Music Album Reviews

Jacques Brel – Olympia 1964 ****

There's nothing quite as gut-wrenchingly emotional as a sweat-drenched, so-poetic-it-hurts Belgian knocking one back, song wise.



Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA ****
Moving swiftly on from flailing Belgians to patriotic american sleeze stadium rock. The Boss draped his jeans-baring tootsie-pop behind onto the cover and unleashed this anthem-fuelled corker of an album.


Green Day - Dookie **
Pop-punk, fringe-and-eyeliner outcasts crying into their electric guitars. Blah.

Remake Vs Original

The Taking of Pelham 123

2009

• John Travolta rocking out the European gigogo face fuzz, middle aged anti-crooner leather and a newt amount of thespian ability. He can be summarised as the nose-flaring, chip-on-his-shoulder flake who plays out like a cross between a low grade neighbourhood thug and a nightclub residing pimp.
• Merry-go-round camera action from the MTV-esque director Tony Scott. It was like watching google 360 in tune to conversations scripted by a writer who probably cites urban dictionary as his sole literary reference.
• Filled to the brim with pointless backstories. Denzel Washington tries to itch the oscar bid by dishing out the 'hard-working-chump-just-trying-to-send-his-tiny-tots-to-college' act with orchestrated 'cue audience emotion' music playing in the background. Denzel's wife gets dairy cravings. And local guns-and leather hood John regurgitates some 'ass model and sledge dog dung story' to break the silence. For real.
• A watered down ending that just slams the 'pointless remake' onto its chest.

1974

This subway action caper is the big cheese of the genre. With a scrip busting at its seams with wise cracks and wispy humour, a lack of computer-dolloped special effects, Robert Shaw playing the subtemperature cold criminal, rainbow gang names later borrowed by a certain Quentin Tarantino and an anti-hollywood ending, this blows the lumpy frumpy remake out of the water.
So what if the subway passengers seem to be a dishing of stereotypes?

Playlist

Johnny Too Bad - The Slickers



Chi Mai - Ennio Morricone


People are Strange - The Doors

Venice Trip

Being the premature-cynic and the chronic complainer, I'm armed with a list of the city's flaws to chew over.

• A teensy-weensy litter problem - Piazza San Marco looked like a land fill site.
• A remorgage-your-house price tag on most things. We didn't go to the high-class oity-toity restaurants but still we had to dish the notes out to fill our stomachs. The Gondoleer's charged like a premium rate hooker.
• There are more illegal street vendors than you can shake a stick at. Wherever your head turns you're burderned with the playdough selling asians and the 'bling bling' handbag schmucks pimping off goods more fake than a glamour model's gravity-defying whoopers .

And for your topical musical viewing I bless you with this italian crooner rocking out with a Clark Gable moustache and overly mobile eyebrows. If the music doesn't do it for you, the so-emotional-it-hurts singer will.


Guarda Che Luna - Fred Buscaglione

Top 5: Ridley Scott films

Ridley Scott is a full-spectrum director who is as versatile as the boy scout swiss army knife.

And before anyone starts flinging dollops of criticisms at his popularist behind, bite on the fact that his popcorn-crunching, dollar-reaping blockbusters woon both the critics and the masses on an equal fronting.

1. Alien


Ridley Scott tossed one off for the feminists and produced this little gem of a sci-fi quasi-horror. By skipping the conveyor-belt characteristics of the holywood generic female action hero (big-busted, skin-tight leather donning, huffing and puffing, twinkle-toed martial artist ) he made the most believable chick hero yet. Sure, she probably couldn't unleash a can of bruce lee-esque asskicking onto a group of iron-pumping steroid-guzzling heavyweights but she has enough of the grey matter to cope with any endoparasitoid, acid spewing facegroping funk that dares to wander the Nostromo.

It's a claustrophobic, swallow-coal-and-crap-out-diamond-tight nail biter that prefers slow brewing tension over full on action and anarchy. Cough. James Cameron. Cough.


2. Blade Runner

A sci-fi noir that turned palm tree, sun and sea Los Angeles into a dystopian, decaying, rain drenched, neon-lit city. Harrison Ford paved his way as the grunting, trenchcoat-wearing sleuth with a candy-sweet spot for the lipstick donning replicant. With a story that aims to twang the philosophising strings of the audience and a cream-your-pants worthy cinematrography this warrants a big thumbs up from me.

3. Thelma and Louise

The said tossing off was done again and despite the 'male-bashing, trigger happy lesbian middle-aged-crisis film' criticism that I've heard the world entire, I damn well liked it.

