iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

A Hollywood executive wanted to hire Gustav Mahler (d.1911) after seeing Death in Venice.

Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The case is being fought in the US. But if you replace “a legal system that he hasn’t corrupted yet” with “a media company whose licensing he cannot influence”, that would be bang on, because that’s why the BBC is fighting back while so many US organisations cravenly capitulated.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I’m commenting exclusively on what I saw broadcast last night. And this viewer very much did decide for himself what her evasiveness meant—as, I suspect, did the vast majority of other viewers. I repeat: I can’t envisage how anyone else would have got any more out of her.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Part of the problem is that Dorries wasn't directly involved, so she had that card to play every time things strayed in directions she wasn't comfortable with. Which arguably made interviewing her a waste of time—except for the graphic demonstration that Reform hasn't got its story straight yet.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Under those particular circumstances, not least Dorries' all too evident determination to avoid asking direct questions, I very much doubt it. I also don't really see how she could have been "exposed more fully" than she was, given that she obviously wasn't going to point-blank admit to illegality.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

And surely the "immediate interruptions" were caused by Dorries making it obvious that she wasn't going to answer the question and was hoping to coast along instead by repeating the same small handful of memorised talking points? How would *not* interrupting her have made for a better interview?

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

It provided plenty of information to this viewer, namely that Reform have no idea how to respond to these allegations coherently, and will visibly tie themselves in knots whenever they're asked to explain the situation by an interviewer who's clearly better prepared than they are.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

People often write "minuscule" as "miniscule", but once you're aware that the first two syllables are "minus" rather than "mini", it makes perfect sense. (My mum had a huge etymological dictionary and warmly encouraged me to look things up in it almost as soon as I was able to.)

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Our shared love of the English language in all its peculiarities and circumlocutions was one of the very first things that attracted me to my wife. And we were both delighted when our son, aged circa eleven, called her a "thieving hussy"—entirely reasonably, as it turned out.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

So's my dog, to be fair. Even in his present post-cremation form.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

You have only to look up the average education level in Clacton compared with the rest of the UK to see why Farage picked it as his constituency after failing to get elected to Parliament on numerous other occasions. And he knew precisely what he was doing when he picked it.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Sue is the name of the person being addressed, not verbal advice to seek legal redress.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I’m getting flashbacks to a 2024 Lib Dem leaflet that insisted that only they could beat the Tories and that a vote for anyone else would be wasted. They came fifth, and barely saved their deposit. Oh, and fourth in 2015 and distant third in 2017 and 2019, which oddly the leaflet didn’t mention.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

And what's really alarming is that the authorities were apparently seriously considering going down the Tiananmen Square massacre route, which had itself only happened a few months earlier. Hindsight makes certain outcomes seem inevitable, but they didn't seem that way at the time.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

One of the great myths of the late 20th century was that the Berlin Wall came down thanks to Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, whereas in fact it was thanks to some extraordinarily brave East Germans (and their West German collaborators) and a series of happy accidents at government level.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

One thing that's always baffled me is that surely even the most obsessive climate change denier has to acknowledge the inescapable geological fact that fossil fuels will run out at some point—so surely accelerating a transition to renewable energy should be a major priority for that reason alone?

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Indeed not—he was very much ahead of his time in quite a few respects, even if today's kids (and quite a few of yesterday's kids) have never heard of him.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

And of course Brazil and South Korea, greatly to their credit, have a far more robust attitude towards leaders who attempt insurrectionary coups in order to illegitimately retain power.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Compare and contrast with the UK, where our closest Trump equivalent, Boris Johnson, was ousted as prime minister after only three years in power, and then subsequently as an MP, because Britain's own system of checks and balances remained just about intact despite coming under severe strain.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

A pliant and supplicant Congress and Senate pose at least as much of a problem. Checks and balances fundamentally don't work if crucial branches of the system blatantly aren't doing the job they're supposed to be doing. They are also substantially owned by billionaire bastards too, of course.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The commentary on—I think—Jazz Boat goes into some detail about how much David Bowie owed to Newley.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

And you get people complacently saying "well, we survived 1976, so what's the problem?" 1976 (whose attendant horrors I still remember vividly, such as having to share bathwater with multiple family members) was a one-off freak event. What's happening now is becoming normal. *That's* the problem.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

One of the extras features an interview from around 1967 that displays all these qualities in abundance.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I had to work on three Anthony Newley-starring Blu-ray releases back to back a few months ago, which was a surprisingly pleasant experience. Although even the most recent film came out in 1960.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Racism Is Bad, M’Kay? (Retitled thus to distinguish it from a vastly superior David Cronenberg film with the same title.)

