Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
This weekend WWE will bring us their second Live Network Special, this time airing from Madison Square Gardens.  It’s a packed card of wrestling matches which looks like it will deliver in the ring, but the event as a whole just feels a bit… random.  The last few weeks have been spent building up to it and yet does anyone truly believe that something monumental will happen here?  Surely not even WWE thinks the fans believe that Big Show has a chance of pinning Brock Lesnar?
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.
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.
Continue reading “Halloween Binge: A Nightmare on Elm Street”
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.
Horror and comedy are often dismissed as easy genres. Â Every year a plethora of films populated by jump scares and jokes about dicks are packaged up and inflicted on the public. Â They’re also inevitably crap. Â The truth is to make a horror film or a comic film is just as hard as making a sweeping war epic. Â To combine the two, is arguably even harder.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a certain frustration to watching The Wildhearts. Â Not because of the band themselves, but because of what should have been. Â That blend of Metallica‘s riffs and Cheap Trick‘s hooks could have been the biggest thing to come out of the UK in the 90’s. Â Christ, I’ve lost count of the number of bands that have borrowed/stolen from them. Â And yet, record company uselessness and personal implosions meant that the best alternative rock band we have, never quite reached their potential.
I have a strange relationship with pop-punk. It played a big part in my early musical education, but in recent years I’ve viewed it as a stale doughnut of a genre. I’ll probably have a nibble, just out of interest, but ultimately I’m going to put it down and go and get something a little bit tastier. Every now and then though band comes along that reminds me just why I spent so many hours listening to this stuff.
