Bluebottle's blog

weeknotes #17

Weeknotes 20/04/2026 - 26/04/2026

Catching up on weeknotes I accidentally published #18 before this one - oops!

Things I've done ✎ᝰ.📓🗒 ˎˊ˗

Films (and TV) 🍿🎥✮⋆˙

The Man Who Haunted Himself, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, Akira, The Clan of the Cave Bear and Excalibur.

The Man Who Haunted Himself is a 70s paranoid psychological thriller starring Roger Moore. It's about a rigid, successful businessman in an unhappy marriage who finds his doppelganger slowly taking over his life... or is it all in his head? I enjoyed this a lot, mainly for Roger Moore doing some pre-Bond acting and the British 70s period trappings.

I can't believe I'd never seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before. Incredible. A maximalist cinema thrill ride that feels like it's about 4 films in one. There's a whole civil war section in this that could have been it's own film. And I know I'm late to the party on Ennio Morricone, but the score! The chemistry between the three leads! 5 star cinema.

Akira was a rewatch for me, re-released in the cinema for it's anniversary. This time around I could see more of the flaws, the flimsy characterisation in particular, but it remains such a breath-taking spectacle it doesn't really matter. That's not to say it doesn't have any emotion - the plight of Tetsuo, the street gang kid who is discovered to have incredible psychic abilities everyone wants to exploit and who's rage threatens to destroy himself, I found really poignant. Also has a great score: "The soundtrack draws heavily from traditional Indonesian gamelan music, in addition to elements of Japanese noh music."

I watched the Clan of The Cave Bear and Excalibur as part of the genre film festival Forbidden Worlds. Excalibur was the stand-out, a crazy, over the top re-telling of the tale of Kind Arthur that fits the whole over-stuffer thing into 2 hours with incredible theatrical sets and a very camp Merlin. It's very silly but by the end it had won me over.

I've been feeling 🫀🩹🥀❤️‍🩹

😮‍💨

I'm looking forward to

A trip to Copenhagen next week.

I've been reading 🍵📖

I finished Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, for book club. I've started reading The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, and Brian by Jeremy Cooper.

See you next week 👋

#blog #weeknotes