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

My late and much-missed dog Monty, with his ears artfully rearranged over the top of his head to make him look vaguely leonine. I am of course posting this particular picture during this particular week entirely at random.

A blond working cocker spaniel with his ears rearranged over the top of his head to form a quasi-wig arrangement.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I already had the stories in print—the same edition as yours!—but I bought a Kindle version so that I could use its search function, which speeded things up nicely. I can't promise to have identified every single source story (that would be tempting fate), but it should definitely be most of them.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Handily, Bruno Schulz's original texts are in the public domain, as he died in 1942, so whenever I encountered a striking bit of dialogue in the film I'd search for it in the Polish texts, and would then track down the equivalent passage in the English translation and work that into the commentary.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

After the usual preliminary "what the hell do I say?" headdesking, I found that the best way into devising a workable commentary was to identify which specific story was being referenced (out of at least a dozen) and then add context that the film elided. At which point it became wonderfully clear.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Not just fifth but behind Restore Britain. That’s going to take some spinning to excuse.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Although I did cheat on you once with Stephen Poliakoff. But only the once.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I put the swearing back into the hard-of-hearing subtitles for the Indicator Blu-ray edition of Peter Mullan’s ‘Orphans’ (the most Glaswegian film ever made, with all that that implies) after the rightsholder-supplied ones turned out to be ridiculously and patronisingly sanitised.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

My point is that he *has* paid up. The money’s in an account over which he has no control. He wouldn’t have been allowed to appeal without doing that upfront.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

But what? How’s he going to get that money back?

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

…except the fact that he no longer has control of the money.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Nothing, because Trump has already paid the money; he wouldn’t have been allowed to appeal in the first place without paying it into an escrow account first. And now that he’s run out of legal road, that money should be handed to her imminently and automatically—Trump has no control over this.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Unless it's changed radically in the last year or so, remarkably sedate. There was the occasional shit-stirring troll, but they were usually identified as such immediately and so rarely gained any traction. Making the subforum exclusive to paid-up members had an astonishingly civilising effect.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

(I do totally understand the economics, though; the booklet is one of the most expensive parts of the package on a per-unit manufacturing basis.)

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

This was particularly annoying with the 1964 'The Killers' as I thought that the lengthy excerpt from Don Siegel's memoirs was so glorious that there wouldn't be much need for anything similar on the actual disc, but at the time I was unaware that the booklet's shelf life would end up being limited.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

In my experience they're usually happy to send one over on request, especially if I promise to mention their contents. Annoyingly, the titles that I produced for Arrow from 2013-17 were predicated on the booklet remaining a permanent part of the package, but they're now first pressing only.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

(People who’ve purchased all fourteen of Indicator’s Jean Rollin discs in their limited-edition versions now effectively have a book amounting to well over 1,000 pages in total. Just sayin’.)

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

So I asked him if he’d been sent a copy of the booklet (reviewers sometimes aren’t, or fail to spot the relevant PDF attached to the distributor’s covering email), and he said that he had, but that “booklets don’t count as proper extras”.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I once had someone completely ignore a 40-page booklet containing about 15,000 words (in other words, the rough word count of a 90-minute commentary) while complaining about the disc’s “limited extras” (caused by a dearth of relevant archival materials; this was a seriously obscure film).

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Although I agree with the sentiment, there's a potential can of worms there, because some crimes are clearly more disqualifying than others. Sex crimes and financial fraud arguably are, but how about a teenage dope conviction? Or being imprisoned on trumped-up charges by a political rival?

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Suing for $10 billion over their disclosure is a bit of a giveaway too.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Phew! Forgive the paranoia, but yours was the first review I’d read that mentioned any of the extras.

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I’m slightly unnerved by the fact that you totally blanked my commentary—can you at least confirm that it made it to the final disc? (I haven’t been sent a copy yet.)

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Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

When someone beheaded a statue of Margaret Thatcher, the art critic Brian Sewell argued that the vandal should be cited alongside the original sculptor as co-author of a far more interesting and provocative work of art than the dull, faintly Stalinist original.

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Reposted by Michael Brooke

Neil Snowdon @neilsnowdon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

More new work! New 4K restoration from the original camera negative. Ft new commentary by @johnnymains.co.uk & @marbleicehook.bsky.social, plus archival extras, and new booklet essays by @horrornonna.com and @cathode-ray-tube.bsky.social, + new art by @Nat Marsh www.arrowfilms.com/p/4k/soylent...

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Soylent Green Limited Edition 4K UHD | Arrow Films

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