Tag: review

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Johnny English Strikes Again

Well, today I took a trip to the Cineworld cinema in Harlow. Not the one in the Harvey Centre but the one on the edge of town. I can’t remember the last time I went to Harlow town centre but I’m pretty sure I thought it was shit. Harlow, you see, is a new town. It’s a classic example of 1960s urban planning with a concrete town centre to boot. It may have improved I guess but don’t know because I didn’t go there.

The cinema I patronised was close to the river Stort but that isn’t tidal. In fact there are no tidal reaches close by so I can’t give you a decent idea of where the tide was at. I can tell you it is pretty much a full moon out this evening. Also, a new one for me in the 40 odd years that I’ve lived and moved around this part of Essex I actually saw deer in the first field coming out of the village.

I should probably get on with the film and the review type stuff. I rated this film on IMDB and there’s a communication here detailing the scoring process. You can even search in the little box on the right to see more reviews and things or use the drop down menu directly below my header picture. I tweeted my IMDB score:

So, as you can see, 4/10 is a pretty pants score. There’s been a few others recently that scored that and there’s even a film where I went completely away from this trusted format. Why did this film get a 4? Mostly because it was shit.

I did like the idea that they were trying to train Johnny English into understanding that the world has moved on and that women can have jobs of power although they could have gone into this much more. The idea that women should be treated the same as men, although it probably doesn’t work so well in this movie franchise compared with Bond because Johnny English is generally a fool whereas Bond is full of misogynistic toxic behaviour that deserves to be corrected and then consigned to the rubbish heap of shit things.

No, this film was pretty shit. Other people in the cinema laughed plenty and I chuckled a couple of times but it wasn’t far enough on the dinosaur discovering a new world idea and it wasn’t enough Mr Bean.

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K – Kula Shaker

I bought this album because didn’t they feel like they could be a rock band? I’m sure there was one good song.

I’ll pop it on the music maker thingies in the house.

<waits>

First song: “Hey Dude”, seems ok, I guess. Nope. Change that. Got to the chorus.

<skip>

Nope.

<skip>

<repeats>

Oh, here’s a song called Hush. Pretty good song. But it’s NOT theirs. It was by Deep Purple. That’s why it’s a good song. It also isn’t on this album. I added after downloading it.

 

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Just Say Ozzy – Ozzy Osbourne

The thing about this album is that the bass sounds so bloody lovely. It’s a live record and when you look at who’s involved you see that Geezer Butler is playing bass guitar and you go “ah, now that makes sense”.

The tracks on this are all proper Ozzy. Really good songs with blistering guitar work.

Miracle Man, Bloodbath in Paradise, Shot In The Dark, Tattooed Dancer, Sweet Leaf and War Pigs.

The last two are Sabbath classics. This is a great album [EP], well worth a listen, but not necessarily worth the £15 on Amazon I just saw! I’d recommend Tribute instead.

Zakk Wylde on guitar, Geezer on bass and Randy Castillo on drums? What more do you want?

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Judgement Night – Various Artists

This perfectly amazing album is what happens when a music label crosses over its artists. I will write about this album as if the second song had never appeared on it as I think it’s a travesty. Here’s what you need to know:

“Just Another Victim” by Helmet and House Of Pain: an excellent opener giving you a taste of what’s coming. The grinding opening riff rips your brain out. The pace change half way through bounces your grey cells once more. Brilliant.

“Me, myself & my microphone” by Run DMC and Living Colour: ringing chords leading to heavy riffs and a hiphop beat. Heavy crashing sounds.

“Judgement Night” by Biohazard and Onyx: Yeah, motherfucker. A bouncy beat with squealy guitar sounds throughout. A bonkers song.

“Disorder” by Slayer and Ice-T: Sorry Ice-T but Tom Araya smashes your scream, he takes it, rolls it up into a small box and disintegrates it to a million pieces. We don’t need your war. A rolling beat with classic Slayer riff and solo until halfway. Hold on to your hats because this song knocks you off your feet. It hits you the way the LA riots hit LA.

“Another Body Murdered” by Faith No More and Boo Ya T.R.I.B.E. A classic Faith No More start to this song with pumping rap lyrics and the gentle piano in the background. The screams part way through are horror-movie standard.

