Paul Haine | Tales from the city

Paul Haine | Tales from the city

All articles by Paul Haine

  1. The Bull, Highgate

    My first attempt at going to The Bull didn’t go well. I’d been wandering around trying to find a pub that wasn’t packed on a Sunday afternoon and I found one; it was The Bull. It was deserted; I wasn’t even sure it was open. I cautiously approached the doors and peered in, seeing fridges filled with bottles of Becks and a couple of dead-eyed staff staring out, their blank stares seemingly willing me to come in and give their day and their lives some meaning. The place had all the charm of a branch of Foxtons, and if things are so bad that you’re looking to me to give the place some life then frankly the battle is already lost.

  2. Review of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

    I never read Tintin as a child as Tintin was quite obviously for the squares, for children whose parents made you take your shoes off at the door, who wouldn’t let you watch Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It and who owned a BBC Micro. I read Asterix instead. I was pretty uncool, but at least I knew it and was making an effort to improve myself.

  3. The Nintendo e-reader

    The Nintendo e-reader isn’t what you think it is; it isn’t a device for reading e-books. The truth is, I’ve just lured you here to read an article about an obscure peripheral for the Game Boy Advance by implying that Nintendo made a Kindle-style e-reader. E-readers are hot right now, aren’t they? It’s all Kindle-this and iBooks-that. I bet a Nintendo one would be lovely, all white and curvy like that Wii U tablet controller.

  4. Review of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

    Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows isn’t much of a Sherlock Holmes film, but it’s an attractive action flick unhindered by 3D gimmickry nonetheless. Robert Downey Jr. continues doing that thing that Robert Downey Jr. does, and he does it well; I don’t know of anyone who does Robert Downey Jr. better than Robert Downey Jr.

  5. Review of Guy Moshe’s Bunraku

    When did Woody Harrelson become one of those actors that adds instant gravitas to any scene they’re in? As he gets older and craggier he seems to have solidified into this wall of character, with every line he reads sounding more meaningful than it has any right to. In Bunraku he happily takes on the “philosophical barman” trope, the linchpin in a film with so many stylistic influences that it’s a wonder everything holds together.

  6. Trailer for Guy Moshe’s Bunraku

    Guy Moshe’s Bunraku. Ignore the low ratings you may have seen elsewhere, this turned out to be one of my favourite film’s of 2011.

  7. Review of Pan Am

    I have to be careful criticising Pan Am because the last time I watched something ironically it was Spartacus, and that grew into something very special; what appeared at first to be a po-faced, poor-man’s 300 ended up with drama, pathos and Lucy Lawless having sex with other ladies.

  8. Late night gaming

    Just as I have a specific type of game to play on a quiet, lazy Sunday morning, there are also games which I never feel right playing unless it’s late at night.

  9. Why I won’t subscribe to your newspaper’s iPad app

    My newspaper of choice, being a discerning liberal gentleman and having had my appreciation of the Guardian burned out of me after four years of working there, is the International Herald Tribune, i.e., The New York Times for people who wish they were reading The New York Times.

  10. The Victoria, Highgate

    The Victoria in Highgate is a nice little gastropub that probably goes overlooked as it’s up the north end of the village, past plenty of other notable pubs such as The Red Lion and Sun, and The Bull. It can lack atmosphere during the week but is worth checking out for the food.

  11. Review of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy slow-burning, balletic adaptation is rich in atmosphere, dripping with character and repressed emotion.

  12. Review of Kenneth Branagh’s Thor

    Kenneth Branagh’s Thor always seemed like it would be the hardest comic adaptation to fit convincingly into the shared universe Marvel have been piecing together for a few years now. Despite lacking the same level of public recognition as some of the other heroes, and having a magical background that could have felt out of kilter with the rest of the technology-borne ensemble, Thor has turned out to be one of the more solid and enjoyable Marvel films so far.

  13. Review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes

    The endless slew of remakes, reboots and prequels only gets more complicated with every year. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is, as far as I can tell, a remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, a prequel to an as-yet unmade remake of the original Planet of the Apes (or perhaps an as-yet unmade remake of the remake of the original Planet of the Apes) and a reboot of the entire Apes series, all of which was based on a book. We live in confusing times.

  14. Reaper

    I’m thinking of a new policy of only watching TV shows after they’ve been cancelled, so I know the level of commitment expected of me. Lexx, an occasionally-brilliant, mostly-awful show ended after four seasons; easy to get through them despite the rapidly-plummeting quality because the finish line was always visible. Lost, on the other hand, I watched as it was broadcast and I abandoned the show in the third season because with no end in sight it was starting to feel like I was in purgatory.

  15. Review of Captain America

    Captain America: The First Avenger is a mildly enjoyable period romp where some staid action and the tawdry whiff of prequel is just about held together by a decent script and likeable characters. Very much a popcorn film; you might enjoy it at the time but you’re probably not going to reminisce about it later.

  16. The upper deck

    I regularly use the bus to get around London on the grounds that the Tube is a place where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Tiring recently of the limited seating on the lower deck of the bus and the constant ethical dilemma about whether to stand for the elderly disabled pregnant woman or just keep on sitting like every other cold-hearted bastard Londoner, I risked a trip to the upper deck, a deck previously avoided because of the belief that you only sat upstairs if you wanted to be murdered by schoolchildren.

  17. Trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

    I’ve no real interest in the books, the original films or David Fincher’s remake, but this is an excellent trailer nonetheless.

  18. Trailer for Ed Gass-Donnelly’s Small Town Murder Songs

    Hard to beat a bit of Southern Gothic.

  19. Trailer for Leon Ford’s Griff the Invisible

    With Defendor, Kick-Ass and Super the fake superhero genre may already be saturated, but Griff the Invisible, starring True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten, looks like it has some charm.

  20. A Starbucks Experience

    My usual chain coffee establishment of choice is Caffé Nero; the coffee is good enough, they sell those little praline chocolates, the premises are generally clean and the background music tends to be of a pleasing Italian theme. Essentially it’s somewhere I can go to feel like an Italian without being molested by Berlusconi.

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