DVD of the Week: High-Rise

We've had Straight Out of Compton sat on our coffee table for about six weeks now. I really want to see it, but things keep getting in the way - usually other movies that I'd rather see more, or on occassion just a desire to see something lighter or more comfortable than I imagine it to be. Maybe this week, but maybe not, especially with Strictly Come Dancing being back this week. I know, I know. Anyhow, this week a film I've wanted to see since it was announced dropped through the letter box - Ben Wheatley's adaptation of J G Ballard's High-Rise. Ambitious, but full of acting talent and from a director with good past form, this was something I really had to see. 

DVD of the Week: Mockingjay, Part 2

So here we are at last, as The Hunger Games trilogy closes off with it's fourth movie. Yes, yet again  the final adaptation on a series of films has been cut in half, alledgelly because there is just so much story, but really because they want everyone to pay twice. I reviewed the first half a while back, and pretty much liked it, with the caveat that I'd need to see Mockingjay Part 2 to really form a proper verdict. This weekend I got to see it, and indeed form a verdict, and that verdict, sadly, is pretty much "meh". 

Games Review: Fallout 4

So since christmas I've been conciously trying to cut back on a lot of my commitments in order to focus on a plan "to do less things better". This is mostly driven by an ambition to finish off my proffesional exams by the end of 2016, which will involve a fair bit of work, and needs to be one of my main focuses. So in some ways it's ironic that I've found 69 hours in the last two and a bit months to play through Fallout 4. In my own defense, it's largely been in small sessions in and around other things, something that the game is surprisingly good for, but still, that feels like a lot of time to spend in a ruined post-apocalyptic Boston, especially given how much I've still got left to do. 

DVD of the Week: Insurgent

As the Hunger Games series winds to a close, the powers that by over in Hollywood continue to hunt around for a big-ticket replacement franchise, with a lot of casualties on the way. As a card-carrying member of "really not the Target Audience" I haven't watched too many of them, but I was entertained enough by Divergent to watch the sequel, Insurgent, as our saturday night movie this week. As is the way we do things now, apparently, it is to be followed up by an adaptation of the third book, Ascendant, split into two parts, so you can pay twice to find out how it all ends. But first, we have to maintain enough interest to get us that far. 

Games Review: Mad Max

It's been a big year for the once dusty and slightly forgotten Mad Max franchise. George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road is probably the best film I'm going to see this year, with sequels on the way and burst of relevance I don't think the franchise has ever known thanks to it's treatment of it's female characters and lurking themes behind the exploding cars. On top of that, it's also gotten a big-budget, AAA gaming release in the "open world" style, promising the power to let you wander the wasteland and gruffly right wrongs. It's called, simply, enough, Mad Max, and I finished it over the weekend.

Box Set Blues: Orphan Black

Our current series of Dissecting Worlds is due to contain a couple of episodes looking at artificial people; ranging from droids and replicants to uplifted successor species, which has been a huge subgenre of Science Fiction since, oh that Frankenstein book that started it all. You may have heard of it. Along the way it's given me the push I needed to start on the often recommended Orphan Black, a Canadian show funded by BBC America, and it seems mostly ignored by the BBC over here, given that they're about to burn off it's third season in the middle of the night on a channel so few people watch they're talking about shutting it down. Seriously, what the hell, BBC? Anyway, thats a rant for another day. For now, the first two series are on Netflix, and here's why you should be watching it. 

Movie Review: Max Max: Fury Road

I had an exam yesterday, in the centre of Leeds, which meant that I had a rare afternoon to kill on my own afterwards, which I decided to spend at the cinema. I've not been to the movies on my own for a very long time - over a decade, at least - but I'm a big boy now and I don't need Z to hold my hand! And being a Big Boy, who'd just had his nose in the books, I obviously went for what looked to be the biggest, loudest, crashiest movie out there - Max Mad Fury Road. I got what I wanted, and then a lot more on top. 

