Saturday morning film clubs for children, I guess you have to be well into your sixties before you can recall such a treat. If that’s the case you will also be unfamiliar with being able to enter a cinema at any time and sit through three or four films before you left, often waiting to see the beginning of the film you came into halfway through. Pictures as we called them then were made in two categories the main feature and the B feature. B features were cheaply made and churned out by a host of Film Studios in Britain. They were the first step for many a well known film stars of the future. Michael Caine is a prime example. That kind of cinema struggled with the advent of TV and by the mid seventies most had been torn down or turned into Bingo Halls. So what happened to these B films? Until a few years ago this question remained unanswered. I discovered by accident a family company called Renown Films who had been quietly acquiring the ent...

If we think the world today is a little crazy, it seems the very model of sanity when you read the FBI report on “It’s A Wonderful Life”. On May 26th, 1947, the FBI issued a memo stating "With regard to the picture, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a 'scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. A film further removed from Communism is hard to imagine. Like The Wizard of Oz it may have received award nominations, five in total, but it didn’t do so well at the Box Office. It wasn’t till it was picked up by TV in the 1960s that it became firmly established as one of the best films ever made. T...