Category: Other

The stuff that isn’t about wrestling.

The Beginner’s Guide

I don’t know whether I enjoyed my time with The Beginner’s Guide.  I’m not even sure whether I understood the game.  In fact, the only thing I’m 100% sure on is that there will be people out there who will claim it’s not even a game.  Because people are dicks like that.  Roughly 48 hours after completing it I honestly don’t know what I think, which makes writing about it pretty hard.  However, I also feel the need to get my thoughts down on paper, or at least whatever you call the unlimited paper of the internet.

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The Martian

Science is cool.  That is the idea that sits at the beating heart of The Martian.  Without it nothing in this film works and yet it could have so easily been its downfall.  Based on a book which tried it’s hardest to be scientifically accurate, The Martian may not have been the easiest conversion to the big screen.  Science may be cool, but on a cinema screen it is rarely sexy.  Yet somehow Drew Goddard’s script makes it not only work, but makes it sparkle.  Throw in Ridley Scott doing his best work in years and The Martian may well be unmissable.

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A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods was a must see for me.  Not because I’ve read the book, which shamefully I haven’t, but because I once set out to spend three weeks on the Appalachian Trail.  Unbearably heavy rucksack strapped to my back, me and three friends started in the exact same place Robert Redford and Nick Nolte do in this film.  Except we were sweating a hell of a lot more thanks to Georgia’s unbearable humidity.  The fact that I only made it twenty-four hours before hitchhiking off the trail and that it was one of the worst twenty-four hours of my life is neither here nor there.

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Halloween Binge: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven’s influence on the horror genre can not be underestimated.  As the great Kim Newman put it, ‘Wes Craven reinvented horror at least four times, most directors don’t even manage it once.’  Arguably, his most telling influence on the genre was the creation of Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  A film I was inspired to return to following Craven’s recent passing.  However, that didn’t seem enough and I decided to keep going.  In the last few weeks, I’ve watched every single Nightmare on Elm Street film, including crossovers and remakes.  Why?  Krueger only knows.

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Until Dawn

Films vs games. It’s a discussion that never seems to go away. Whether it is Hollywood’s feeble attempts to convert some of our greatest games into cinema or gaming’s wish to be like its more glamorous cousin. The two seem to be unable to leave each other alone. Which brings us nicely to Until Dawn, a teen slasher masquerading as a video game.

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The Visit

Horror and comedy are often dismissed as easy genres.  Every year a plethora of films populated by jump scares and jokes about dicks are packaged up and inflicted on the public.  They’re also inevitably crap.  The truth is to make a horror film or a comic film is just as hard as making a sweeping war epic.  To combine the two, is arguably even harder.

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Bill

The story of Bill needs no introduction.  I mean everyone has heard the tale of Shakespeare, who is still going by Bill at this point, being kicked out of his lute band (Mortal Coil) and moving to London where he and his first play get embroiled in a Catholic plot to kill Queen Elizabeth.  It’s basically history 101.

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Brand New at the Usher Hall

If you took a second to look around the crowd before Brand New took the stage at the Usher Hall, you would see an interesting sight.  The room is filled with all the usual suspects, but they’re all the usual suspects from a variety of different gigs.  There are people wearing Nails t-shirts and others wearing lumberjack shirts.  It’s a veritable mish-mash of musical ideas.  All here to see one alternative rock band from Long Island, New York.

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Legend

Creating worlds around bad people is a tricky business.  When done well, you get shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.  Filled with unpleasant people, who do bad things and also their families and the crap that they have to deal with in that world.  Importantly though, we are never offered excuses for what they do, but instead just given a glimpse into what motivates them.  When it’s done badly, you get self-aggrandising crap that tries to hide the fact these characters are bastards.  Legend sits somewhere in between.

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