Tag: review

Posted on

Diamonds and Pearls – Prince

There was a time when I liked listening to Prince, or whatever his name became. I saw him live on the Diamonds and Pearls tour in Earl’s Court Arena and I was really impressed with the show. The man is a genius. For some bizarre reason I just wanted him to play “Anarchy in the UK”, I think it was his guitar sound, it had that punk edge to it.

This is a good album. It’s different. Not metal and a bit funk and pop, but I still like it. I don’t think you’d get far putting this stuff on at a disco but it is brilliant. It also takes me back to the carefree times of the early 1990s!

My favourites are:

  • Cream
  • Gett Off
  • Willing and Able

I’d rate this 5 stars.

Posted on

The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here – Alice In Chains

Alice In Chains are an awesome band. I find their music haunting and beautiful. I reckon that the first few albums are just brilliant and after that the newer albums seem to sound the same. If I want slow heavy ghostly rock then this is an album I’ll play. It’s a newer album to me and is therefore subject to the Old Dog problem.

Anything by this band is worth a listen.

Posted on

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

First off: I haven’t read the books. I probably won’t. I don’t get a great deal of time to read and so when I do I read other stuff I find interesting. I’m currently reading “Ring World” by Larry Niven and have been for about 4 months!

Second thing: People who eat from noisy packets should be escorted from the cinema. I go to the cinema about once a week and last night was the first time for quite a while where there were idiots eating from extremely noisy crinkly packets. I could understand it if you sneak food into the auditorium in a plastic bag and quickly get food out and make a “one-off” noise but making noise all the way through the film is not acceptable. It displays a complete lack of empathy and care.

Thirdly: Since I haven’t read this book this communication is simply about what I thought of the film and not how it did as an adaptation.

Overall, it was a good film. Very well made and filmed. The acting is ok and the storyline worked well, possibly apart from the final five minutes which left me a little non-plussed. Out of it all I think I liked the chariot ride the best. Well, that’s not much written for a film of 146 minutes but it’s not outstanding.

I do like the look of the Capital and the politics. It makes it quite interesting. The fashion looks good but then again flamboyant costumes have been used for years to enhance films. I can’t help thinking that the same story has been told many times. We all know how it’s going to end. I keep thinking of “The Running Man” and how this is essentially just a cross between that and “Battle Royale”.

It’s all cyclical, I guess. When I grew up I think that Swallows and Amazons was still quite a big thing for kids to read along with the Famous Five and also the Hobbit stuff. Over time franchises grow and decline giving a snap shot of the teen zeitgeist. Harry Potter and then the Vampire crap will all become a thing of the past with children only reading it because their parents buy it for them thinking it’s good stuff while a new story will rise and sell shed-loads. Is Lord Of The Rings really (I mean really) that good? This cycle is probably going to get worse with bigger blockbusters with a shorter lifespan because information travels so much more quickly via the internet now. My conclusion is that the grand-themes will return but jacketed within different characters, leading each generation to think they have “their” thing. Ha ha. It’s all been done before.

 

Addition 4 hours later:
Potential Spoiler

When Katniss fires her lightning conductor at the force field it breaks the shield. That’s fine but then there’s loads of roofing and girders crashing down to the ground. If you have a force field you don’t need a solid structure too. I don’t understand what was going on here. It doesn’t fit with the technology in the film.

Posted on

Thor – The Dark World

This is a really enjoyable film. It is funny, predictable and grand. Finally, superhero films have grown up.

I went to see this film in 3D as the showing time suited me better than a standard 2D showing. I don’t normally like 3D films as the 3D effect adds nothing to the enjoyment of the film for me. It’s a rather pointless gimmick [I am planning to write about my response to 3D at another time]. I was generally quite impressed as there weren’t too many gratuitous 3D shots and nothing in the film seemed out of place.

I like the CGI and battle scenes. Normally CGI battle scenes seem too busy and too much blurring. I struggle to make sense of what is going on on-screen. Thor did this well with sensible battle scenes and nothing over the top. A battle recently didn’t like was Superman’s final fight in his latest film. I like the fact that the people of Asgard use swords to fight, even with all their tech, it allows for good scenes in films. The final destruction was well done and not over the top as most films tend to make it.

The plot line doesn’t really matter. Once you invent “gods” and mythical creatures you can do anything you want in terms of plot [much like Doctor Who] and creatures [much like Doctor who]. The last part of the film and the epilogue just go to show you can just make-shit-up. Five infinity stones? Wow, they suddenly appeared from nowhere and can now be used for future films, clever but not thrilling. By the way, I don’t read graphic novels and so have no idea if these are in the books.

The cast was stellar and hammed it up brilliantly. Nice to see an old version of the Doctor in there and also nice to see Rene Ruso pop up, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen her in anything since Lethal Weapon 3.

This film was good fun and well done. I laughed out loud many times, on occasions by myself, but I don’t care.

Posted on

Gravity

I went to see this film and was rather excited about it. When I go to the cinema I generally don’t watch the trailers. Most trailers seem to give too much away about the film and if you see them once then you don’t need to see them again. If it is a film of which I am already aware and am looking forward to then I won’t watch the trailer and I will continue to read my book (on the Kindle app). Occasionally there’s a trailer that makes me look up and Gravity was one like that. Firstly it’s in space and I like space stuff. Secondly it was directed by . This was enough to make me very excited. Since I first saw the trailer I have avoided seeing it advertised since, I don’t want to know any more about the film.