“I Love You Mary Jane” by Cypress Hill and Sonic Youth: this is one chilled out song. A slow rolling beat with the distinct vocal style of Cypress Hill. This works. It’s relaxed. It’s strange and smooth.

“Freak Momma” by Mudhone and Sir Mix-A-Lot: I know little of Mudhone but what I do know is this song is in their distinctive style. The beat catches up with itself at times and tries to overtake in your head. Almost a summer garden song.

“Missing Link” by  Dinosaur Jr. and Del the Funky Homosapien: a groovy bass line with rapping and a singing lead guitar. Another chilled out song. Something to relax to.

“Come and Die” by Therapy? and Fatal: imagine you’ve got zombies chasing you around the neighbourhood. You are jogging away, hoping you don’t turn a corner and get caught by a separate hoard. That’s the pace and feel of this song. It’s also the music that should be playing in the movie where you are running from zombies. It’s a meta song.

“Real Thing” by Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill: want to bounce your head, nodding with the beat while walking or chilling in your sofa in the garden. Well, get the wickerwear out, put the cushions on and lay back and relax. Hold a finger in the air and direct the music from your slouch. Feel the beat take you.

The song I’ve not mentioned is “Fallin'” because it’s shit.

This entire album was the soundtrack to a chunk of my time at university. It was amazing and still is. It has that raw powerful sound of anger and sadness. I feel like we haven’t moved on. Society is still suffering and these songs and artists could easily make all this again.

At its time this was an amazing album, a collaboration of artists of metal and rap who weren’t Aerosmith. This crossover is brilliant. I love it. I really love it.

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Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop – Jeff Beck

This album was originally bought on music cassette and has since bee played a reasonable number of times. My ignorance comes to the fore here as I don’t really know who Jeff Beck is. I think he wrote “Hi Ho Silver Lining” but I could be mistaken. I don’t want to Wikipedia him because that’s cheating. My suspicion is that he used to be a member of an awesome 60/70s rock band and then was part of a few super-groups.

This album was late 80s or early 90s and it’s good fun. It’s not rock by a long way but it has gentle rhythms and sampling along with some spoken word lyrics. I quite like it as something different for the summer evenings. Perfectly pleasant for company I guess.

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Jar Of Flies / SAP – Alice In Chains

It has been a while since I wrote some stuff about albums I own and what I think about them. Hopefully I’ll have a push to produce more communications over the next while. It’d be nice to get a load of stuff written that isn’t just pretty pictures I’ve taken. This site was turning into a little bit of a photo-blog and while those communications are important I should be getting back to the purposes of originality.

Jar Of Flies.

Don’t listen to this if you are slightly depressed and alone. It’s a struggle to listen to this EP when perfectly happy and emotionally stable and alone so any worse off and you need to hide your shoe laces away.

This EP perfectly uses the haunting vocal style of the lead singer [dead – drugs] and the gentle guitar sounds of Seattle. Every song on this album makes me feel. This was one of the first ten or so CDs I bought, I think I owned it before I owned a CD player. This EP is perfect and tearsome.

You must listen to it at some point. Preferably when you are well. And in a brightly lit room. Laying on the floor, in the dark, with sunglasses on and beer in your system is not the ideal listening position.

Well, it is really but we shouldn’t go there. This album takes me back to 1994 with the opening three seconds.

Get your fucking hair cut.

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Mile 22

Yesterday I went to the Cineworld cinema at Rochester to see the film Mile 22. I didn’t know what to expect but as it was rated 18 I thought it might be better than some of the other films currently showing. As I journeyed the sun was shining and it was a lovely day, only ruined by my need to tidy the garden and pull some weeds. The tidal state of the river Medway was quite high.

River Valley
River Valley

You can’t see a great deal of the river in this photograph but it is there and was lovely and still giving nice reflections of the valley sides opposite.

As is usual I rated this film on IMDB when I left the cinema. I also then share stuff via Twitter because once it’s embedded in this page the tweet looks pretty good! You should see something written about my rating system and it just so happens I have an explanation in this communication.

Why the low score? Well, this film was shit. That’s why. I didn’t actually walk out although I did think about it. I was less than enthused about ten minutes in. After that the film just kept getting worse.

