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Listed below are comments made by Duncan Cookson between Friday, 10th July 2009 and Sunday, 4th October 2009.

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• What Jennifer Aniston's Best Friends won't tell her 5:32pm on 04 Oct 2009 Just to clarify, I think Aniston has shortcomings as an actor, but they are shortcomings that are shared by many actors, it's not really anything to do with her TV career. The fact that she had a decent TV career is definitely a reason why she may be favoured above other more talented actresses but that still isn't anything to do with her 'face' or being only suited to TV.
  
  She's also in the news a lot (and very attractive) which helps her get roles, but her lifestyle may be another reason why she isn't setting the world on fire. Lots of distractions. She looks like she's phoning it in sometimes, but she does have qualities as a comedic actress and can carry a bit of drama too.
  
  With TV we have time to develop a kind of (imaginary) rapport with an actor and can forgive various shortcomings, while the actor has time to develop a real rapport with their colleagues and improve their performances. A lot of actors enter the public imagination more with their TV roles than their cinema career (as long as they have good writers). Gary Sinise is good on CSI:NY although he was never more than a decent cinema actor. The same can be said of Kiefer Sutherland, Martin Sheen and any number of actors who were okay on the big screen and loved on the small screen.
  
  I've seen quite a few Aniston films I enjoyed. Along Came Polly, Friends With Money, Office Space and Bruce Almighty and she was good in all of them. Personally I find her watchable even if she isn't fulfilling her potential.
  
  But lets look at Sandra Bullock. As discussed previously there is a lot of affection for her and yet she's been in a string of bland and sometimes terrible films. I'm willing to bet that if she'd come off a succesful sitcom career she'd be derided by Kermode as being unable to carry a feature.
  
  By the way I'm surprised no-one has mentioned George Clooney, Marisa Tomei or Bruce Willis. Loads of them actually if you look. But why are there more male actors who seem to have made the transition than men? Because good female roles are rare, they're often poorly written and as men we tend to identify with and take more interest in the male roles. I'd love to know if women are as dismissive of Aniston as male cinema critics, armchair and otherwise. Then there's the age thing, spend a few years on TV and you're already out of the loop unless you're a gossip mag megastar like Aniston.
  
  So please. She's not the best actress in the world and has been in some pap films. But that's it, she can be good too. Her TV career should be a complete irrelevance in judging her films.
• What Jennifer Aniston's Best Friends won't tell her 4:30pm on 04 Oct 2009 Totally disagree. This is just prejudice. If you watch CSI New York for long enough and see Gary Sinise in a film now you think of the TV character. She plays her characters restrained and low key, that's a problem. Maybe she's trying too hard not to be Rachel, but her comic timing is excellent and going on about her 'face' is pretty silly. It's about her acting if anything and I think if other not-so-great actors and actresses had come out of a career in television you'd be saying the same thing.
  
  They did a psychological experiment giving people two glasses of beer, one with balsamic vinegar added and one with nothing added. When they weren't told about the vinegar they favoured the balsamic beer, when they were told they universally hated it and preferred the normal beer. That's what you're doing with Jennifer Aniston and you've been doing it for years. It's annoying. Cinema is better than TV....we get it...
• The Greatest Megabudget Movie Ever Made 10:11pm on 29 Sep 2009 Off topic but film-related looks like I won't be watching many films in the future. In the wake of the Polanski affair my boycott list has grown from one (Woody Allen) to many. Basically everyone who signed that petition; Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Darren Aronofsky, Terry Gilliam, Julian Schnabel, the Dardenne brothers, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wong Kar-Wai, Walter Salles, Jonathan Demme, Tilda Swinton, Monica Bellucci, Asia Argento et al. Maybe that's just what goes on in the entertainment business and it's no big deal, but I suspect if he'd been Father Polanski, Catholic priest, they would have felt differently.
  
  In any event your reviews are more entertaining than the films anyway so I'll still be listening :)
  
  As for money and films, there comes a point where I think you have to consider whether we can morally accept a film that spends several hospitals worth of money on nothing worthwhile. So I think it's okay to say a bad film is made worse by the money wasted on it (including ours as punters) and a good film is made better if it was made cheaply. I think an expensive film has a duty to be good, and deserves more scorn if it isn't.
• Cost report 9:45pm on 18 Sep 2009 I like to use the list of countries by military expenditure page on Wikipedia to compare with film budgets.
  
  I was listening to an NPR podcast from the US and a lady who'd been to Toronto was full of praise for Up in the Air, Precious and A Serious Man. Seen any of those? They're generating Oscar buzz inevitably and she said that the number of nominees for an award has been increased from 5 to 10 this year, which I hadn't heard, in a year when studios are releasing less films. Interesting, good move I think. Also the Coen Brothers are back working with their usual cinematographer for A Serious Man, who took a break for Burn After Reading which might explain why I didn't like that one. Hopefully the new film will be worth the money.
• Loving Sandra Bullock 4:59pm on 24 Jul 2009 Kermode Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo :) I feel the same way about Sandra Bullock. I even liked the Lake House despite Keanununu's lamentably laminate performance. I'd be interested to see if women feel the same way because I always put it down to the fact I fancied her...
• The Culture Show: Screening Room 9:13pm on 16 Jul 2009 Jesus was that Chow Yun Fat in POTC? I saw the first one and hated it so didn't watch the rest. Hard to understand the global appeal of these films. Maybe when they're dubbed into different languages the voice actors improvise a better script.
• The Culture Show: Guillermo del Toro Interview 9:02pm on 16 Jul 2009 Nice to see you dressed for the occassion Mark :) Very smart.
• This from... you 8:52pm on 16 Jul 2009 Thanks Dr K :)
• Blog reply replies: A matter of opinions 08:44am on 10 Jul 2009 I do think that films as long as Transformers should come with an intermission. Or maybe in this case an intercession or an intervention.
• Blog reply replies: A matter of opinions 05:21am on 10 Jul 2009 That's not all VictorVictory, there's a few articles around that allege Michael Bay made Megan Fox 'wash his Ferrari' while he filmed her as an audition for Transformers (see here, which sounds like a euphemism but apparently isn't. I can't find the source article by Jason Solomons though, so I'm not sure how accurate that is.
  
  I thought I'd better actually watch a film by Michael Bay to see what the fuss was about. Years ago, without knowing who the director was, I saw Mystery Men, which wasn't as funny as it should have been and didn't hang together very well, One of the Bad Boys films which was funny in places and Armageddon which was weak and I managed about 15 minutes of Pearl Harbour before giving up. So I watched Transformers. For the first hour or so I was enjoying it, thinking 'oh no, that means I must be a moron'. It was preposterous but funny, Spielberg-y, but then it degenerated into clumsy, overblown action sequences and for the last half an hour I was watching it out of the corner of my eye while browsing the internet to see what the film's budget could buy you. It's equal to the military budget of Panama. The last hour and a bit was just bad filmmaking; clumsy, cluttered and hard to follow visually. Lost interest. So that's okay. I'm not a secret Michael Bay fan. Ironically it's the scenes with human interaction that work the best.
  
  I also watched Ghost Town recently which was waaaaaaaaay better than I'd feared it would be. Enjoyable and even poignant at the end...

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