I was rather worried that my expectations for this film were going to be too high. I have seen a number of films where I have been overly looking forward to them and have ultimately been disappointed as the film didn’t live up to expectations.

I needn’t have worried.

The opening shot was awesome [literally]. The rest of the film was beautifully filmed. It looks just stunningly gorgeous. I even decided to see it in 3D and in the past this has tended to remove something from the film but this was really well done. I won’t write too much because the trailer is so minimal and I don’t want to give anything away up in this section. Basically, apart from some simple scientific issues, this film is absolutely brilliant. I’d even go see it again. I am happy with the scientific short-cuts, as the film would not have worked or flowed as well if it had been truly simulated.

Go see this film. I dare you to be disappointed.

SPOILER ALERT

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of errors I picked up on. You can’t get out of a space suit in about a minute. It takes about an hour to get the whole thing on so this was a little imperfect. When returning to Earth the astronauts have their backs to the ground, Bullock’s return was filmed in such a way as to imply she was heading face down, or facing the direction of motion. There’s more analysis over at Phil Plait’s blog pages at Slate.com

Posted on

Ender’s Game

Wow!

I have bought the book but will read it after seeing the film. I’m currently working my way through Ringworld by Larry Niven. Back to the film:

It was ace. I really enjoyed it. I didn’t know a great deal about it before I went. I’d had a small synopsis from a friend and so went with a complete open mind. I loved it. The visuals were really good and the story was rather excellent. Go and see it.

I’m trying desperately to not give anything away but for me there were two moments when my jaw hit the floor. I guess if you’ve read the book you’ll know what these are.

It was great.

 

I don’t like the descriptions by the press of it being Harry Potter in space. That’s not what it is about. It’s a story with a wonderful political background and reflects on the politics of the time. Whereas Harry Potter is just the latest in a long line of book series that sell lots, it a generational thing. Every generation has “their” Harry Potter, or Famous Five, or Swallows and Amazons. My main issue was that Ender looked like a young Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory and I had to work hard to remove that thought as I watched.

Posted on

Device – Device

This album is from the singer dude from Disturbed. Let’s face it, it sounds like a Disturbed album. It’s good. Not outstanding, but good.

He does have a song with a woman singing along with him. I don’t like that.

Posted on

Escape Plan

This film was better than the trailers would make out. It was quite good fun although had one MASSIVE and annoying misunderstanding of science. Stallone and Schwarzenegger were both quite entertaining and the whole film worked well. If you want 90 or so minutes of fun and a little plot then it’s well worth the time-investment.

SPOILER ALERT – Do not read any further unless you want to know!

The idea of a prison owned and run by very rich people is sensible enough. Prisons are already run by profit making private companies so I don’t have any issues with that. The main premise of the prison was to keep these people out of society (and to gain information from them). But, this seemed a little expensive. If these people are as bad as thought then it would be massively cheaper just to kill them. There’s no point in keeping them alive (unless you need some information from them and that could be done much cheaper). Is it more morally right to keep people detained without trial instead of killing them, when the bottom line is profit I don’t think so.
It would have been nice to see Stallone’s partner suffer a little more with dirty objects as the film made it quite clear he was very OCD about dirt.
Generally the film was quite accurate to reality. A prison on a ship, done that, there were prison ships on the Medway during the Napoleonic wars. A constantly moving ship in the ocean? No problem with that. Do the prisoners know they are on a ship? Happy that it could be kept from them although every ship I’ve ever been on vibrates with the thump of the engine. It has been a while though.

My Biggest Problem with this film:

The Coriolis effect does NOT, I repeat NOT make the water flow down a plug hole or toilet in a particular direction. If you understand physics a little you would know why. I’m not going to debunk that particular part of the film here. JFGI. Sometimes I hate script writers, ignorance is not an excuse for messing up the science.

Posted on

Demonstrous – Demonstrous

Somehow I ended up downloading this from iTunes, probably following a “what other people bought link”. I was searching for some music rather like Slayer and Evile but something a bit new.

What I got I would pretty much call an instant classic. This album is awesome. It’s got all the elements that make a great thrash album. There are chugging riffs, melodies, awesome vocals. I would recommend this to anyone who likes a good bit of thrash.

Looking into the band I can see that they only managed this one album. Fair enough. The best music seems to come from the friction and hatred from working together to produce something that works.

This album is well worth the money.

Posted on

Denim and Leather – Saxon

I love a bit of Saxon. That great NWOBHM sound. Two guitars, bass, drums and vocals. Nothing else needed.

Denim and Leather

I bought this off iTunes about a year ago as part of a multi-album pack. I don’t like they get lumped together in the music app though so I edit the meta data and split the albums up with their own album art work. iTunes HATES me doing this. Recently I did this with Suicidal Tendencies and iTunes went ape-shit at syncing with my phone and I have to rebuild my complete library. I hate iTunes most of the time.

This album is awesome. I originally had the Best of Saxon on music cassette and played it loads. This album has some of the greats from there and others too.

My highlights are:

Denim and Leather
Princess of the Night
20,000 Feet

It’s real party music (or at least I think it is).

Privacy Policy Proudly powered by WordPress