I don’t like shaky hand-held camera work. It’s lazy because it means there’s more space in the choreography of fighting than there should be. Hand held cameras give the idea that you are part of the fight and therefore you can’t see all the fight. You have no fucking clue what is going on. I gave up trying to track what was happening at times and let the scene play out and I would back-fill the fight from who was left standing at the end.

Some of the vocals were so poorly recorded or had such terrible accents that I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Had I been watching at home I would have put the subtitles on. Which wouldn’t have made a huge difference to my understanding of the film because the plot was fucking terrible.

The Mark Wahlberg character was a piece of shit. We had some back story about him being really gifted and using “pain” to stop his mental thoughts but he was just an abusive person. I hoped he died. As a group of my friends would say “he’s a right proper Cynthia”. He was the leader of a super-secret cell of USA government hard bastards who went in and did the job and got out. Except we saw them resign their posts before using this super-power and therefore weren’t members of the CIA while they were blowing shit up.

One of the female characters was so cool under fire that it was highlighted by the film but then she couldn’t hold her emotions together when she was talking to her ex-husband. What a load of toss. Bullshit.

I don’t even want to go into all the problems with the plot and how it doesn’t really fit together or make sense. This film was terrible. I hated it.

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A Simple Favour

As part of an entertainment weekend I booked a seat to see A Simple Favour. A film about something. I didn’t know really, it was a film on at the right time for me to get to the cinema. There are things to be done you see. Also, hopefully it would stop me overdoing it at the SITD gig. There was a method to my planning. The last thing I needed was a big hangover.

It was raining as I drove to the cinema and so I did not notice the status of any solar-lunar effects on the Earth. I can tell you the tide was just below high when I drove away as the skies had cleared to sunshine.

I rated this film on IMDB and there’s a communication which covers the rating system called IMDB Ratings. Then my customary behaviour is to share my score via Twitter.

So, what did I think of this film? It was alright I think. It wasn’t super stunning or scary. It was a little full of too-perfect people, although I guess they had their flaws exposed as the movie went on. I guess my problem is I’m not sure who was the baddie. I am pretty sure both the main female characters were not heroes.

I think I saw a movie similar to this a couple of years back. A woman gets all scheming and fakes her own death. Etc.

Maybe we are meant to find both women horrific in their own ways.

I think I have one comment about the rest of the school mums and dads. This film had school mums and also a single dad who was probably a gay character. Perhaps the film-makers could have realised that there are life situations where the dad might be staying at home in a heterosexual relationship. I don’t think there was a need to make him gay. Unless, of course, there are quotas. On second thoughts, well done movie for showing a gay dad in a positive light and messing with the heads of all those crazy christians in the USA. Anything to get in their heads.

This film was a good waste of two hours. It’s worth a watch but maybe don’t pay for it.

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[:SITD:] – Electrowerkz

Throughout the rain I struggled yesterday to get to Angel. Well, it wasn’t a struggle but I wanted drama! Smith and I got to Angel with plenty of time for a few drinks before heading to Electrowerkz for an evening of music and atmosphere.

First band up on this quadruple bill was My Hysteria. They had a good solid beat but the songs were a little long and the singer needed more variation in his voice. He also didn’t manage to fit his audience participation in with the music but maybe that will change for him as the band progresses.

My Hysteria
My Hysteria

Second band were called Matt Hart. That may have been the name of the singer, the guitarist or the band. I don’t know. I also missed the beginning of the set. My notes go as follows:

Singer. Guitarist. Heavy bass drum beat, samples. Heavy guitar. Not quite working. Not sure why. Needs a live drummer??? Distorted voice. Lacks an “energy”.

I guess that’s something they could work on as well. I do understand that this reviewing stuff is very subjective and so should you. We probably don’t like the same things. However, I do like a decent live drummer.

Matt Hart
Matt Hart

Thirdest up was a band I had seen twice before. Biomechanimal are a regular support band over here and they played before the headliners. The main question is whether I thought they were any good. I’m not sure they were. My issues with this band are that the vocals are too distorted, I can’t hear the bass player and apart from the last two songs which were very “dance” the rest were a bit, meh. I have previously written about this band and commented then that I couldn’t hear the bass player. Disclosure: I play bass.

