Martin Cuff Consulting

It doesn’t happen quite so much these days, but there was a time when you mentioned living in Africa and people thought there were giraffes in the street. I did live in Zimbabwe for a while and I remember startling a zebra once, when out on a morning run (the run being more unusual than [...]

OK, I’m back in the saddle after a marvellously lazy Christmas break; the grand total of my efforts being 1. opening the wine (thank heavens for screwtops) 2. rolling to the pool 3. nope, that’s about it. So since the spectacular Avatar, I’ve not seen any movies except a few Almodovar oldies on dvd – [...]

2012 is from Roland Emmerich, so you know it’s going to start with a lone scientist with his mouth open, staring at a flickering monitor going “Oh My God”. You also know there’ll be some quasi science and a bit of cultural history – here the link to the end of the Mayan calendar in [...]

Steven Soderberg goes all Casablanca on us, with a black and white, forties-style film noir, The Good German. George Clooney plays Jake Geismar, a war correspondent in Potsdam, Germany, for the Post Armistice conference held by the victorious Allies. It starts as a murder mystery, when his venal, vicious snotrag of a driver is pulled [...]

Of all the made-on-location movies I’ve seen this year, I think Knowing, staring the original child of evil, Mr. N. Cage, was probably the most surprising; I really had no idea it filmed in Melbourne. And with no little irony, another movie about Satan’s progeny also intrigued me. Set in Seattle, Whisper actually filmed in [...]

Tarantino brings World War II to an explosive and entirely non-historic end with The Inglourious Basterds. Basically it’s a double story thread – a group of American Jews are behind enemy lines, killing (and scalping – a real yeuch) Nazis. And a Jew who runs a Paris cinema gets a chance to revenge the murder [...]

I love Sandra Bullock. I love her because she’s funny and beautiful and self-deprecating, but mainly because she reminds me of my scouser friend Helen, with whom I lived and studied and worked for too many years to recount. Watching Sandra Bullock is like they stuck a hidden camera in our living room and stole [...]

At least twenty years ago, my sister Emma and I went to see Michael Jackson perform at Wembley Stadium in London. It was quite a revelation. Gone was the squeaky, kind of gross, stick insect with a repulsive butchered face, miraculously replaced by a one-man dynamo of energy, panache and sheer performance. I’d have little [...]

It’s an understatement to say I am not fond of the Royals. I’m not bothered by any of them personally, it’s what they stand for that I find so monstrous. With the only thing in their favour being a happy accident of birth (or not so happy, if you take a look at Fergie’s kids), [...]

Sam Mendes. Kate Winslow. See? I am not always low brow. In Revolutionary Road, the lovers of Titanic grow up and settle in the suburban precursor to American Beauty. It’s all picket fences, and grey commutes and cigarettes and martinis and shagging the secretary / next-door-neighbour. Prison with tupperware and a manicured lawn. April (Winslow) [...]