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Without doubt an epic feast for the senses. The visual effects are staggering given the total lack of CGI in the era, with most holding up superbly almost 60 years later. The film is very slow, with long stretches without dialogue book-ending the section most people remember. HAL 9000 might even be the best actual character in this movie. Drops half a star for a combination of the slightly unsatisfying Star Gate section which, through no fault of its own, now looks like a 1980s computer game, and the immensely annoying folks of the "If you don't rate this six stars at least you're Not A Real Film Fan" tendency. But it's still a sensational watch even with those issues, which tells you how remarkable it actually is. 2001 would have blown my mind on a big screen in 1968, I'm sure. ★★★★½

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In Kidderminster Morrisons this morning to get a few things, and there was a chugger standing right in the rather narrow exit passageway. My heart always sinks when this happens, since they tend to ask things like "Would you like to help children with cancer?" and, seriously, what are you supposed to say to that? These days they usually aren't licensed to accept informal donations, so they're trying to get you to sign up to a direct debit – and I will not do that with something I've had sprung on me, no matter how good the cause.

So, I have to harden my heart for a moment and simply walk past without breaking stride. I often feel bad about it, but in all honesty the whole setup feels coercive. In a supermarket particularly so, as many customers will be struggling financially already. I do sometimes try to square the circle by, if I've got time, heading for a charity shop run by a similar charity and buying something from there. But it still puts me off going back to that supermarket for a while.

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A comment in an otherwise unrelated post a little while back made me think about how the American domination of English-language social media is distorting the way people see or even talk about the history of British race relations. I'm not really up to a complex, detailed, dense post on this – and I'm no expert anyway – but I'll try to get something down. I happened to read this point of contrast today and it really hit me:

* Black Americans are overwhelmingly likely (80-90%) to be there because their ancestors were trafficked there as slaves.
* Black Britons are overwhelmingly likely to be here because their ancestors came here as free people.

It's certainly true that many British people, of all races, find the American way of looking at race to be very monolithic. It largely works for the US, because of that statistic. It really doesn't work for the UK, because we simply don't have one background that fits the large majority of our Black citizens. (And because of the importance of class in British discrimination, but that's a post in itself...)

The reason this matters is that the aforementioned US dominance of online discourse provides pressure that people "should" talk about the issue in a way that fits with American sensibilities. But doing that in fact risks erasure of the distinct history of Black people in Britain.

Not just Black people, either. Whiteness in itself wasn't necessarily a shield against enslavement in Europe, something I tend to find many Americans find very hard to process. In fact, possibly as many a million Europeans – including from Cornwall – were taken by Ottoman "Barbary" slavers operating out of North Africa between the 16th and 18th century. Yes, the very same era when Europeans were taking people as slaves from Africa – on a more industrialised scale, absolutely. It doesn't fit into a nice, tidy, American social media-shaped box, does it? But it happened.

If someone's family tree has gaps in it because their ancestors disappeared in those Barbary raids, then they must be able to talk about that without needing to add a "disclaimer" about a completely different atrocity. It is also a form of erasure to make out that anyone who brings up the Barbary trade is basically a white nationalist under the skin. Some indeed are, but many are simply talking about their own family heritage. Context matters. Once again, the standard US framework just doesn't work here, and it's harmful when people (often, it has to be said, white American liberals) try to force it to.

One final point, and this returns to Black British history. For Black History Month – which is in October here – in 2024, a poll was taken which among other things revealed that about twice as many British people (of all races) knew about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott as knew about the Bristol bus boycott which happened in their own country and helped bring about modern equalities legislation. I only knew about it myself because I have family roots in Bristol. But again, it bothers me that we've made a US event our "standard" example when the background to that boycott – beyond the shared central factor of institutionalised racism – was really quite different.

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Since I know all you Blade Runner fans need to know this, I was watching the Final Cut. Anyway, this was a good experience for the most part, if not "BEST FILM EVAR" level. The city was really interesting since I love world-building in films, and you could imagine spending time there if you could hack the weather and the general dystopia. Harrison Ford was very solid as Deckard, and I really grew to enjoy the 1980s notion of what future tech would be. No smartphones or LCD screens in 2019, folks, you heard it here first! I dunno, maybe they'd just have all seized up in the rain.

I mean, I do kind of get the feeling that Ridley Scott thought up this incredible setting and then asked himself, "So, what about a plot?" because what I get from it is not massively original even for 44 years ago. Replicants, designed with a built-in expiry date, going rogue, your friendly neighbourhood blade runner (who amusingly cannot fight for toffee) has to sort them out. Aged less well in a few points, not least a thankfully short scene with Rachael that sits uncomfortably with today's views of consent. I get that it's playing on noir films that did similar, but still.

Okay, to the "Tears in Rain" speech. It was... okay, I guess. I suspect having seen it everywhere for decades has robbed it of the power it probably had in 1982, since the underlying concept is still worthwhile. The movie's slow pace is nice for the most part, especially in the city driving shots. That bloody ESPER image enhancer scene went on and on and on, though. Vangelis's music works well, and seeing big ads for Pan Am is amusing more than distracting. Oh, and there's a unicorn, so yay for that. ★★★½

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We didn't get particularly close to the forecast 17 °C today, but with the strengthening early spring (in meteorological terms) sunshine, just creeping into the teens with the sun out made it really pretty pleasant. I didn't have the spare time to go anywhere interesting, but even walking down the road was much nicer than in all the grey and drizzly weather we've had for so long. They're even finally taking the flood barriers down in town! Admittedly about a week later than everyone expected, but it's a nice sign of progress, at any rate.

