Tag: review

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Silver And Gold – A.S.a.P

Way back in the past Adrian Smith decided to leave Iron Maiden and do his own thing. This was a little sad for me as I had always preferred Smith to Murray for some reason and I wondered what Maiden would do to replace him. Smith then went on to produce this solo album and I bought it, except that I didn’t really. At some point Jannick Gers joined Maiden and then Smith came back so now they have three guitarists. Not a classic line up but the longest running line up I guess.

Smith released the single Silver And Gold from the album Silver And Gold and I went to Our Price in the Harvey Centre in Harlow to buy the single on CD. In those days people weren’t trusted to browse real CDs and so the cases were in the shop and the CDs were kept in cardboard wallets in the back of the shop. I guess we were all thieving bastards back then. I took my CD case for the single up to the counter and the person went to the back to get the music disk. Once I’d paid my money and left the shop I looked inside the case and would you believe it?, the shop person had put the CD for the same named album in the case instead of the single CD. I had won “shopping”!

As an album this is, for me, OK. I don’t listen to it often and while I don’t mind it, it’s not something I normally seek out. Sometimes while I write these I have the album playing in the background but I couldn’t even be bothered to do that this time!

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Shout At The Devil – Mötley Crüe

I’m pretty sure that a friend of mine, Mark Hodges, gave me this on tape initially. I expect that at some point I went and bought the album but I don’t have my usual clarity on personal album history with this one. I remember liking the Crüe from Girls, Girls, Girls onwards. All that 80s metal came at the right time for my teenage years when humans seem to make most of their musical brain connections. There might be a PhD in there somewhere, I know people ten years older than me who either really love the 70s rock – Pink Floyd – or Ska or Punk, the link between those formative years of brain changing chemistry and the music that rebels at that time seem strong.

I do enjoy this album, I love that trashy L.A. sound but these days I feel slightly embarrassed at the obvious sexism within the industry and songs. I don’t necessarily think that these bands were socially unaware I just think that the zeitgeist was a pretty bad place. Until a few years ago I would have said that the world was heading in the right direction and becoming more tolerant of differences but I’m not so sure now. Hatred seems on the rise and it saddens me. Maybe the only silver lining will be the eventual destruction of most of the population through climate change. Perhaps then those that remain will be able to rebuild a fairer society.

Every Mötley Crüe album has a shit song. It’s almost as though they do it deliberately. There’s Nona on GGG and this album has God Bless The Children Of The Beast. These additions seem to be short songs and utterly terrible. I don’t know why they did it. I’m not sure I care but skip these songs I will.

ShoutattheDevilCD2.jpg
By Source, Fair use, Link

Have you seen a bunch of men look more scary? The overtly heterosexual band Mötley Crüe going out of their way to shock and horrify the older generations while endearing themselves to the youth of the time by rebelling and scaring the baby boomers. This stuff freaked people out! They thought all this loud music was caused by the devil and tearing their children away from their control. A small secret is that all children seek to provoke and find themselves, they aim to select something to make them different, make them stand out, make them original. The irony of this is that we’ve all been there and some of us tolerate it while others condemn. I’m always curious to see how the next generation finds their “thing”. I’m old enough to have been around the block a few times and have seen the rebellion time and time again. Maybe my professional life helps keep me informed also? The close contact with the next set of teenagers and hearing about how they get their identity. It’s just a shame so many of them seem greedy and a bit “tory”.

If you want to see what shocks the “grown ups” then have a look at the Daily Mail and see what they show of the younger generation. I suspect it’s all about the drugs and parties, especially for the DM because then they can show pictures of young ladies behaving bad and there’s nothing the older DM reader likes more than looking at pictures of young ladies behaving badly. This also goes for the Daily Telegraph. To some extent I think it comes down to the oldies being jealous of the care-free days that they lost and won’t find again. All that awaits is the slow degeneration of bodies into permanently aching lumps of meat before death and so those in charge of society get upset at what they have lost.

I enjoy this album and would recommend it to any of you.