Biomechanimal
Biomechanimal

Finally we get to the German headliners. Shadows In The Dark or [:SITD:]. They were really good. I’d seen them at M’era Luna before. I like listening to their albums. I do think that their sound can get a little repetitive and so I thought it might be a bit like the Hocico gig. However, it was way better than that. The sound was very good. They proved that the right band in the right venue can be awesome. All their songs were enjoyable and the beat varied throughout to keep interest. It did not feel like an eighty minute set.

SITD
SITD

It was quite clear that the lead singer is suffering with his identity dealing with hair loss. I don’t think there’s ever any need to wear a beanie hat indoors. The main singer was reasonably energetic and even got down into the crowd to sing a verse and chorus of a song, a nice touch.

SITD
SITD

The [:SITD:] gig gets a solid 7.5 out of ten. I very pleasant and enjoyable evening drinking amaretto and cranberry juice. I definitely don’t have cystitis now!

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The Predator

This glorious afternoon I opted to stay in a darkened room and watch a film. The room was screen 7 at Rochester Cineworld cinema. You see, when you have a subscription you need to make sure you go enough to make that worth while. I could have stayed at home and learnt the songs for the next Disaster Area gig but I chose not to.

I failed to notice the state of the tide on the way to the cinema and it is quite unlike me to do that. Ever since I started mentioning it I have been a little obsessed although it is a quick and easy way to connect with nature, the sun and the moon. The tide was low when I left the film.

I rated this film on IMDB using the system explained within the words of the communication called IMDB Ratings.

This film was quite terrible. I only stayed until the end to see what would happen. I’m a big fan of the original movie Predator. It had Arnie and an alien and a misfit group of hard-core homo erotic troopers who all died one by one until Arnie had beat up the alien enough it decided to nuke itself out of existence.

This film had a misfit bunch of soldiers who were all bad men and heading to prison [I think, I’m not sure why they were all in the same bus]. There was a chap with Tourettes so that rude things could be said and blamed on Tourette’s syndrome when really he just said the toxic-masculine bullshit that the script writers really wanted to say. I’m pretty sure he had some stuff to say about “eating pussy”. It’s a shame because the actor playing the Tourette’s chap is really good and could probably pull that character off in a serious film.

There was a kid with ASD or high functioning autism. He seemed to cope pretty well when all the guns started going off. There was a brilliant throwaway line that autism is the next evolutionary level to let the movie goers know that this kids was the future.

There was a female scientist, a kind of Tia Carrere clone, who apparently:

“wrote the book on evolutionary biology”

I always thought that was Charles Darwin. When we first meet this actress she looks EXACTLY like a make-up advert with her head turned 1/4 on and hair flawlessly flowing down her shoulders. It was pissing ridiculous.

I looks as though the script writers just had gaps in the script with the words “insert science sounding shit here”. On that train of thought apparently a helicopter can “track another helicopter’s frequency”. Jesus.

It was disclosed that the Predator had been before in 1987 and another year. Predator 2 was in 1990. I’m not sure what year they said because they then claimed that it was coming to earth with an increasing frequency which is a pretty spectacular claim to make given just three datum points. Also, the predator was being chased to Earth and crash landed so I’m not sure that “intention” could be claimed.

This movie was enough for conspiracy dicks. It had secret aliens, a massive under dam base where thousands of people work on alien artifacts and secret government organisations run by a young man who seems to have extrapolated way too much from the limited data available. Also, this movie had

GUNS

Now, I know the original was full of guns and macho bullshit but it was an Arnie film. What the fuck did you expect? In this film it shows the American obsession that violence can cure anything. The gun can kill all things and rectify the problems facing the country. Got an alien dog running at you which doesn’t go down with a couple of bullets? Just shoot more bullets at it. This movie does not celebrate genius or alternative thinking. It celebrates a culture fantasising completely over small arms, and sometimes bigger weapons.

Arnie used his ingenuity to harm the Predator enough. This movie uses guns.

So, the primary female character explains at one point that the Predator left her alone when she was completely naked in the decontamination room. Does this come back to be used? Does this have any explanation later in the film. No! Because, fuck you. Don’t expect us to tie together all the plot points or even let this film make sense.

Save you money. Find Predator with Arnie on a streaming site and watch that. It’s awesome.

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