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It's hardly surprising that I sometimes struggle with questions of film ethics – meaning, in this case, production ethics rather than simply what appears on screen in the end product. Professional specialists in it write academic papers, even entire books in which they struggle with them. But it's a subject I find fascinating and difficult at the same time. For a start, what we now think is excellent ethics may well not be seen that way in 50 years' time. But even allowing for that, consider:

1. I regret to say I am convinced that actual, straight-up-and-down abuses are more numerous than we'd like to think – look how many cases the Weinstein affair revealed – and, as I know from my own research about Sandra Peabody's mistreatment making The Last House on the Left, sometimes even severe abuse can be hidden in plain sight for many years and still not widely taken seriously. But look how long it took for the abuses on (to name but three) Last Tango in Paris, The Birds, and even The Wizard of Oz to move from industry whispers to established fact. Decades in every case.

2. Even once we remove malice from the equation, there's the sliding scale that runs from encouragement to pressure to soft coercion to hard coercion. To take a film I've covered recently, I've never seen The Evil Dead's Betsy Baker say or even imply she was coerced into agreeing to the chainsaw scene, the scene that I find impossible to accept as reasonable risk even for 20-year-olds in the woods almost 50 years ago. Baker has said she agreed to do it "for the scene", which can be a red-flag phrase, but in this case the agreement seems real. But should she have been allowed to say yes to something as dangerous as that?

3. Then there's Stagecoach. It's a Western made in 1939 about 1880, which is like making a film today about 1967 in that plenty of people were still alive who remembered the year when it was set. It contains two almost universal problems with old Westerns: poor representation of Native Americans and poor treatment of performing horses. In a film made the same year, Jesse James, a horse may (sources differ) have been made to leap over a steep drop to its death. To what extent should that complicate our relationship with such films today?

4. A director can have a deservedly good reputation for professionalism and their films can still prompt concern for cast and crew's safety. John Carpenter rejected the abusiveness of some other low-budget 1970s horror directors when he and Debra Hill made Halloween. That's worth a great deal. But a few years later he started his studio career with The Thing. Today that film is widely admired for its practical effects – but some of those would be vetoed on sight by a safety co-ordinator today, while Rob Bottin literally worked himself into hospital.

5. In the 1969 British film Kes, there is a scene where schoolboys are caned on the hand. There is good evidence that the production had told the boys that director Ken Loach would call cut just before the cane actually hit them. He didn't. Loach seemed less than sympathetic when interviewed about this years later, as well as falsely telling the young lead his screen kestrel would be killed for real. This is child cruelty. Of course there are far more serious examples out there, but "it's Ken Loach" should not be a magic shield. We had enough of that with Hitchcock.

Of course, being the human I am, I am not always perfectly aligned in my personal behaviour over these films with where I "should" be if I were fully playing by the rules of ethics. I refuse to watch Last Tango in Paris, but I own a copy of The Wizard of Oz. I know in my head that "non-physical cruelty" on set is so easy that in the power-imbalance-heavy world of cinema it must happen much more often than we'd like – but suspension of disbelief is of course a key part of acting. And on and on and on. Here endeth the rambling, at least for now!

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I've done the subject line in Welsh for the last few years, so I thought I'd do it in English today given the millions of Welsh people who speak that as their everyday language. As those who have been here a while will know, I have fairly strong Welsh heritage on my mother's side – various Davises and Lloyds appear before you go back too many generations – and for this reason, I (unfortunately!) have ended up supporting Wales at rugby union.

I like Wales a lot as a nation. It's a bit of a fool's errand to date a country (what criteria do you use?) but the word "Cymry" ("compatriots", used to describe themselves) comes from the Old Welsh/Brythonic "combrogi" and has been around for maybe 1,400 years. It didn't only apply to what we now call Wales, as that as a distinct political entity was still centuries away, but Celtic Brittonic peoples in modern northern England and southern Scotland too. Indeed, the county name "Cumbria" comes from the same root.

The Senedd (Welsh Parliament) elections take place this spring, and one of the challenges will be uniting the west and the east. I'm more familiar with the border regions, which often feel like Shropshire bar the bilingual road signs and have very strong links with the English Marches, but where the people definitely consider themselves Welsh: pubs don't show England matches even in Knighton, a town right on the border. People who live in Knighton do not always appreciate being dismissed as "Anglos" (one of those theoretically neutral terms that isn't always received that way) by those from Cardiff or Caernarfon.

The Welsh language is important to Welsh identity, and I always like to see and hear it being used. I hope it continues its recent resurgence. Welsh is a very old language, not as old as Basque or Greek but recognisable as a distinct language before English really was. But in a place like Knighton, it's little more relevant to everyday life outside specifically cultural contexts and certain jobs that require it than Irish is in Dublin. Knighton feels familiar to me in a way that Caernarfon doesn't. But it's still, as those pubs prove, very much Welsh.

Now, if the rugby team could learn to beat anyone at all, I would be a happier man, but that seems to be asking too much even for this proud small nation! Happy St David's Day.