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Shake Your Money Maker – Black Crowes

I’ve seen the Black Crowes twice and both times it was pretty good. The first time was at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park in 1991, I went to this with my sister, Angela, to see AC/DC. The Black Crowes were the first band on stage and I really enjoyed them. I don’t think I knew anything about them prior to that. I suspect that I went and bought their first album after that. I know I had the album on music cassette and then I eventually updated it to a digital copy. The second time I saw the Black Crowes was at Brixton Academy and there are three main things about that I remember most. One; I was in the pit and the crowd collapsed and that was my first experience of that. Two; I’m pretty sure the band had a lot ofwhite fairy lights above the stage and it looked pretty nice. Three; the journey back to South Kensington with SR did not go that smoothly and for some reason we ended up on a night bus heading to Edgware and it was most definitely not Sarf Ken.

This album has a very southern/country feel to it. There’s a nice gentle rolling ambience to the songs. This band’s second album never really struck me as much as the first. I have listen to this over and over. Listening to it as I write this I that the addition of keyboards and plonky piano sounds really adds to the feel. Bluesy Rock ‘n’ Roll.

There’s also a melancholy feel to some of the songs. For me I think this album is a very “summer album”. It fits with beers in the garden and a sunny day. I don’t think this would be a “shit mood” album. I can only listen to it when emotionally happy. It would upset me more if I was down a little.

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The Vigil

Because the cinemas are so quiet at the moment it is actually quite nice to go there. They’ve got themselves sorted for Covid quite well with hand sanitiser, face masks, wipes etc. The cinema I go to has a 5 people only in the toilets but you can’t actually see in the toilets to know if there are 5 people so I’m not sure how that will work on a busy day. A lot of the current crop of films out are reissues. The cinemas or film companies are trying to get the world used to the cinema again by getting us to see our “favourite” films. Amusingly a lot of these films are ones I couldn’t be bothered to see again. They are pushing Inception quite a bit ready for the release of Tenet but I hated Inception and won’t be going to see Tenet. I’ve just tried to create a hyperlink to my review of Inception but that term doesn’t exist on this site! I’ve just looked up when that film came out and it was in 2010 which is before this site existed, my dark ages I guess. I can tell you that a friend recently asked if Inception was brilliant or bullshit and my answer was “bullshit”.

The state of the tide of the river Medway was high. It wasn’t completely high tide as I could see some mud bank on the eastern side, the river was also flowing seaward quite fast and so I think the tide was waning. There are times when the river looks still, times when it flows the “wrong” way and times when it looks too fast. These coincide with whatever the tide is doing at that time, but with a small delay the further upstream you get.

River Medway
River Medway – I was going to walk further along for the picture but it was near film time.

After watching this film I rated it on IMDB. There’s a whole convention about what the ratings actually mean and descriptions of such are in this communication. When I can then access my PC I tweet the IMDB result. I gave up Twitter on my phone and so I now only check it when I can access the flight simulator. The result is below:

So, things. I considered walking out of this film but thought it would be a little rude so I stayed until the end. This film was a “horror” and I’m not really into that. Once you give up all belief in supernatural you can then logic away the scary shit and just watch the film for giggles. I can remember being a teenager and seeing The Omen, Poltergeist, Amityville and so on and they really disturbed me. There was something about those films that really shook me deep. I think I knew they weren’t real but the playfullness of the filmmakers affected me, which I guess is the point. While watching The Vigil I had the following thoughts:

I am bored and this film is boring me.

This guy is getting paid USD400 for reading Psalms and he is failing to do that. He made an agreement but isn’t holding up his side of the bargain. I don’t know what the rules are concerning a Shomer but he’s not doing anything. A Shomer is there to read to the corpse and ease the spirit on its journey. How long does this journey take? If the Shomer stops reading for a toilet break is that allowed? Must the reading be constant? What are the rules? Overall this seems a silly idea to me. Anyway, the main character isn’t doing his job.

Overall I thought this film was poor. It could have been really good. But it used the sound and music to increase tension when it would have been harder but more rewarding to really explore the relationship between this character and his religion and the traditions it has. I can’t decide if this film was a cheap attempt at horror or a real exploration of the psyche!

This Shomer has left his protected bubble of Hasidic Jews in New York. We learn why he left I guess and he is part of a support group for people who leave this oppressive regime. He suffers guilt and problems stemming from a traumatic incident along with leaving the community. We learn that he has seen things and takes tablets to help him control his visions. So, this film is about the psychotic breakdown of a man leaving a religious organisation and the mess that the Hasidic caused him. He is troubled by his own demon and it comes to him while he is [not] doing this Shomer job. I might read a little more about this film and, if I’m lucky, it will be a metal breakdown rather than a horror movie. I won’t be letting you know though!

