Category: Reviews (Page 2 of 9)

The new Bond film, 'Quantum of Solace', veers as wildly from Good to Bad as frequently as Bond's Aston Martin crosses the center-line on the Italian tollway. On the whole, the film was OK, although I was hoping for the trailer to either Watchmen or Star Trek. Alas, we saw neither. Also: worst Bond theme song ever. I award points for the fact that Bond did not end up bonking the Russian lady.

But answer me this: Why did the villain build his secret base out of exploding concrete?

This diversion was followed by another long day at the office. And this is on a Saturday! Deploying an upgrade often requires working odd hours.

I feel stupid about this because I really wanted to see this film in
the theater, with a bunch of people around me. I dragged L along with
me. I thought it would be part of the fun to not know anything about
the movie going in, but perhaps that was a mistake.

SPOILER

Is it fair to say that the film is "Blair Witch Project vs. Godzilla"?
Yeah, it probably is. Except that it's an apt description of the movie
I'd wished I'd seen, because it only really describes the first half of
"Cloverfield".

Blair Witch succeeded (for those who enjoyed it) because we never really saw anything.

The producers of Cloverfield were not brave enough to maintain this
throughout the film, and the second half of the movie is an unlikely
sequence of Perils-of-Pauline near-miss encounters as we see more and
more of the monster until nothing is a mystery anymore. (Any fan of
Doctor Who knows that monsters are scariest when you see only  glimpses
of them.)

Actually the only mystery remaining is how the handi-cam's battery powered the thing for 84 minutes.

And of those 84 minutes, the film actually seems 20 minutes too long.

"Cloverfield" succeeds when it is focused on telling a personal
story of regular people on the periphery of an extraordinary event. It
fails when – like a dinosaur trapped in a tar pit – it is unable to
break free of traditional block-buster movie cliches.

The Comedy Festival is on at Caesar’s Palace and tonight, Eddie Izzard appears at the Augustus Ballroom at 10:00 pm. Even though we are due to fly out to San Francisco tomorrow morning, we decide to make the drive down to the ‘Strip to see our favorite comedian.

(Point of fact: It’s not “even though”, it’s actually by design. We got the Izzard tickets quite some time before we realised we had to make the SF journey, and so the timing was quite deliberate, the earliest we could make the flight and still see Eddie the previous evening.)

We left the house at 8:30 pm, figuring we’d have time to maybe have a little coffee and/or dessert somewhere in the hotel. Alas, this was not to be. After we took the Flamingo exit from I-15, we found ourselves stuck with traffic inching along through clogged intersections for half an hour, making the journey to the entrance to the Caesar’s Palace self-parking garage.

Worse was to come. We spent another 30-40 minutes circling the floors of the parking garages looking for a spot. “Circling” makes it sound like we were moving at a rate somewhere on the positive side of stationary, whereas the truth was that we were moving only slightly faster than we had been a few minutes before on Las Vegas Blvd.

At about 10:00 we finally caught a glimpse of a car’s backing lights as it vacated a spot, and we took it.

Friday night in Vegas. There was a reason we never did this. Yet Mr Izzard should be worth it…I hoped. We’d seen his last show on TV and I didn’t think it was as good as his 90’s material.

We ran down the stairs of the parking building and out into a back alley way. Where was the casino? It was impossible to tell what direction we were looking it. We followed the road and eventually came to a loading zone and a security guy who said, “keep going that way, then don’t go through the doors but turn left and then right,” and actually those were pretty good instructions because we found ourselves at one of the familiar entrances to the casino floor.

Now it was 10:05 pm and we still had to find the Augustus Ballroom.

Turns out that it is up two very long flights of escalators and then down a very long corridor that must go the whole length of the convention center. At 10:10pm we thrust our tickets at the door people who gestured us through into a very large but typical convention ballroom, packed with people. We had no idea where our seats would be but an usher waved us along with several other people to a row of empty seats on a raised platform near the back – basically the best seats in the house! The show hadn’t started yet but everyone was very fired up and very ready and it was clearly only a matter of minutes.

Eddie came on and was brilliant. Definitely classic-era calibre material. It’s really hard to describe his kind of comedy. His zany, super-smart stream of consciousness is something you either love unreservedly, or go “huh.” We love it and several of his expressions have entered our permanent lexicon. (I’m less certain about Ducks and Football, about which he wouldn’t shut up.)

He was worth the kerfuffle with the car park, and the traffic. It was midnight by the time we drove into our own garage back in the North end of the Valley, and we had to be up at 7:00 to get ready for our SF trip. Tired!

We missed the first 30 minutes due to a late arrival (hey, a birthday dinner at Dragonfly can’t be rushed) but it was totally worth it (both the dinner and the concert).

Mr Clarke has lost a lot of weight but none of his talent. Probably the highlight of the night was a rendition of Song for John from the Journey to Love album, in which Stanley showed us what he could do with an acoustic double bass.

