Jackdaw Posts

Picture this :  Rolling green hills. Candlelit parlours. Men in silk waistcoats exchanging pistol shots at dawn over imagined slights. A world so meticulously constructed every frame could be framed—preferably in gold leaf and hung above a harpsichord. This is Barry Lyndon , Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 epic. A film that unfolds like a moving museum. It is beautiful. It is hypnotic. And at its centre is a problem with a jawline. His name is Ryan O’Neal.   Barry marched with the best. Ryan just wandered. A Journey Through Art (and Glassy stares) Kubrick doesn’t make movies. He makes controlled environments and lets the people inside slowly suffocate. Barry Lyndon is no exception. He reconstructs 18th-century Europe with such precision it’s almost suspicious. The cinematography, led by John Alcott and guided by candlelight and NASA glass, is legendary. The rooms glow. The landscapes breathe like oil paintings. Every scene is symmetrical enough to trigger mild anxiety. And the musi...

S ome films wear armour. Others just roll in the dirt and let the wounds speak for themselves.  Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh + Blood (1985) is the latter. A filthy, blood-soaked medieval fever dream where the sword is never clean, the motives are never noble, and love comes laced with plague. It’s a film that starts with a corpse hanging from a tree and gets grimmer from there. Is it a good movie? That depends. Looking for a romanticised epic with swelling violins and heroic speeches? Keep walking. But if you want betrayal, brutality, and the kind of mud-stained realism that smells faintly of rot—this might be your chalice. A skull for a throne. A raven for a crown. Welcome to 1501. The Plague Years: What’s It All About? Set in 1501 but really set in the chaotic heart of human nature, Flesh + Blood follows a band of mercenaries led by Rutger Hauer’s Martin—equal parts knight, bandit, and mad dog off the leash. After being double-crossed by their noble employer, they do what any me...

It starts with a photo. Black and white. 1940s. A crowd outside a bridge opening in British Columbia. Men in hats, women in heels—history in crisp collars. Then you see him. T-shirt. Hoodie. Wraparound shades. A camera that looks like it fell out of a sci-fi prop van. The internet loses its mind. They call him the Time-Traveling Hipster. South Fork Bridge, 1941. Everyone dressed for the decade—except him. Shades. Slogan tee. A camera that shouldn’t exist. Cue the conspiracy. The Man Who Fell Into a Photograph He stands out like a tweet in a telegram. While the crowd clings to post-war drab, he’s dressed for a music festival. Graphic tee, bomber cardigan, slick shades—he could be queuing for overpriced coffee in Shoreditch. Except this is 1941, not 2021. The photo is real. No Photoshop. No deepfake. No AI. Just a slice of celluloid mystery that has fueled conspiracy forums, Reddit threads, and late-night YouTube spirals. So, is he a glitch in the matrix? Or just the best-dressed ...

In 1984, Miami Vice   didn't just premiere—it made an entrance, like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons - loud, flashy, and impossible to ignore. Created by Anthony Yerkovich and refined by Michael Mann, it wasn’t just a cop show. It was a mood. A neon-lit fever dream where crime got dressed up in Armani and soaked in synth. The budget was insane—$1.3 million an episode—which meant they could afford real locations instead of cardboard backdrops. Miami wasn’t just a setting; it was a character with sun-bleached skin, peeling paint, and a fondness for questionable nightlife choices. This was TV saying, “We’re done with dull cops in dull suits.” Instead, it gave us cops who looked like they might forget their badges but never their sunglasses.   Neon Noir: When MTV Crashed a Crime Scene Photo by Ussama Azam - Image courtesy unsplash.com Soundtrack to a Generation: When Pop Music Met Prime Time Forget elevator tunes. Miami Vice   weaponized music. With a $10K episode music...

You ever wonder why the French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and even the Finns—who really had no business doing so—write with the same set of 26 letters? No matter the accent, dialect, or grammatical acrobatics, they’re all marching to the same script. A, B, C, rinse, repeat. One alphabet. Half a continent. And a trail of conquest, religion, bureaucracy, and accidental genius to explain it all. The Alphabet That Conquered a Continent Blame the Romans It started, like so many European habits, with the Romans. They didn’t invent the Latin alphabet—no, they borrowed it, shamelessly, from the Etruscans, who pinched it from the Greeks, who swiped it from the Phoenicians . Originality wasn’t the point. Longevity was. The Latin alphabet began as a tool of empire. The Romans brought roads, baths, and indoor shouting matches—and they brought their writing with them. Veni, vidi, scripsi. I came, I saw, I wrote in capital letters and didn’t bother with spaces. They carved it into stone....

In 1943, a U.S. Navy ship supposedly vanished—then reappeared miles away. The story of the Philadelphia Experiment has baffled, thrilled, and amused ever since. Was it science, myth, or something stranger lurking beneath the waves? Let's lift the fog. The Philadelphia Experiment: When War Met Wonder and Vanished Project Rainbow: War Games and Wishful Thinking The world burned. Steel-clad ships cut the Atlantic. And somewhere in a Navy lab thick with wires and ambition, a strange idea flickered to life. The story begins with Project Rainbow , a hush-hush U.S. Navy initiative whispered to involve more than sonar and sweat. According to lore—and we stress the lore—they weren’t just building ships. They were building ghosts . Invisible ones. Enter the USS Eldridge , a destroyer escort built for the nuts and bolts of convoy protection. But it was picked for something grander. Something science-fictional. The plan? Wrap it in electromagnetism. Bend light. Maybe bend time. Make i...

There was a time when Hollywood told stories in broad daylight—clear heroes, happy endings, a moral wrapped up with a bow. Then the shadows crept in. War left men hollow, the city turned cold, and nothing was simple anymore. That’s when noir was born. Not from scripts or studios, but from the gut. A world where the American Dream had a price tag and happy endings were for suckers.   Image is courtesy of Sofia Sforza , unsplash.com Into the Shadows: The Hard Truth of Film Noir Lights flicker. A cigarette burns low. A woman with danger in her smile steps into the frame. This is film noir—where good men don’t stay that way, dames can’t be trusted, and the only thing longer than the night is the list of bad decisions. Born in the back alleys of 1940s Hollywood, film noir wasn’t a genre—it was an accident. A byproduct of postwar cynicism, German Expressionist cinematography, and pulp fiction’s unsentimental view of human nature. American studios churned out crime dramas soaked in paran...