REC

Yet another Blair Zombie Project but this Spanish film actually delivers the goods, unlike Diary of the Dead. It's very claustrophobic, the pacing is taut and the framing is excellent, despite being a hand-held cam. The steadiness of the cam also doesn't allow much for motion sickness. And the climax, in night vision, is totally classic. Dude, if you aren't freaked out by it, I salute you, you got nerves of steel.

Final Fantasy 7 : Advent Children

Probably a good advertisement for a Playstation 4 Final Fantasy game. I wonder why the Japs never quite got their footing on CGI cartoons, always catering to the same pre-adolescent crowd, with incoherent verbiage and video game action scenes. Take a page out of Pixar's books, my Japanese brahskis.

Slumdog Millionaire

How on Earth did this win so many Oscars? Pretty meh to me. I wish there was something along the lines of "struggles in the slums turning into an epiphany at the end" or "Sisyphian task of never escaping the ghettoes" but this is just a rags-to-riches starry-eyed love story. In essence not that much different from a Bollywood story albeit you do see the seamier side of Mumbai, which Bollywood are wont to show. Anyways, not that different from a typical Indian story, throw in some mirch masala (problems) between two lovers and it all ends nicely. You do feel good after it ends but me, being racist against "kerlings" in general, sees nothing great at all about this. The celebratory song n dance routine at the end credits is nice, though. The host of the quiz show throwing that answer and the eventual result is also blah and predictable. One and a half out of five stars.

Superhero Movie

Yeah yeah I'm scraping bottom barrel with this. But just switch your mind off and enjoy the visual gags (some recycled) and it ain't that bad. Mostly frame-by-frame parodies of Spiderman, Batman and the X-Men, it does throw up some genuine laughs. However, when the jokes suck, they really suck, as in the Professor Xavier's family sequence. Generally not as good as the Scary Movie series but not as bad as Epic/Disaster/Date Movie.

Ip Man

Typical chop-socky uber-heroic martial artist fare. Ip Man was one of the great proponents of Wing Chun (historical Chinese martial arts) and the sensei to Bruce Lee, to boot. This one follows his early years, as the shining beacon of Futt Shan (where another Chinese martial arts hero, Wong Fei Hoong also came from) and his struggles through the Japanese occupancy. The fights are choreographed well and I'm a big fan of Donnie Yen, the lead. But it's all been done before and even if this one does it well, one can't escape the feeling of ennui. What's there to separate this from "Once Upon a Time in China" or "Fearless" or "Fist of Legend" or "Fist of Fury", etc. etc.?

Got these two:-

The Undertones - The Undertones

Derry's finest. Proves to be more catchier than the Buzzcocks. Lots of interesting bits make what seems like Ramones covers more interesting - the tom toms on "True Confessions", dissonant guitar solos and Chuck Berry riffs on the bonus track "Get over You". "Teenage Kicks" is still damn irresistible. Makes me want to check out other stuff from them.

David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything that happens will happen today

Finds them both in fine form. Don't think is electronic gospel as they described it, anything remoteley approaching gospel is the choir vocals on "One Fine Day". Otherwise an electronically bolstered rock record that has the same mood as U2's Zooropa. Byrne is in top form, sounding alternatively Hindustani, African and Jewish at places. The songs are pretty structurally dense and the production thick as a pea soup fog. The melodies are similar in feel to Byrne's "Like Humans Do", whereas the uber-catchy "Life is Long" can give any Heads hit a run for its money. Fucking "A".

Black Flag - Damaged

This is supposed to be seminal hardcore, but I suppose I like my hardcore more melodic ala The Replacements' first two albums or EPs. Introspective for the most part. But I don't like Hank's voice that much.

Punisher War Zone

Tanked at the box office and put on DVD release. It's supposed to a black and white portrayal of a vigilante yet discounts the fact that the mafia are living breathing people and not meat on the move. Some devastating violence, though, although the editing is flashy. The lead looks like Steven Seagal.

Role Models

Yo! Yo! Yo! Get your dick jokes here. Dick jokes, everyone. Dick jokes cheap! It's a Seann William Scott movie, what'cha expect? My gf wanted to watch Race to Witch Mountain (another piece of crud) but this one fits our timetable so we saw this. On the upside, pretty blatantly ok waste of time.

Big Star - No. 1 Record/Radio City - I still don't like both much after relistens and relistens. Lacks the wistfulness and melancholia of "Third" which is great. The slow songs work best - "Thirteen" and "I'm in Love with a Girl". Give me the Raspberries or the Only Ones.

Mothers of Invention - We're only in it for the Money - The pastiches of 60s songs aren't particularly clever or witty, although done well enough. I like the musique concrete slabs better.

Brian Eno - Here Comes the Warm Jets/Before And After Science/Another Green World/Taking Tiger Mountain(By Srategy) - New wave when there wasn't New Wave. Pretty good sonic explorations all with underlying quirky pop songs. Dislike the ambient shit on TTM(BS) though.

Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey/Garvey's Ghost - The former an excellent roots piece with "Back to Africa" militant slants. The latter a dub version of the aforesaid albeit without the spacey reverbs made famous by King Tubby. Both quite good.

Jeff Beck Group - Truth/Beck-O-La - Pretty early metal. Pretty deftly executed. Nice to hear Rod the Mod belting out seminal material also instead of the old housewife shit he does now.

King Crimson - Lark's Tongue in Aspic - Again, complex music which is emotionally evocative. Love this. Sounds like Dream Theater is trying to play like this but fail. (I only have one DT album, though)

Miles Davis - A Tribute to Jack Johnson - Just two long songs of mostly one-chord vamps with not much logical progression. I think it would have worked better if he had chopped up the songs into smaller ones but that's just me. The playing is exemplary, though.

New Order - Movement (Deluxe Edition) - Doesn't add much to my cassette copy as I own all of the singles on comps. A transitional album at best.

Of Montreal - Satanic Twins (Remixes) - Remixes of songs from Sunlandic and Satanic Panic. Haven't heard the originals so no idea how they fare. "Rapture Rapes the Muses" outshines the rest.

Macca & Wings - Red Rose Speedway - Surprisingly, "My Love" is not half as schmaltzy here as heard by its own what with the other gems here, in fact it reminds me of "Bluebird". Favourites are "C Moon", which can seque nicely into Toots and the Maytals' "Sweet and Dandy" and the inebriated "Hi Hi Hi".

Macca & Wings - Venus and Mars - Nice pop songs sandwiched between moments of pomp ("Rock Show"). I think Macca is the only one who had a consistent period of career following the break-up of that band I dread to mention.

Big Country - The Crossing/The Beloved - Happiness - Both childhood favourites until my cassettes conked out.

Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance - New wave post-punk. The eclecticism can be a bit over-bearing.

Peter Tosh - Legalise it - Good enough to have a toke to. That's the whole point, innit?

Public Enemy - Nation of Millions - Replacement after I threw it out for niggas being ungrateful to the States for providence.

Prefab Sprout - Gunman and Other Stories - Harks back to Steve McQueen. Nowhere as good as Jordan but much better than Andromeda Heights, which only had one or two good songs.

Something Else by the Kinks - Masterful tunes backed by grandiose-sounding instruments which somebody here mistook for baroque pop (well, the structures sure ain't baroque)/Arthur - Fail to see the concept as well but nice enough tunes.

This Mortal Coil - It'll End in Tears - Excellent side project by the dudes at 4AD, with cameos by the likes of Liz Fraser. Semi-instrumental. The covers are good, especially "Song to the Siren". The rocky "Not Me" is a square peg but rocks my testicles anyway.

XTC - Apple Venus/Wasp Star - Lavishly orchestrated pop songs. NICE! Even if not a Dukes album, they hark back to the Beatles and the Kinks.

The Dukes of Stratosfear - Chips from a Chocolate Fireball - Novelty or tribute album? You decide. The 60s acts it apes are immediately apparent. I like this too.

Wire - Chairs Missing? - So far removed from Pink Flag it might be a different band altogether. Takes time to digest.

Who watches the Watchmen?

Patrick does, apparently.

Patrick went into the cinema expecting a post-modernist masterpiece, and all he got was a nearly frame-by-frame translation of the comic, with huge chunks of the dialogue reproduced without the nitty gritty realistic feel. Patrick also wonders y the soundtrack is only effective with two songs - "The Times They Are A-Changing" and "Sound of Silence" with Hendrix's "Watchtower" all too obvious. Patrick also finds the voice-over narration extremely irritating, with that same gruff growly hoarse voice like the recent Batman.

Patrick also can't identify with any of the characters, at least in the comics, Dan Dreiberg was a pretty sympathetic character. Patrick also feels sorry for those who haven't read the comics as they'd be lost within the first fifteen minutes. Patrick doesn't think much of the changed ending, even if he didn't like the ending in the comics that much either.

All in all, Patrick feels this is a pointless exercise, nothing new for the comics fans and those who haven't read it will have trouble taking in the minutiae of the proceedings.

P.S. In honour of Alan Moore, who likes to refer to himself as the third person.

Burn After Reading

Caught this over the weekend. Besides the slight niggle that every profanity was censored in the cinema it was playing in, I hugely enjoyed this. As a spy spoof, I suppose it is dead-on with the intelligence community running around like a chicken without a head. I suppose I should complain that one somewhat likeable character gets offed (there aren't really any likeable ones otherwise) pretty early. Dunno how it stands with other Coen Bros comedies as Fargo and The Big Lebowski, maybe not much, but passes the time better for me than the more serious fare such as No Country for Old Men. And the George Clooney character, with the trawling randomly for sex and paranoid of men in black, gives me deja vu about myself.