If you want to know some more about strange religious behaviour then just read an article on the Eruv. It’s a piece of string that “extends” the boundary of your property so that you can go outside and do things on the days when God insists you stay inside your property. Why God allows this loophole is beyond me, it’s all rather made-up.

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Unhinged

I rated this film on IMDB, there’s a communication with a list of how the rating system works. I tweeted the result.

This film was terrible. I hated it. I considered walking out but was curious how they would end it. It was utter shit.

I think the lesson here is how we blame the wrong people for the things that go wrong. Woke up late? Your fault. Lost job just before retirement payout? Likely the fault of the regulations that are written by your government. Addicted to opiates? Likely the fault of the government. The media spin everything so our anger is misplaced. It keeps the masses quiet. Why don’t Amazon pay any tax? Because of the laws of the land. Why don’t companies pay fairly? Because of the rules of the land. Why is your MP fucking useless? Because individual people are selfish and vote without any form of altruism. Best I stop this before I end up in a downward spiral. This film was shit.

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100% Wolf

To avoid the last day of this heatwave, there have been seven days with temperatures in excess of 30C, I booked in to the cinema. The main reason was to enter an air conditioned building for a few hours and relax without sweating all over everything. I went to see 100% Wolf.

On the way to the cinema I noted that the tide was very low. All of the mud banks were visible and the little boats were stuck in their tiny channels that keep them from beaching. After the film I thought about the rating and then did that and tweeted the result:

I gave this film a 4/10 because I fell asleep for about twenty minutes and then proceeded to figure out exactly what had happened to the characters once I’d woken up. I only watched until the end just to see what happened. This is possibly not the fault of the film but the fault of the hot weather and me not sleeping great. Without doing some control experiments I won’t know about which cause it is.

This film surprised me at the beginning as it was an Australian production and I don’t think you see many of those, especially animations. Maybe I’ll try and watch something slightly more highbrow over the next few days. I’ll let you know of course. In the mean time, while the world awaits MSFS 2020 here’s a clip of me going Gatwick to London City for giggles.

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Back To The Future (35th Anniversary)

So, I wanted to get out and go somewhere and I normally return to the darkness of the film theatre as an easy escape. There isn’t really a lot of films on at the moment because all the major studios have delayed release of all their films due to the SARS-Cov-2 issues. So, in a sensible move, the cinemas around here are showing classic films to get us to visit. Today, as of writing, the following films are available to watch with my comments after each:

  • Back To The Future (35th etc) – seen
  • Back To The Future II (2020 reissue) – will watch at home
  • Dark Waters – seen
  • Dreambuilders – don’t want to see
  • Goodfellas: 30th Anniversary – maybe
  • Harry Potter II RE – don’t care for these movies
  • My Spy – already seen on Amazon Prime
  • Onward – absolutely not
  • Proxima – seen
  • Sonic The Hedgehog – seen
  • The Dark Knight (2020 reissue) – can’t stand Batman films
  • The Empire Strikes Back: 40th Anniversary – maybe
  • The Greatest Showman – kill me now
  • The Shawshank Redemption (2020 reissue) – maybe
  • Unhinged – really not sure about this isn’t it just Falling Down?

So, there is plenty to see and that’s just today. Tomorrow there’s a different selection of films going on. I might go again at some point. I’ve been going to early showings assuming that the cinema is cleaner than after a few crowds have been in. I’m not sure about the whole opening doors to the toilets thing but I guess if everyone uses hand sanitiser that shouldn’t be too bad. To be honest in the film yesterday there were only five people in that particular screen and I think we all pretty much enjoyed the film.

Earlier in the day I had been down to the river at Peters Village and seen that the tide was quite low. When I checked the tide charts supplied by Wolfram Alpha I could see that the tide was turning and by the time I went to the cinema it would have been around 75% of high water for that day. Sure enough on the way in to the cinema as I drove along the esplanade I could see that the tide was indeed getting towards its highest. There were no mudbanks to be seen.

