The Irish Critic (whoever he or she may be), recently made the long and treacherous journey to Hollywood, and boy were the expectations high. ‘Hollywood‘, the critic thought, the historical iconic home of the studios and stars, where Julia Roberts paraded down Hollywood Boulevard in ‘Pretty Woman‘. The place where all your dreams come true.
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Archives for the month of: September, 2008
Of course, it is absolutely impossible to discuss ‘Righteous Kill’ without mentioning its stars- Al Pacino and Robert De Niro have reunited for the first time since ‘Heat’- but boy would I love to do just that (and I’m going to do it for just a second).
Happily, monolingual English-speakers such as myself only ever get to watch the ‘good’ French films: translation into subtitling takes time and money – so why bother with anything but the worthy? Two new imports worth your time and your money are as follows:
Claude Chabrol’s latest do, A Girl Cut in Two, and Guillame Canet’s sophomore (but never sophomoric) release, Tell No One. (A Girl was originally released in France in 2007, and Tell No One as far back as 2006. They’ve only just hit American theatres – different time zones, remember – and that matters only because the New York Times recently listed them among ‘this year’s’ best films.’)
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Rough and ready as they come, The Rapparees (who formed about six years ago), have been described by Hotpress as ‘irresistably rough-arsed’ and that’s exactly what they are.
‘How little things can make a big difference’: that’s what this book is all about. Malcolm Gladwell, although irritatingly smug and sure of himself, is a man with the answers to questions we never thought to ask but to which we would quite like to hear the answers. Why were hush puppies so huge in the nineties? Why have we never heard of a band one minute and the next minute they’re everywhere?
While this book might reside predominantly in the technology sections of book shops, rest assured it is not just for the tech geeks amongst us. You have my word as someone who doesn’t know the difference between a URL and an SMS and couldn’t care less.
J.D. Robb is actually a very assertive looking woman by the name of Nora Roberts. Why people still use pen names I don’t know, maybe she thinks her own somewhat underwhelming. Nora Roberts however, is a fantastic storyteller.
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The music of ‘Funeral for a Friend’ is difficult enough to pin down. Is it emo? Maybe metal? They prefer just ‘rock’. Ihad just decided to put the issue to rest when I heard the latest track from their new album ‘Memory and Humanity’, and was thrown into a whole new state of confusion. ‘Kicking and Screaming’ is ‘extreme pop’: Ryan Richards describes it as ‘basically a pop song played loud, hard and turned up to 11.’
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To the untrained ear the debut album from Sheffield’s finest teenage rockers may sound like, well, a bunch of noise. Tut tut. Listen harder and you’ll find that it is so much more (that’s what they say anyway).
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Apologies to all those die-hard Seth Rogen fans (are there any of those?), but am I the only one who wishes the Rogen-express, constituted by a series of films either starring, or written/produced by Rogen and his gormless looking partner in film crime Evan Goldberg, would come to a halt? It is undeniable that ‘Suberbad’, ‘Knocked up’ and now ‘Pineapple Express’ are essentially the same movie, slightly reformatted and with different actors. Hence from the moment ‘Pineapple express’ gets going you get the sneaking suspicion that you might have seen the movie before.
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