Category: Other

The stuff that isn’t about wrestling.

A Practical Guide to a Spectacular Suicide

A Practical Guide to a Spectacular Suicide is yet another film that managed to gain its funding through the use of the crowd, raising it’s £3000 through the use of Sponsume.  Directed by Graham Hughes and co written by him, Keith Grantham and Graeme McGeagh.  All 3 of whom only have one previous film to their name, 2010s The Big Slick which was made for only £200 and won a BAFTA New Talent Award for writing.  APGSS is a dark comedy and has been shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, it’s another one that is unlikely to make its way to a wider cinema release, but should at some point be available in one form or another.

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Coherence

Coherence is currently playing at the Edinburgh Film Festival and is a small independent sci-fi thriller.  It was directed, in his first feature film, by James Ward Byrkit, who is best known for his role as a writer on Rango.  Shot inside his own home, he decided against the use of a traditional script, instead just mapping out the major plot points.  This allowed the actors to improvise and brings a realist feel to the dialogue.

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A Discussion on Length

When you sit down to review an album there are many things that need to be thought about.  The most obvious being whether it is any good or not.  However, something that often gets overlooked is how long or how short an album is.  Unless an album is ridiculously short or ridiculously long it is very rarely a point that is raised and usually for good reason.  However, there is something to the idea that if an album gets it’s length wrong, it can skewer the whole thing.

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The Importance of a Title

When it comes to cinema there are a million reasons a film can fail and another million reasons a film can succeed.  One of the reasons that is often overlooked, is the title.  This week I went along to see The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, a charming film from the director of Amelie, Pierre Jeunet.  It was by no means my film of the year, but it was a sweet touching film about a genius child attempting to deal with the death of his brother and the rather eccentric family he has been born into.  Now despite this film coming out in a week that was, to put it nicely, slightly lacking in strong cinema releases, it completely failed to scrape the top ten.    So why was this?  Well the only thing I can think of is that people are being turned away by the title.

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Rock and Roll

Every couple of years some twat who has never actually seen a guitar writes an article claiming that ‘guitar music is dead’, as if it is some great scoop and actually true.  Which of course it isn’t, yes bands with guitars more often than not fail to top the charts, which is instead full of soulless crap (in the majority anyway), but any slight scratch below the surface shows that music with guitars is far from dead.  However, is it still cool?  I mean of course it’s cool, but is it really cool?  There was a time when rockstars were the coolest fuckers on the planet and had an amazing ability to do more drugs, drink more booze and fraternise with more young women than anyone else.  Is that era dead?  Are the current wave of rock bands lacking that little bit of va va voom?

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Linkin Park in 2014

I’m of a generation of rock and metal fans who probably all, despite what they may claim now, at one point loved Linkin Park.  They were releasing their best work when I was hitting that age where I was beginning to make my way over to the dark side, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the traditional musical formula I’d grown up with.  Therefore, to sit here and completely destroy Linkin Park would be very hypocritical, this band meant a lot to me once and while I’ve got past that, it doesn’t erase it from history.  Despite that, there is no denying that their recent output has all been a bit shit, as they disappeared up their collective arses into a world of synths and musical wankery.  Yet this year seems to have seen a turn around from the band, playing Hybrid Theory in full (still their best work) at Download was the first step and then they started promoting The Hunting Party, their most recent album, as a return to their rocking roots, but is it too late?  Even if The Hunting Party is great is there still a place for Linkin Park in the minds of people like me?

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Hollywood and the Curse of the Comedy Sequel

Much like the last article, this was originally going to be a review but I decided to do something a bit different.

 

Comedy sequels are notoriously difficult ground.  Ask someone to come up with a list of five good Hollywood examples and most people would struggle.  Most often they fail as they attempt to cover old ground, forgetting that often what is funny the first time around, has already become dull by the second.  The Hangover is probably the best recent example of this.  Two films after the original (which despite the amount of people who may claim differently, wasn’t that good itself) the formula has now been milked past any short shelf life it may have had and left the laughs behind a long time ago.

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The Art of the Comeback Album

This was originally going to be my review of the latest Pixies album.  However, I decided that was a bit boring and instead I’m doing a wider look at the idea of comeback albums.  Enjoy.

The last few years has seen the idea of the comeback become a bit of a trend.  With everyone from Refused to Crazy Town deciding that maybe the world needs them after all ( we really don’t Crazy Town) it’s become clear that coming back is the new black and in conjunction with that it raises the thorny issue of the comeback album.  Some bands do one, some bands stay far away.  One band who have recently decided to do a comeback album, although they have been touring in recent years, is the Pixies.  Now I should probably say this out of the bat, I bloody love the Pixies, they are everything that a band of that genre should be and while I’m not a huge fan of that kind of music, the Pixies have a very special place in my heart and because of that I apologise for anything I say about them that sounds mean.

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Download Preview: Sunday

So as more and more people flock to the hallowed turf of Donnington, we are onto our final day of suggestions at Ramblings About, where we are looking to point you in the direction of those bands you might not have realised were worth your time.  The Sunday traditionally see’s a classic rock edge to the main stage, but there is plenty going on elsewhere to insure that even the most avid hater of the Aerosmith’s of the world, have something to enjoy.

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Download Preview: Saturday

So the first day of music at Download is getting ever closer and we move onto our recommendations of who you might want to check out on the Saturday  (if you’re interested on our Friday suggestions click here) because at Ramblings About we do things chronologically.  I realise some people are now at Download and setting up their tents so if you’re reading this from a field I hope the weather stays good!  (I’m not actually sure if it’s currently good, but it is in Edinburgh).

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