Few games have ever caused me to experience the seemingly contradictory emotions of love and loathing at the same time. Alien Isolation may in fact be the only one.
Trainwreck
Being funny is hard. Being funny for two hours, is very hard. That’s the challenge laid at the feet of Trainwreck from the start and, like most Judd Apatow films, it is probably around half an hour too long. However, it does manage to be funny. A lot of which is due to a star making performance from Amy Schumer, who is also the first person to write a film that Apatow directed who is not called Judd Apatow.
The Gift
The Gift is a film that would do better without a trailer. A glance at said trailer would believe you to think you were about to witness a very simple home invasion horror. A man and his wife return to his hometown and are haunted by an old school friend. However, the film itself is much more intelligent than that.
Summerslam Preview
For the first time in a long time, WWE seem to have decided to make Summerslam a big deal. Always seen by the fans as one of the bigger events. Recent years have failed to live up to those expectations. There have been some big moments, Lesnar demolishing Cena for example, but the event has always felt a few notches below Wrestlemania. This year it feels different. Not only has the show been expanded to four hours, but we have a huge main event and the kind of celebrity participation that is usually reserved for the biggest show of the year. Summerslam feels like a big deal and what goes down this Sunday, could well shape the WWE all the way up to Wrestlemania.
Frank Turner – Positive Songs for Negative People
Frank Turner has had one hell of a career since the end of Million Dead back in 2005. He has played 1708 solo shows (as of Sunday the 9th of August 2015) and released six albums. That’s not even mentioning side projects like the brilliant Mongol Horde. In that time, he’s risen from playing the back rooms of pubs to a handful of people, to selling out arenas, all seemingly off the back of word of mouth and good songs. It’s a journey that now continues with Positive Songs for Negative People.
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Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation
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.
Southpaw
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.
WWE 2K16
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
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.
Roddy Piper
If John McClane had been fighting against a faceless bad guy in Die Hard it’s a safe bet that it, like hundreds of other action films, would have been forgotten instantly. Hans Gruber made him, because a good guy needs a bad guy. Roddy Piper was that bad guy. He was the ying to Hulk Hogan’s yang and it’s a pretty safe bet that without the Hot Rod, Hulk Hogan would never have reached the height of celebrity that he did. On the week that it came out that Hulk wasn’t the squeaky clean American hero that he wanted us all to believe, Roddy had to upstage him once again. Sadly, this time he did it by leaving this Earth behind.
Ramblings About Wrestling 