Barcode (3G S style)

Should open the door for barcode scanning app store apps. Delicious Library anyone?

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Barcode (3G style)

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What happens if… (iPhone video)

Click here to download:

IMG_0603.MOV (2349 KB)

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For Mum: Michael Bublé at Nottingham Ice Arena (12.2007)

I wrote this review in December 2007, and for some reason I never published it.

Today is the 1st anniversary of Mum’s death. She never read this review; like an idiot I never got around to publishing it while she was alive. I did tell her about the gig though.

I’ve not edited this for context or anything, it’s exactly how it was written 18 months ago.

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This review is for Mum. I probably ought to explain why.

Mum’s just coming to the end of her second run of Chemotherapy; it’s the third time her Breast Cancer has come back. I won’t go into specifics, but suffice to say she’s not had a fun time of it over the last couple of years.

Chemotherapy makes her painfully tired, makes her hair fall out, and just flat out makes her poorly. How she’s managed to remain as upbeat as she had throughout it all is beyond me. But, as upbeat as she is, there are some things she just can’t do at the moment.

And one such thing, despite her love for the guy, was to go and see Michael Bublé play at Nottingham Ice Arena on Sunday the 2nd of December. So, this review, it’s for Mum. Now you know.

I bought the tickets off Mum, and took my mother-in-law. She didn’t have a clue who this Bublé guy was, but I thought she might enjoy it. I’d never seen him live either, but I’d been entertained by his appearance on Las Vegas a while back, and I’d heard good things.

The arena was impressively packed; it’s great to see a UK audience get behind an artist like this in the way that they did. But before every great headline act, there has to be a support act. And in this case, they just happened to be great to.

I doubt anyone in the arena had ever heard of Naturally 7, but I suspect they’ll all be telling their friends about them now. Comprised of, unsurprisingly, seven guys, they’re a soul group who imitate the sounds of instruments with their voices. They performed a couple of their own songs, and their version of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”, and a little Simon and Garfunkel medley.

Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell

Hope this works. Going to try to use Posterous to get quick reviews of stuff online. Here goes.
 
Saw Drag Me To Hell last night. I went from flat out uninterested to quite excited over the space of a couple of weeks, after hearing positive reviews from people.
 
My take: it’s a lot of fun, and it feels like an old school Sam Raimi movie. Which will either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your view of Raimi.
 
It’s got classic Raimi camera work, floaty Evil Dead demons, lots of banging and clattering as spirits try to come through, juvenile use of explicit grime and snot, and feels like a reasonable companion to The Evil Dead. I honestly expected a Bruce Campbell cameo to complete the link.
 
There are some good jumpy moments, even if most are the extremely cheap “go very quiet then make loud noise” kind, and a good creepy atmosphere despite the occasional laugh out loud moments. Oh and at times it’s pretty gross.
 
It’s not perfect: you can see the end coming a mile off (although I suspect you’re supposed to be chuckling along for the last 15 minutes knowing what’s coming), sometimes the Evil Dead thing is a little too blatant, and there’s some extremely ropey cgi. Also I’m not the biggest fan of Alison Lohman (I’d really have liked to see Juno’s Ellen Page in this as originally planned) but she does ok. In true Raimi tradition she takes a awful lot of stick an ends up covered in a multitude of nasty looking substances.
 
So set your expectations to “gross out, creepy, funny, slighly unoriginal, but lots of fun” and go and see it, I’d say.

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Thoughts on Watchmen

Can I write anything about Watchmen and not come across as a moaning fanboy? Can I avoid giving the impression that I’ve got nothing better to do than pick holes in a project that critics thought was doomed to fail? Probably not, so apologies if this strays into obsessive fanboy territory at any time.

If this write up does wander off into the realms of the obsessive and disappear up its own arse, it probably won’t be painting an accurate picture. I’m not really one of those special kind of geeks that thinks Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s original graphic novel should be placed on a pedestal and worshipped three times a day. I first read it when I was an impressionable teen, and didn’t really “get” it. I thought it was “OK”, but it wasn’t until recently when I read it again and at that point I was completely captivated by it. I’m a geek who rates the book highly – geeky enough to have a blog, and be writing about Watchmen on it – but I’m open to a little poetic license. In fact I expected it.

The thing that makes writing about Watchmen The Movie so bloody tricky is Watchmen The Graphic Novel. Adaptations are always going to walk a fine line between remaining one hundred percent faithful to the source material and reinterpreting things, but I don’t know if anything has ever had its work cut out quite like Watchmen. Watchmen fans aren’t like normal fans. Probably because Watchmen isn’t, or wasn’t, like normal graphic novels when it was originally released.

There’s no avoiding the fact that it’s deep, it’s challenging, and it’s widely regarded as unfilmable. Even if you hate the novel, you can’t ignore its influence or not recognise the admiration it’s received from scores of readers over the years.

Do you simply consider whether Watchmen is a success as a movie, or as an adaptation? Can someone who’s already read the novel approach the film with a blank slate and take it for what it is? I can’t. My feelings towards it are skewed by my appreciation for the original. I wanted to like it. Maybe that’s part of the problem; I broke my own rule and got stupidly excited about seeing it. That sort of expectation is rarely good, and usually works against you. It’s the ones that you’ve not built yourself up for that usually leave the biggest impression.