Sure, the blokes are hardly lovable lugs worthy of the 'Mr Nice Guy' status and the female protaganists decide to shoot and steal their way through the Southern states rather than sweet talk themselves out of their little pickle...but that's exactly the point. It's the antidote to the sappy-dappy, fairytale smut featuring airhead characters fluttering their eyelashes, pouting their lips and making conversation about glitter and sparkles.

4. Gladiator


A soap opera-esque plot pitched between sandal-and-armour donning ab crunchers, a dashering of blood-thirsty violence, occasional whinings to music in an incomprehensible language, perfume advert camera work and stern-bordering-on-constipated expressions. Are you not entertained? Ah, yeah, actually. I am.

5. Black Rain

           

Playlist

Voila. Some of my bad-taste repetoire on display.

The Letter - The Box Tops



The Windmills Of Your Mind - Dusty Springfield




Thick As Thieves - Kasabian

General Reviews

300 **

• A homoerotic sword, sandal and loin cloth epic
• Leather-underwear-donning beefcakes drag their asses against a powerpoint background and slaughter everything in their path.
• Plays out like a violence-strewn Calvin Klein Advert with as much story depth as a puddle.
• The one dimensional prototype characters only whip out a slight fizz in the emotion and chemistry department.
• Repeat offender of the slow-motion effect. Used heavily when interrupting the kick-and-stab action with peach soft porn and orgy scenes.
• Features this gimpy abomination:

Bourne Identity ****

My cement-sealed favourite of the Bourne film triplet.

• Filmed in the pre-spasmadic camera era (ie absence of earthquake tremor camera work) - doesn't induce motion sickness/projectile vomiting/general confusion as to what the fuck is happening by
• The stepping stone to hot wiring the entire action genre and reshuffling suave, card flicking, martini-glugging chick-stick Bond into a fist clenching, rooftop-jumping pseudo-Bourne beefcake. Step up Daniel Craig.
• Bares at least a fuzzy-edged resemblance to the paper and ink version.
• Devotes a chunk of the running time to the toplessness of the amnesiac. On behalf of the oestrogen-fuelled gender, thank you.

Rambo First Blood Part 1 ****

Prior to ousting out the lead guzzling automated weapons and unleashing his one man army anarchy in foreign turf, the abs-with-a-voice character was slinging his shit at home.

Plot: A disgruntled war veteran has his metaphorical toes stepped on by the major a-hole hick-town sheriff and whips out a can of whoop-ass by jousting the troopers with chiselled sticks, hunting knifes and animalistic groaning.

Overall Opinion: Guilt-free shameless entertainment that somewhat arches and misses when the ending comes about. Shying away from the ending of the paperback it's based on, it decides to try and whip out the age-old emotional punch of a man of muscle yellping, whelling and incomprehensibly drawling. No thank you.

Netherlands Trip

Damn right. My dirt-poor-travelled, blog scribbing ass was hauled into the capital of the orange country in time to watch the World Cup finals in a sea of citrus coloured dutch folk.

Post Holiday Evaluation:

Coffeehouse tally - I don't puff the magic dragon but I still derived an infantile pleasure at sight spotting the rastafarian window displays and visualising the semi dazed cafe dwellers with their bed ridden hair, slurred speech and glazed expressions. Duuuuuude.

Hotel insomnia - I slugged it out into the early hours of the morning by shuffling in bed with the air conditioner turned up to the gail-force propeller level. The dutch television channels slowly morphed into feather soft porn bonanzas with barely clad women massaging themselves under a telephone advertisment banner.

Daft security questions: Do on-the-cusp-of-evil-travellers buckle and own up as soon the 'Did you pack your own bags' question froths up into the conversation?

Dafter prohibited items list: I was skim reading the mammoth list of no-go objects at the airport when I stumbled upon 'radioactive material' in the mix. Do the plastic-fantastic, chavette travellers insist on slipping uranium into their hand luggage for an off kilter after-tan glow or is there now a ripe mainstream market for the geiger-counter-inducing products? Health and safety gone mad.

Utrecht - A goddarn beautiful city without the havoc and hefty crowds of Amsterdam. Odd outdoor toilet contraptions for the dudes plonked all around the city - useful after a beer guzzling session, prevents a urine stench perfuming the city but provides unpostcard scenery of guys hovering around a plastic mould.

Amsterdam - Once the canals kick in, the city isn't half bad. We stomped around the city when the football-madness was still ripe so we got to experience the vuvezela-hooting and the orange-clad fans full on.

Football on the big screen - In one word to summarize the whole scenario...crap. For the pre-football gathering they were blaring out techno music so we decided to stroll around before perching our asses back on the lawn and watching the game. By the time the anthems blared out, the place was so jam packed that we got a microscopic view of the screen. Frankly. I like my football without having to wince my way throught two towering beasts bobbing in the foreground. So in half time we quickle squandered to a bar and saw the remaining match in a smoke mist filled beer garden.

