Category: Review

Wrath of the Titans

A second try at this review as WordPress somehow deleted the one I’d finished last night just as I was about to post it. Damn you WordPress.

After putting the chocolate-encrusted kids to bed we checked the cinema times and found one we could catch without too much of a rush. Hence heading out to see…

Wrath of the Titans

“Follow the Navigator.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Bad guys try to release their daddy, who will rip the universe a new one. Hero has to stop him.

See it if you like: No-brainer effects-driven fantasy fests

It annoys me how Hollywood insists on making sequels to complete messes while ignoring decent fare which is crying out for a continuation of the story. For every Conan (siring a follow-up I believe), there’s a Percy Jackson or a Vampire’s Assistant cut off in its prime. While the original version of Clash of the Titans was a standalone masterpiece, the 2010 re-working was complete crap.

Wrath is actually a little better, perhaps helped by the fact that I had low expectations. The story is simple enough – Perseus (Sam Worthington) is back and doing the dirty work of his father Zeus (Liam Neeson) again. This time, there are only a few gods left as the humans have stopped praying to them. Along with Zeus are Ares (Édgar Ramírez), Poseidon (Danny Huston) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes).

Hades hatches a plan to re-awaken their dad, Kronos, for reasons I forget but the upshot of which is that the humans will be punished by having their entire universe ripped apart. As you do if you’re a pissed-off deity who’s been shoved into captivity for a few millennia.

Helping Perseus are Agenor, the son of Poseidon (played by Toby Kebbell) and Andromeda (eye candy in the shapely form of Rosamund Pike). There’s also a wonderful turn from the ever-excellent Bill Nighy as Hephaestus, armourer to the gods.

My main problem with Clash wasn’t actually the poor acting and abysmal dialogue. It was the awful special effects which looked cartoony in places and simply didn’t work with the live-action footage into which they were embedded. They were about as realistic as Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry Mouse.

Wrath has had better luck in this area with particular credit due to the team who worked on the fire and lava effects. The major scenes at the start and end of the film are very well done with suitably huge missiles and explosions. I think even Michael Bay would nod in approval at the fireworks. Best of the monsters, in my opinion,  are the whirling conjoined nasties in the final sequence. Nice and evil and slashing about so quickly you can’t pick out any problems with them.

The plot isn’t up to much – gather three objects and combine them to form one big weapon with which to defeat the inevitable huge bad guy at the end – but it works. It’s all predictable enough, but what film isn’t these days? The characters are a decent collection, though Andromeda doesn’t add anything to the story other than a) the ability to gather an army what with being a warrior queen and b) something pretty to look at.

Don’t expect too much and you won’t be disappointed.

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21 Jump Street

A little behind the times due to being so busy, but we finally made the time for a cinema visit and squeezed in the 2011 update of an old TV series:

21 Jump Street (2012)

“When did I get stabbed? That’s awesome!”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Two high school opposites find themselves on the same undercover squad when they join the police… and get sent back to high school

See it if you like: no-brainer, low-brow, side-aching silliness

Jonah Hill had a hand in writing this reworking of the 80’s TV series as well as starring as Schmidt, the fat (but smart) loser. Channing Tatum is square-jawed and knuckle-dragging as his exact opposite, the popular jock who can’t scrape the grades to pass his tests.

The characters and set-up are breezed through very quickly indeed at the start of the film, which is welcome given the fact that it’s hardly original. From high school rivals to police academy buddies in less than five minutes. With a line in humour similar to that found in Hot Tub Time Machine it similarly comes very clean about its lack of originality in a speech by the guys’ captain as the plot is being pushed along.

Kicked from the front line into undercover work, they find themselves thrown back into high school to try and uncover a drugs plot. Throw in a bit of confusion which results in Hill’s Schmidt becoming Mr popular while beefcake Jenko ends up being the nerd, and the laughs genuinely roll in.

It’s not high level humour and it doesn’t ever pretend to be. It’s fairly predictable, but it is also marvellously silly. The two actors work well together and there are some decent little twists in the story to keep you entertained waiting for the next gag or use of the word “****”.

There is absolutely nothing new in 21 Jump Street but it doesn’t matter. It’s funny and entertaining. The theatre was rocking with laughter and we left with big smiles on our faces. What more could you want from a comedy?

Oh, it also has a nice little surprise at the end. See if you can avoid any spoilers before you see it!

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Review: Death by Facebook

Death by Facebook
Death by Facebook by Everett Peacock
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not really my kind of thing. I was sold on the title, thinking it would be quite geeky but facebook itself gets a couple of mentions in the story.

There are a few plot strands and a decent cast of characters, but I think the story was trying to appeal to too many audiences at once. Chick-lit, crime, spiritual, thriller… Just too much for one story. The spiritual stuff in particular I found a bit overly mawkish in places and that kind of stuff really isn’t my cup of tea in the first place.

Without giving away any spoilers (I hope!) the vulcanology material seems quite well researched and written. Had the book been a thriller or disaster story set purely around that, I’d likely have enjoyed it from what I read.

But, it’s just too much of a melting pot for me.

