John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 10/10/2026I never buy anything from Amazon but use it to find things to buy elsewhere. The search was always a bit shonky, but now it’s utter shit as it guesses you want to buy something with a vaguely similar - or completely different - title. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Third Canadian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. youtu.be/TjpdBZi0hws?...youtu.beThursday 12 pm SwimmingYouTube video by Rheostatics - Topic 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 08/10/2026If you like vaguely pretty colours passing before your unfocused eyes… 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Thomas Pynchon’s new novel. “A screaming comes across the car.” 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026The genius of rhyming “appeared” with “disappeared”. 020
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Not so much Derby and Annie as Darby and Joan. 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Oddly, it was 2024 when we watched it. boxd.it/6GArA9boxd.itA ★★ review of Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)Ulmer could certainly do interesting stuff when he got the chance but this, shot back-to-back with The Amazing Transparent Man in a fortnight for both, isn't one of those occasions. It riffs on Wells'... 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Sugar Town is about a town made out of sugar. Weirdly “sugar” is well-known for reducing focus and concentration, hollowing out memory, generating anxiety, damaging social relations and generally wrecking mental health. Which is why they used the song to advertise a mobile phone. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Sadly, neither Michel Piccoli nor Erland Josephson are available to become the new Bond. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 21/09/2026This reminds me of going to see the embalmed Lenin and slowing down a bit for a better look, whereupon a soldier took a threatening step towards me. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Well, there’s certainly a difference between dripping a bit of water on a baby’s forehead and smashing it with a bottle of champagne. 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 17/09/2026I’ve seen at least two courtesy of prints from the NFTVA. 000
Reposted by John Leman RileyNicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy! 181141056479
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Weird. It’s the most easily available: I think one of my copies is a Kino DVD. A shame that Lutz Becker’s reconstruction ran out of steam (whatever). 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 13/09/2026Generally speaking, reviewer jobs are given on the basis of “style” rather knowledge. So, restaurant critics who know nothing about food, book critics who never read, film critics for whom Star Wars is cinematic pre-history. But they can turn an amusing phrase… 020
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 06/09/2026I see that Abebooks (Amazon’s mini-me) has been infested by one of those companies charging $138 for a slender volume comprising stuff they’ve scraped off Wikipedia with a hilariously inappropriate cover and an “author” whose name is some permutation of Greek philosophers/mythical characters. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Perhaps he can persuade the banks not to charge interest on loans. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Am working through this in chronological order. The latest bunch (1886-92) includes: - A man dying in agony, realizing his life has been pointless - A man failing to understand that he’s been hanged - A woman dying of disappointment after discovering that her husband isn’t dead - A woman going mad 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/09/2026I’m considering writing about it at greater length, but in the meantime… boxd.it/g5RTsNboxd.itA ★★½ review of Island of the Dead (1993)Kovalov’s second film, after Garden of Scorpions, is another mashup of clips, on the surface in the manner of Bill Morrison (e.g. Dawson City: Frozen Time (qv)), but actually with more impressionistic... 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Probably happened a few weeks ago during the World Cup, with the operatives arriving in a coach, and dressed as Dutch football fans. Fortunately, there are no cliffside roads in Holland. 041
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 01/09/2026It’s appeasement all round. I’m on the shore at the moment, but here it’s still Lake Ontario because they don’t want to piss off Canadians. 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 30/08/2026Apparently you can find anything on Amazon. Apart from a spine. 110
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026Haven’t watched it myself yet, but going by his earlier stuff it might be quite culturally dense…. 100
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026“Ostrov Mertvykh” (Остров мертвых, 1992) is another of Oleg Kovalov’s Morrisonian archive footage compilation essay films. This one charts the move from the Russian fin de siècle, through modern art into authoritarianism. You can see it by searching in Cyrillic. 110
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 19/08/2026We hope Apple will protect their profitability by making their products slightly less pervy than Meta’s. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 13/08/2026Should have taken the train. Could have caught it at Crewe station. 160
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 08/08/2026That’s not quite true. It’s always been available unaltered for streaming. I watched it complete on @hollywoodsuite.bsky.social about three years ago. The music license problems relate to home video, hence @indicator.bsky.social deciding not to proceed with their release. 020
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/08/2026For islands such as that, we can be grateful for rising sea levels. 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 03/08/2026Fraser Nelson was editor at the time. Liddle cost the mag a few grand by interfering with the Stephen Lawrence trial. But he was, apparently, popular with the readers. Nelson also published Taki’s defences of Golden Dawn and the Wehrmacht. 120
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 02/08/2026We’re long past the time when I spent less on tickets for the opera than I did on the cinema. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 30/07/2026They put you to sleep for 57 years, then wake you up and force you to undertake a potentially fatal mission which is only necessary because they ignored your advice first time round? 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 28/07/2026The film has a lot of things I didn’t get on with, but I’m finding that Wilson has a reputation for saltiness. She doesn’t think much of Tom Holland (the classicist) or Mary Beard or most other translators. She wrote about Anne Carson using the same “teenagers will probably like it” argument. 042
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 22/07/2026Outraged that Nolan chose to render the wine-dark sea as a Cabernet Sauvignon rather than an authentic Agiorgitiko. 000
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 21/07/2026You’re going as the son in The Monkey’s Paw? 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 17/07/2026If only trademark legislation didn’t exist, there’d be a healthy profit to be made in producing little stick-on C’s that people could put on their non-Criterion discs. 010
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 15/07/2026You used to get a disc of Photoshop Elements free with a printer, and could buy CS outright. But since that’s all most people ever need and most updates are redundant, they’d never upgrade and Adobe would have gone out of business [insert crying emoji] 110
John Leman Riley @lemanriley.bsky.social · 15/07/2026It’s weird that “You will own nothing and be happy” is touted as a Communist plot and yet, here we are, with capitalism slamming it into fifth gear… 110