Beer - I got my first taste of the yeast drink and its a full on thumbs up from me. Although I've only gulped down Heineken and Jupiler, with enough football matches I'll become a hard core beer aficianado before the season is done.

Cycling - Whereas America has cemented its footing as the oil-guzzling, gearhead car-orama country, the Netherlands surely sweeps the stakes on the two wheeled front. In related news, my on-foot pedestrian ass nearly got run over twice there by mopeds.

Klose But No Cigar

Ze Germans are out! Ze Germans are out!
And to spare you any feigning acts of pseudo-emotional grief I'll just spurt out my opinions point blank. The blood-red spaniards got not only the largest slice of my support, but they earned themselves the whole goddamn cake.
The Germans broke my itsy-bitsy heart twice already with their furious-football-in-net-act against England and Argentina, and even with the teeth gritting revenge acts aside, the Spanish tiki taka conveyor belt act outclassed their opponents by a large chunk of notches.
The wise psychic octupus strikes again.

Plus, am I the lone ranger here or did anyone else see a spiffling similarity between Mesut Ozil and, er, Buster Keaton?

Most Overrated Films

Let me first start by whipping out an apology from the bag.
Overrated is a vulgur term. It assumes superior taste to the masses and envokes images of self-opinionated dickwads with an infinity-probing ego.
Still, the title beats the softer-around-the-edges version that is 'Films Considered Great By Critics That I Thought Were Pretty Crap Or At Least Not Good Enough To Get So Much Praise'. So you'll have to rock out with an apology and an ego-centric title.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - Before I'm cast out and the villagers start gathering the torches, let me soften the blow. Firstly, I watched it on a channel so inadequete in the signal department that Peter O'Toole looked like a pixalized fuzzball in a turban. Secondly, there was a critical underestimation of the duration time and my plans of a mini camel and sand afternoon film failed miserably. Long before the final reel of film flickered on screen, either the sofa moulded to the shape of my ass or my ass moulded to the shape of the sofa. But excuses aside, this was one lengthy piece of borefest and I'd rather sell my soul to the arabs than have to undergo that strained-out sword brandising experience again.


The Rules of the Game (1939) - In case you missed it written thinly between the lines, I'm neither a film student nor an elbow-patched, corduroy wearing high-concept-art-favouring critic who psychoanalyses each nanodetail to enclypoedic levels. So watching this early French high society romp didn't move me in any direction bar the one leading towards the eject button. Sure, my ears have been filled to the brim by praise and the symbolic 'society dancing on a volcano' prewar angst but I refuse to squint, squander and pretend to see great depths where I can only ogle a shallow pool.


La Dolce Vita (1960) -This film was a tough nut to crack. With the raving appraisals and high-footed status this Italian flick is perched on I was damn right expecting the ground to move, a holy light beam to stream into the room and a major philosophical revolution to occur. So imagine how high my eyebrows were arched in suprise when I found neither profoundness nor deep-setted meaning but a run of the mill, overly-stylised version of the 'the ponderings of the upper class and pseudo-intellectuals' genre that was bundled and filmed the world entire. My expectation of an understated but effective melodrama was shattered by orgies, big busted babes strolling through fountains and textbook high-society musings.


The Searches (1956) - I should begin by not side-stepping around the topic and stating that the fickle hand of 'cowboy and indians' films has never tickled my fancy for several reasons: the deep-rooted smotheringly patriotic American 'manifest destiny' messages spread and stretched from the opening to the closing credits and the moulding of the west into a simple good guy-bad guy structure to help viewers digest popcorn without any guilt or conscience-itching. The Westerns that I always turn to involve a spewing, spurting, cigarillo-chomping, full-on-the-cojones heroic renegade dumping iron bullets into cussing, spewing whiskey-glugging gangsters. So, unsuprisingly, the bucket-load popularity of this John Wayne and John Ford outing is nothing bar a mystery to me. It was long, tedious and had as much appeal to me as a bathing in excrement.
Titanic (1997) - A film that received golden statuettes from every direction, shattered and stamped the box office records, filled James Cameron's pockets to the brim with the president-toting green paper and caused herds of women to tear-gush their way through Kleenex boxes. However, I've always found it to be a stereotype-strewn formulaic romance that slung the sinking chunk of metal as a slight-of-hand backstory to churn out more tickets. James Cameron. Stop dunking your hands deep into the piggy bank already.

