Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
There are a lot of parallels between the Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises. Both started quite small-scale, based around a specific idea, and as they’ve gone on they have got bigger and sillier and seemed to settle into what they want to be. They’ve also at this point, both peaked with their fifth film.
Boxing films are notoriously hard to pull off. They can go from the sublime to the ridiculous very easily, as director’s try to capture the frantic nature of the sport. The truth is that the best boxing films don’t focus on the sport itself, but the people involved in it. Which is exactly what Southpaw tries to do.
Footage has just been released of WWE 2K16, showing that… well it’s pretty much the same as all the other ones. WWE games have been running off the same tired engine for years now and even with a change in developer, it doesn’t look likely to stop anytime soon. Sadly, that engine just doesn’t work and creates an experience that has more in common with a fighting game than a wrestling game.
The Legend of Barney Thomson is born from the city it is set in. It’s humour, people and language are so Glaswegian that you wonder how it will go down to any audience not based in Scotland. Robert Carlyle’s debut film as a director is as Scottish as he is and sees both him and Emma Thompson steal the show.
If tough times create great music, then we can all be forgiven for getting a little bit excited about the new Lamb of God album. Throw in the fact that they are consistently one of the best heavy metal bands we have and Sturm Und Drang already feels like a contender for album of the year. However, after all the shit that Lamb Of God, and in particular lead singer Randy Blythe, have had to go through in the last couple of years, can it really stand up to fan’s expectations?
The rise of mobile gaming has led to a lot of crap. Free to play games, which in reality require you to pay several hundred pounds to actually achieve anything, and thousands of clones of more successful games. However, it’s also led to some very interesting developments in text adventure games and other experiences of that ilk. One example of that is Lifeline, a text adventure that sees you communicating with an astronaut who has been stranded on a moon.
It’s become a commonly held view that Pixar have been in a bit of a slump. Brave and Monsters University were hardly bad films, but they missed that bit of magic that has always made Pixar so special. While Cars 2 sadly goes down as one of their first genuine flops. However, with the release of Inside Out Pixar are proving that rumours of their demise were greatly exaggerated.
With competition rearing its head from Apple Music, Spotify have introduced a new feature. Discover Weekly. A weekly playlist put together by, I assume, an algorithm buried away in Spotify which look at what you’ve listened to and comes up with other bands that it thinks you might like. It’s a nice feature for those wanting to move outside of their musical comfort zone, but does it really work?
Wilson grabbed everyone’s attention with their debut album Full Blast Fuckery, a beer fuelled orgy of hard rock. Tracks like ‘Viking Pussies Fuck Off’ were perfect at catching the attention. This year they’re back with their second album, Right to Rise, which sees the band growing up and cementing themselves as one hell of a hard rock outfit.
In Marvel’s quest to conquer the universe, Ant Man has been their troubled production. With the news that Edgar Wright was dropping out three weeks before the start of filming, geekdom was thrown into turmoil as they already begun to lambast the Wrightless film. Sadly we will never see Wright’s version of one of Marvel’s more unusual superheroes, even though he and Joe Cornish still receive writing credits, and instead are left with Peyton Reed‘s effort.
Ramblings About Wrestling 