Talking Movies

Regular readers of the blog will know that, like Charles dating his Oxford days from when he met Sebastian, I think of the blog proper as beginning in September 2009; from whence monthly archives can be found all the way up to April 2026. And yet today is a milestone.

It is 18 years since the staking of this claim in the digital terrain. April 22nd 2008. A mere month after the collapse of Bear Stearns and the intervention of the Federal Reserve to calm the waters. A move that would inexplicably not be repeated for Lehman Brothers in September 2008 leading to the credit crunch. But in Ireland we were already experiencing the quiet implosion of the housing market from its bubble peak, as the soft landing we had been promised did not materialise; because there never had been one before in history. George W Bush was the President, and Barack Obama was trying to push the obdurate Hillary Clinton out of the race to replace him. Bertie Ahern had mere days left to serve as Taoiseach before one implausibility too many about sterling exchange rates spurred his resignation.

What has this got to do with the blog? Everything, and nothing. When the blog started I hadn’t mastered how to insert images, so I simply did without for a while. Which is how, when I backfilled all the posts later, the first entry ended up with a gif that didn’t exist at the time; months before the release of The Dark Knight. At all times, it seems, technology to me appears unbidden as a black monolith, and, after panic, fear, and curiosity, I eventually figure it out. It is darkly comic that after such beginnings the blog now showcases AI generated art. People in 2008 insistently read into The Dark Knight the political context of its time. But context fades, and is forgotten. It can be interesting to reinsert lost context, certainly, but valuable culture must have eternal verities.

Back in 2008 I was engaged in a writing project that could have been derided, par Spaced and especially Paul, as being all references. Now in 2026 I am engaged in an even more ambitious writing project that aims to strip out nearly all references. The imitation of Chekhov, if you will. It wasn’t until 2009 that I finally saw Three Sisters in performance, but I knew Alfred’s dictum in The Dark Knight – “Endure!” – had a Chekhovian ring to it. By 2010 I had officially expanded the remit of the blog because I wanted to write not only theatre reviews as well as film reviews, but also colour pieces, concert reviews, and thinkpieces on music, television, theatre, literature, art, philosophy, and wider culture, including, yes, politics. And now in 2026 the humble blog is legally old enough to vote. Whoa.

I hadn’t realised until last year just how many blogs fell by the wayside since the heyday of the form in the late 2000s. I’ve seen people give perfectly reasonable excuses to pull down the shutters. I’ve had perfectly reasonable excuses to do so. And yet didn’t. Talking Movies Endures.