After watching the film I rated it on IMDB because that is a thing I do for cinema films and there is a previous communication detailing the ratings process here. I then tweet the result on my rarely used (for now) twitter account.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing this film again. It was great fun. There are so many aspects of the film that are well thought out and delightful little touches that it was as if I hadn’t seen the film ever before. I couldn’t tell you when I last watched this whole thing, but I can tell you that it was still excellent and it did make me wonder why films weren’t made like this anymore. Maybe they are and I just haven’t found them, or maybe they are and I’m struggling with confirmation bias, but this was a well scripted, well made film where every little bit of it just seems to work really well.

I’ve already bought the box set on Blu-Ray along with the Indiana Jones trilogy and Star Wars (1-6). I will be watching the next few films in this particular series over the next week or so and I can’t wait. I honestly can’t remember much and am pretty sure that the last time I watched the third film would have been in the cinema when it originally came out. We’ll see what I think of it!

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Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son – Iron Maiden

This is playing as I write this and also while I composed the previous communication. I guess I have to start somewhere and as a spotty teenager I was descending into Heavy Metal. This was the first Iron Maiden album to be released while I was a fan. Everything else was just catch up, I missed the live released of Somewhere In Time, which gets reviewed soon I guess. My mum bought me this album from out of nowhere. She just came home one day and gave it too me – this was quite strange for my mum.

For me this takes me back to being a fifteen year old and soaking up all the atmosphere and myth behind this album. I would spend ages looking at the artwork, reading the lyrics and trying to figure out what it all meant. This was Maiden’s seventh studio album and it was their first “concept” album. I guess you write a concept album once you’ve been around the block a bit. You’ve got a solid fan base and you try something new. This album is based around the story of the seventh son of a seventh son who is meant to have magic powers.

So, this was the second album with keyboards which for Metal is wrong but that’s not really a worry. If it adds to the song then it’s fine. I think my biggest problem is that the guitar work isn’t that clear. I don’t like the sound of the guitars on this and “Somewhere”. It’s all rather vague. Maybe it’s a product of the time, new sounds, new effects, trying something different, but for me it just doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong, this is an amazing album and should be rated somewhere near the top but there’s something “missing” for me.

My first concert attended was Iron Maiden on their Seventh Tour. Seeing the band at Wembley Arena was amazing and the set amazed me. It was an amazing first gig. Songs from this album featured heavily as you would expect and I loved it.

  • Moonchild – A good concert opener.
  • Infinite Dreams – I always found this to be quite a romantic song.
  • Can I Play With Madness – not great.
  • The Evil That Men Do – Good but not as good as they think it is.
  • Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son – A tour de force, hints of Rime but still good.
  • The Prophecy – I think this could be my new favourite on this re-listening.
  • The Clairvoyant – Another classic, it’s OK.
  • Only The Good Die Young – Pretty good.
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Proxima

March 15th was the last time I went to the cinema. It is July 31st. That is 138 days without a visit to the cinema, no films seen in the [not] luxury surroundings of the Rochester Cineworld cinema. There are 233 communications within the menu “Film”, I’m not sure all of them are cinema film reviews but I am sure more than 200 are. The first film reviewed on this iteration of my website was Oblivion. That’s a little amusing as I recently saw that it was on Netflix and checked this place to see if I had already seen it, I realised I had and decided to not bother watching it again. The original cinema list is here and starts with Shrek 2!

I think there are formalities to get through before I mention what I thought of Proxima and the first point is to say that I did NOT notice the state of the tide on the way in to the cinema. I checked it on the way out but I think I was just pleased to be driving next to the river that I didn’t actually look at it and register how high or low the water was. When leaving that place I did look and the river was low indicating a low tide. I saw the 13:40 showing of this film on the first day that cinemas were allowed to open. I figured the place would be cleaner earlier in the day. When I booked the ticket I wasn’t aware just how hot the weather was going to be and I’m glad I went. It is 36C out there and spending a little while in the air conditioned cinema was great. My lounge is 26C and it felt so nice to come in to the cold house when I got home. I did have a bike ride earlier today and I rode along the river most of the way so it was shady and cooler than everywhere else.

The last few years I’ve spent some time trying to find two films that haunt me from my early years. One was a sci-fi piece that was Australian I think and about the end of the world. Another was a French animation which involved time travel. I think I have found them both and I am going to watch the live action film later. I think it is called The Quiet Earth and I saw it on a list of Sci-Fi films you should see but might not have – it was a listicle and I had seen most but the summary makes me think that this is the one I’ve been searching for. The animation is called Les Maîtres du temps and I will be trying to find a copy of that film to see if it as messed up as I remember.