View all my reviews

Steel Panther / The Treatment – Glasgow O2 Academy

Steel Panther
Steel Panther (Photo credit: Iain Purdie)

[sets on Flickr of The Treatment and Steel Panther]

Amazingly, the day before the gig Steel Panther announced another tour in November with tickets on sale on Friday. With their recent opening slot for Def Leppard/Motley Crue and a performance at Download coming up you can’t fault their work-rate. Pretty damn good for a band a lot of people classed as a novelty cover act not too long ago.

Openers The Treatment weren’t too bad. A young bunch of upstarts from down south with all the bottle needed to get a crowd interested in them. They really looked the part with all the poses, bouncing, jackets, flash guitars and so on. The music wasn’t half bad and after the first couple of tracks my foot was tapping. It took me a while to find anything about them online – the name doesn’t make it easy to Google – but if you want to sample some of their stuff then check out their MySpace page.

Steel Panther bounced on stage (despite their creaky ages – Michael Starr‘s 50-ish years is constantly referred to throughout the set) around nine o’ clock and launched into a cracking set of songs from both albums. Starr has a cracking voice and in Satchel they have an incredibly talented guitarist. Drummer Stix Zadinia (*childish giggle*) is no slow poke either, and also a dab hand on the keyboards. It’s always hard to rate bassists especially with the mushy sound you get at the Academy, but Lexxi Foxxx at least looks the preening part.

Steel Panther
Steel Panther (Photo credit: Iain Purdie)

Despite being just off the lower floor area, we had a cracking view of all the action. They easily had the energy of the younger opening band, and a sense of humour more appropriate for an early teenager. Nob gags, blow-job miming, constant cries of “boobies!”, painful segues into each track – all of this made for a highly entertaining 90 minutes. If there was anything missing it was [name song here].

As ever, when a band has a decent amount of material to pick from, they always have to skip some stuff. In my opinion I’d hoped for “Stripper Girl” and “The Shocker”. Although I bet that there was one guy in the crowd who was more disappointed than me at the lack of the latter – he’d gone to all the trouble of dressing up for it!

The set passed in no time at all, including a couple of songs for an encore. The teenage part of me loved them grabbing girls from the audience to dance on stage for them and – surprise – one of them flashed the audience. I’m sure she’ll love that one cropping up all over Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…

We legged it right after the gig to dodge the crowd and because Wendi had to drive home. As it turned out, the band left the venue while the crowd were still outside to sign autographs and get pictures taken. Great to hear that they’re still very much in touch with the people who are spending hard-earned cash to put them where they are. There aren’t that many bands that will still do that in this day and age.

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Bowling For Soup / People on Vacation – Glasgow Oran Mor

Bowling For Soup / People on Vacation
Bowling For Soup / People on Vacation (Photo credit: Iain Purdie)

[Full set of pictures on Flickr]

Bowling For Soup are a great band in many ways, but one thing I really love is the way they tour twice a year. Once as a full band, and once as a two-piece acoustic pairing featuring Jaret Reddick and Erik Chandler. This is the third time I’ve seen any band at the Oran Mor and, perhaps as a coincidence, they’ve all been humorous acts. The others were Hayseed Dixie and Amateur Transplants.

Erik opened the night with a solo set featuring tracks from his EP “Writing The Wrongs”, which we bought from the merch stand. A good enough set, and he’s a great guy on stage. Funny, quick-witted and entertaining. There were only a few songs, and it was often hard to hear him over the buzz of conversation from those who weren’t bothered about his set.

The second act were People on Vacation, a side-project of Jaret and Ryan Hamilton of Smile Smile. Again, they’ve got a good line in banter and some decent songs to while away the time until the headliners (that’d be Jaret and Erik again) came on. Their style is a little different from BfS, and it’s nice to see someone stretching themselves a little wider musically. As luck would have it, they were bundling their EP in with Erik’s so we got both for a tenner.

Bowling For Soup / People on Vacation
Bowling For Soup / People on Vacation (Photo credit: Iain Purdie)

The two Soup lads were on stage moderately early with a 10:30 curfew (which they ran over), and video cameras poised to record them for a DVD. Whether this was unique to Glasgow or not I don’t know, but the performance was a good one, so fingers crossed they make use of some of the footage at least.

As they stated on stage, Bowling For Soup have a hell of a catalogue of songs. As such, there’s no real set list when they do these acoustic gigs. Instead, the boys have a “cheat sheet” listing all their stuff and they do react to suggestions from the crowd (or at least appear to!). Tracks played went as far back as “Running From Your Dad” and “Emily” and as recent as “Turbulence” which really suits the acoustic sound.

Of course, there were favourites  such as “Girl All The Bad Boys Want”, “Punk Rock 101” and set-ender “1985”. As ever, there are always more songs that it would have been great to hear but with under ninety minutes and some great between-songs banter (including discussion of their discovery of the Scots words “honking” and “pish”), there was no way they’d play every single one.

They were, though, superb. As ever, it seems there will be a full band tour in October to look forward to and if they continue to sell out these acoustic tours then I guess we can look forward to another in a year or so’s time.

Great guys, great music and a great value gig. If you’re not into loud rock music, but like good entertainment from some people who don’t take themselves too seriously, it’s a great tour to catch.

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