The Downfall of Disney

Walt Disney, the big cheese of animation, kneaded, moulded and fueled the animation field into the money-guzzling industry it is today. Sure, now his surname utters dread at the mental image of high-pitched girly shrieking and aggressive merchandise marketing...but flickering through the history pages its clear it wasn't always so. And it all started with a mouse. A spherically-generous, foot-tapping, whistling mouse.


Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) - The Citizen Kane of animations. The top dog of cartoons that has dumped its influences the world entire and that has slumped Disney's wife into the running of the worst box office predictor. 'No one's ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture' she slurred out and how wrong she was.

Working on the classic prince meet princess fairy tale, Disney side stepped heavy handed, sugar coated soppiness and made this little number a funfair even for adult eyes. Funny, heart warming and goddarn scary when the queen bitch horror show begins.


Bambi (1942) - Despite the emotional trauma of seeing Bambi's mother getting the royal hunting rifle treatment, this coming of age romp should be pinned down down as a Disney classic. Sure, it probably induced a world wide epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder in children, but it also dished out a whole spectre of emotions without overwhelming the animation. So hats off to the man. And next time I veto we should make it a flesh wound only.

Cinderella - This glitter, sparkles and gloss cartoon used to invoke hardcore daydreams of fuzzy-wuzzy singing creatures and wand-brandshing vertically challenged godmothers when I was still in my pigtails and ribbons years. Rewatching it now, the tooth-decay-sweet bland main characters, the prototype rags-to-riches story and the soft-hue, stylised soppiness is enough to induce projectile vomiting.

Fantasia - This Disney's love letter to the ears maybe be struck out as a kitsch glorified pre-MTV music video by the critics, but as a freckle-drenched kid watching the marriage between high brow music and bobbing cartoon characters was a treat. Sure, now that I'm a freckle-free borderline adult there are some moments where I can but whince and scowl, but there also moments where I can but revel in its beauty.

Jungle Book (1967)- The creme de la creme of the bunch. Side stepping the gushing princes and princesses plot and instead tickling the spine of the Kipling novel, the Disney factory churned out this little timeless hit. The catchy-as-herpes musical numbers, the right on the button humour, the distinct character artwork and the absence of heavy handed mushy sentimantality will make sure this rumble in the jungle feature captivates the heart of audiences for decades to come.
All together now : 'Look for the baaaaaaaaaaaaaaare necessities.....'

The Aristocats (1970) - This is an up and down affair for me. The sappy, heavy on the sighing, whiny, verbally-upper-class 'Aristocats' are short of any other adjectives bar annoying. It's a flawed, watery feature with only the occasional redemption of the finger-clicking music dished out by the jazz-favouring alley cats, the butt-wagling ducks and the musings of the croaky-voiced rural dogs.

And before burdening you with an entire filmography to churn through I'll just make vague, inappropriate generalisations about the post-Walt world of Disney:

When pencils, paints and crayons were laid aside and pixels and vectors started ruling the joint, animation screeched ahead in the downward spiral. Now, I'm not one to stamp, smother and burn progress in the favour of rehashing the real-deal original but note that as soon as they unleashed the computer-minded herd onto the set, character design took one to the groin.

A large chunk of later animations went full blown on making a reincarnation of live action musicals by dishing out perfect coordinated dance moves and crap-the-world-over show tunes. When once oddball, erratic characters bobbed and jabbed along flawlessy to hip-swagger music, now computer-graphic-regurgitations whip out an understocked-jukebox power ballad.

The Disney Channel years ensue.

High School Musical - Disney lost its last inch of dignity and scrapped any lingering sensations of artistic merit for merchandise. Photoshopped teenagers singing into their basketballs is now their crowning glory and the company has mutated into a prepubuscent wet dream where campy generic underaged hussies are the poster children of bad taste and puddle-depth talent. Walt Disney is probably scolding in his grave.


P.S The Lion King didn't do it for me. Cast me out. shame me, name me and blame me, buts it's all a matter of opinion.

Germany Vs Argentina

Germany 4 : Argentina 0

Even before England cashed in the return ticket from South Africa and followed their snail trail back home, my feather-soft spot for the feet-of-gold little Messi, the unrelequenshing Argentinian-Wall that is Tevez and the prophet-status, bumbling-at-the-sidelines Maradona meant I was rooting for them like a fully pledged pseudo-Argentinian.

So imagine the whincing, the drill sergeant screaming, the scowling, the tear gushing and the muffling out screams with a cushion when the Germans unleashed a can of whoop ass and ripped Argentina a new one.

But fair play to the Germans.

Tom & Jerry: Cat Concerto

The Cat Concerto (1947)

A drool inducing, side-splitting cartoon that warrants the word 'genius' more than Einstein himself.