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Devil Dolls and Demon Downloads

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In 2019, legendary film director Martin Scorsese became a top news story for a few weeks when he was asked by an interviewer if he had any opinion about the Marvel superhero franchise , which was at the time unchallenged and secure at the top of the box office food chain. Scorsese opined that these movies felt closer to theme park attractions than they are to movies, and that "in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema." His remarks ruffled more than a few feathers, especially amongst the millions of movie-goers who were enthusiastically making Marvel's movies some of the most (financially) successful films of all time. (It's actually not that difficult to break financial records when the ticket prices keep going up. If you adjust for inflation then one of the most successful films of all time was The Wicked Lady in 1945, starring Margaret Lockwood; a film that has nothing to do with either Martin Scorsese or Marvel.) Bigger than Captain America ! Also Taxi Driver ... ...
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Dear Friend...

Wednesday, 4th February, 2026 Dear ChatGPT, I have been thinking recently about the film "Desk Set"; Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's penultimate film together. Written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (the parents of Nora) Desk Set presents as a romantic comedy in the classical tradition. Hepburn is Bunny Watson, head of the "Research and Reference" department of a major television network (portrayed as fiercely independent and staggeringly good at her job) while Tracy is Richard Sumner, an "efficiency engineer" contracted to install a cutting-edge computer system (named EMERAC) which the reference team is afraid will put them all out of work. Desk Set is a film that works on many levels. It's a delightful, engaging and very funny comedy of manners that makes exceptional use of the specific talents of its stars (real-life couple Hepburn and Tracy had tremendous chemistry onscreen and off, and ultimately made nine films together) but it also serves ...
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The First Hallucination

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When I was doing my music A-Level (about 150 years ago, give or take) I had one particular professor who was, shall we say, flexible with her facts. I don't doubt her qualifications, and I'm sure she was eminently capable in her chosen field, but I came to realise that nothing she said to us in class was reliably accurate. Sitting through her lectures became something of a "spot-the-mistake" game, which isn't really meant to be the purpose of a music A-Level. We were told, for example, that Mozart was born in 1754 (no) and that Bach's Brandenburg #4 featured trumpets (not so much). On and on it went; class after class, mistake after mistake. It was my own fault, I suppose; I should really have spotted the red flag the first day I met her, when she spoke to me about Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings , then asked me if I could tell her more about the "tenor horn". I found myself explaining to my future lecturer that the "...
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