He was ably assisted by three young musicians from around the world on Keys, Drums, and Electric Violin, not one of them over 25 years of age. It was a joy to watch them all play together.

We are big fans of the German film Mostly Martha on which this is based, so I admit that I sat down in the theater with some misgivings as to whether I was going to enjoy the film. They were unfounded. It’s kind of a “food movie” so I knew I wasn’t going to hate it, but I didn’t expect to enjoy myself as much as I did.

No Reservations closely follows its inspiration, as it should, but L thinks the ending is different. I couldn’t remember. (I think J has our copy of the Mostly Martha DVD and we’re looking forward to re-viewing the original.) If it is different, then I think No Reservations is better, in the way that shaving some white truffle improves the perfectly poached egg. Unnecessary, perhaps, but you’re going to enjoy it.

Zeta-Jones is always fun to watch and she manages to project the necessary “perfectionist single woman” despite being “too hot to be single” if you know what I mean. Aaron Eckhart, on the other hand, plays the unwanted love interest adequately but he is slightly unconvincing because he plays it as a “too hot and charming to be unencumbered by previous relationships” guy. But what the heck. All is made up for by the perfect casting of Abigail Breslin as the newly-motherless moppet. She’s perfect, adorable, and we just wanted to take her home and pet her.

Totally recommended if you have a honey you can go see it with.

Hail Malthus!

After a fine meal of Pho from a restaurant across the road from the theater, we went to see a performance of “Urinetown – The Musical” at the Las Vegas Little Theatre last night. It is an amateur company but they did very well. The Malthusian themes are probably not the best thing for my peace of mind right now.

Still. If you’re going to see a musical about water shortages, Las Vegas is definitely a good place to do it.

Ironically, inside the Transformers movie is a rather good movie trying to get out. But it doesn’t succeed. I think Michael Bay should have spent a little less “happy time” with the script, I think.

This post is brought to you by AccuSharp, makers of the knife and tool sharpener voted best manual device by Cooks Illustrated in a recent issue.

I’ve tried honing our knives using a sharpening stone, a steel, and a strange diamond dust crusted thing that you pull the blades through, and I haven’t had much luck keeping a nice edge on our kitchen weapons. When the time came to put together a nice selection of chef’s knives as a flat-warming present for Younger Son, we debated whether to add a knife sharper or similar to the package. I realized that I didn’t have a recommendation. So, to the “tubes” we went.

After finding a reference to the Cook’s Illustrated comparison, I ordered the device online, only to find it was carried in our local Ace Hardware store. I should have checked first, because where possible we like supporting our local stores instead of just using the LazyWeb.

Anyhow, I’ve been sharpening the major cutting edges in our knife collection, using the new sharpening gizmo, and I have to admit that now I realize that our knives haven’t really been “sharp” for some time. Now they are dangerous again. I have to alter my habits in the kitchen because every other time I’ve sliced vegetables with the newly sharpened blades, I’ve also managed to slice the top off one of my fingers. Bad chopping practice on my part, is all…. unless there is truly such a think as a too sharp knife. And I don’t think there is.

That was the best damn concert I have ever been to. At $15/ticket certainly the best value for money. I would have paid much, much more. We have Dolby’s DVD of his previous one man show (the “Sole Inhabitant Tour”) but this was better. The songs were more polished and the second half of the show featured three extra musicians, the Jazz Mafia Horns, and they really kicked the show up a notch. I don’t think poor Thomas knew what kind of audience he might get in a small “club” venue in a local hotel casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas, but I hope that during the concert he got the message from us that we were hard-core Dolby fans. One guy in the audience even had a couple of vinyl albums for him to sign.

Dolby blogs about his evening here.
And there’s a good write-up on the tour in general here.

Last night L noticed that Thomas Dolby is playing at The Cannery on Wednesday. I am so embarrassed that I missed hearing about this myself. I’ve been checking his tour dates but they’ve been updated since I last looked and now there it is. So naturally, we drove down Craig Road to pick up some tickets. While we were there we took in a screening of Frank Miller’s 300.

This film made us very uncomfortable because it unashamedly glorifies fighting and dying for the sake of, well, nothing much really. And the bad guys are Persian turban-heads. As propaganda goes, this is pretty unsubtle, much like Triumph des Willens. I’m sure many people watch the film and feel strangely reassured without realising that they are being fed the line that it’s ok to sacrifice your sons to the meat grinder because after all, it’s “glorious”.

Feh. We survived the film by laughing semi-hysterically throughout. It’s just so… Gay. What else can you say about a story in which a deformed hunchback betrays his kingdom because the simpering enemy god-king (decked out in gold paint jewelery) promises him a uniform?

In hindsight it would have made a very attractive music video for, say, Queen.

Let me finish by saying “Thomas Dolby on Wednesday! Woot!”