As is custom I rated Proxima on IMDB and there’s a communication covering all the details of the rating system here. I then tweeted the result. Normally this would be completed from my phone but I have deleted the Twitter app for mental health reasons. I therefore only check Twitter about 0.75 times a day.

I really enjoyed this film, far more than some recent, meant to be realistic films like First Man. The film covers the training an astronaut receives in the run-up to launch and but primarily this film focuses on the way this challenges the relationship with her young daughter. I liked the dedications during the credits to the female astronauts who had young daughters when they went into space.

This film uses a mixture of space training alternating with relationship issues. And it has Matt Dillon! Matt Dillon! I’ve not seen him in anything for ages and he totally still plays the sexist pig quite well. I thin he melts a little towards the end of the film which I think was nice but also rather predictable. Eva Green conveys the emotions of being a parent really well. I really enjoyed her performance. I enjoyed this film, but probably won’t be watching it again, hence the 6/10.

A thing that irks me is how so many films try to make everything look so easy and non-technical. I think the idea is to maintain that myth that anyone can do anything if they work hard enough. This is complete bullshit. Some people aren’t able to do things that they want. You can practice and you can try your best but there are a lot of other people out there who are trying to do the same as you and it only takes a very small difference for them to win. Space is hard. Space is complex. We have this romanticised view of astronauts being gung-ho cowboys when in reality they are full of the most technical and detailed information about their entire mission that the side shown to the public is remarkably false. All media representations of aircraft, boats, cars, bridges, anything designed and built by humans tend to undersell just how complex these things are. Your mobile phone is, to you, just a black box which does stuff. I think that’s how most of the world is represented to us as humans. These things just work and we don’t have to worry about how.

Proxima showed some of the technical aspects of being shot into space and I liked it for that. It showed the difficulty of training for a mission and it showed the stresses on the human. It is a good film.

The Quiet Earth

Yesterday I also watched The Quiet Earth. I paid to watch this on Amazon and I am glad I did. For some reason I saw this film in the 80s and it has stuck with me all that time. I regularly think about it. Firstly, an admission – it’s not set in Australia but New Zealand and I think I’ll have to accept that’s close enough. The film follows the journey of a man who awakes to find himself alone in the world. He does find some other people eventually after going mad and we see what happens. I enjoyed it. Here’re the main things that I remember from thirty years ago:

  • An experiment to create an energy field around the Earth went wrong
  • The charge of an electron had changed

Both of these things were in the film but they weren’t actually big parts of the plot. I don’t know why they have stuck with me so much. Possibly my admiration for aviation matters? One of the issues with aircraft [and cars] is that they have to carry their fuel with them. This means that to travel further you need more fuel so you have more mass and therefore need more fuel to transport that extra mass. If we could find a way of negating the need for fuel to be carried on the aircraft then we would have a really efficient system. The premise behind this film is that an energy field was created in the atmosphere to power aircraft. This has stuck with me all that time and I used to think about it quite often.

The other film I mentioned earlier, Les Maîtres du temps, I have found on YouTube and will watch later. I can’t find it to stream and it costs a whopping GBP40 on DVD because it’s so rare. Having looked into it a little it looks like a joint production between the French, the BBC and Hungary so I expect it will be weird as fuck.

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Sehnsucht – Rammstein

Look, you know what you are getting with a Rammstein album. Excellent, hard German industrial metal – or whatever genre the posh people think it is – which I’ve just checked and it is Neue Deutsche Härte apparently. This is Rammstein’s second album. I first heard this band in the early 2000s when a friend, Sara, gave me two albums because she had to many and she thought I would like it. I mean, she wasn’t wrong. This band is one of my all time favourites.

What you need to know is that you should have all the Rammstein albums and you should play them regularly. Don’t think too much about the lyrics, I’ve found it’s best not to know. This band is amazing.

This album has Engel, Du Hast, and Bück dich all massive songs with excellent live performances.

It would appear that many very good albums begin with an S. Or it’s that many decent album titles just happen to begin with an S. I’ve found in life it’s often helpful to think about the direction of causality.

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