DVD of the Week; Mockingjay, Part 1

Not being a young adult, much of the recent "Young Adult" boom has passed me by. As much as anything this is because it's simply not aimed at me, and so many of the beats that make it popular with say, teenagers, are ones that I'm very familiar with (as YA existed long before it got it's own shelves at Waterstones) or don't appeal because I'm forced to admit that I'm not probably sort-of middle aged. Dammit. Anyway, the one series that does seem to have connected with me is the Hunger Games - I enjoyed the books, and the first two films were both corking good fun, anchored in strong performances and smart adaptation choices. However, as is the way of things, they have split the final book in two, and we've only just caught up with Mockingjay, Part 1, and  will have to wait for the proper finale later this year. 

DVD of the Week: Cloud Atlas

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite books of the last few years is David Mitchells' Cloud Atlas - an intricate, sprawling, and pretty pretentious in places mediation of life, humanity and all that "stuff" that serious novelists like to meditate on. Its the sort of book that, in my wildest dreams, I would like to write myself, the sort of complexity and cleverness, mixed with genre-savvy and accessibility, that I wish I had myself. Part of the joy of the book is the nested structure; 6 stories that fold into, and then out of, the next one as we move forwards (and then back again) in time. Each story is tonally different, each a homage to a different style, and yet each journey is essentially thematically the same. What possessed then to make a movie it is completely beyond me. And yet they did.

First Impressions: The Man in the High Castle

As much as I am believer in the oft-quoted idea that we live in a "television golden age", it's also a strange, shifting one for which the future isn't really clear. This is especially in true in the UK, with it's super-fragmented landscape when it comes to getting access to the source of this Golden Age, the US. Sure, Sky have a lock on HBO, and generally treat their other imports pretty well, but if a show you love has the misfortune to be picked up by one of the other networks you're taking a risk getting committed. At the very least you need to be prepared to follow it all over the schedule. And then, of course, are the shows we never get at all. However, one of the bright spots in all this is that the likes of Netflix and Amazon, desperate to stay ahead in the streaming game, are now commissioning their own shows, and releasing them internationally. Amazon are even playing the "crowd-sourcing" game, releasing a series of pilots for critical review before deciding which ones to take forward. 

Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The Planet of the Apes movies were one of these series of films that always seemed to be on TV when I was a kid. Actually it always seemed to be Escape from the Planet of the Apes for some reason, but broadly speaking its a series I grew up with, and probably affected my sense of what Science Fiction, as a genre, should be - something that for all its faults wants to be about deeper things. So you can imagine how crushing I found the Tim Burton film, and how hard I fell for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which could have just been franchise fodder but instead insisted on being a smart, thoughtful movie. A couple of years on we get the inevitable sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, although I can't help but feel that they got the titles the wrong way round.

DVD of the Week: Robocop

It's often cited as a sign of Hollywood bankruptcy that we are are living in age of sequels and remakes, compared to perceived earlier ages when we didn't. Like most "ohhhh back in the day" arguments it does't really hold that much water, and largely comes along over the summer when the most visible things in the multiplex's are franchise fodder, and it's largely from people of my generation, who are seeing their youth remade and rebooted. I'm not totally sold on the idea of these sorts of films being safe bets anyway; nostalgia is a dangerous thing, and there is always the risk of a backlash before a film even starts shooting, especially once they start sliding down the ratings towards the PG-13 (12A) rating and perceived "watering down".

Games Review (sort of): Warhammer 40,000: 7th Edition

Gosh, it must be "games week" here on the Rambling blog, but its probably a fair enough representation of out time at the moment. But for a games-mad household, Warhammer 40k is a odd bird, a large-scale, long game with a lot of plastic miniatures bought at high prices. But that said, its starting to eat up a fair bit of my free time at the moment, and I even got a chance this weekend to head down to their HQ in Nottingham where you can book out tables to play on. Which was pretty cool. So, what's it all about, and what the attraction?

DVD of the Week: Elysium

Can we all just take a minute to remember how good District 9 was? It seemed to come out of nowhere, which a biting storyline, a great central character arc, real-world relevance and some brilliantly realised imagery. I was totally blown away, as were a whole lot of other people, so the anticipation around Elysium - promising much of the same - was pretty high. Of course, it came out and the reviews were, well, fine, I guess, so by the time we're getting to see it my expectations of a repeat of the jaw-dropping impact of District 9 was pretty diminished. Which in some ways is a good thing, because no, it's not as good as District 9, but does deserved to be assessed on it's own merits.