Too Many Ideas - Archive for the ‘Review’ Category
The Town
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010Potted review: The Town is an excellent, gritty heist movie that manages to effortlessly develop characters and plots. I like my heist movies gritty and personal. I’ll enjoy an Ocean’s 11 style romp but a character driven drama like Heat is what I yearn for. The Town absolutely falls into that genre. The Town’s strongest […]
The first English Dictionary of Slang 1699 Review
Monday, October 4th, 2010My copy of The first English Dictionary of Slang 1699 reprinted by the Bodleian Library arrived in the post today and a willing-tit of a book it is too. The introduction is interesting covering the dating of its first printing, who B.E. Gentleman (the mysterious author) might have been and other topics. The original preface […]
Nottingham Contemporary
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010I went to Nottingham Contemporary on the second leg of my holiday. The building is very striking. The Diane Arbus and Gert and Uwe Tobias exhibitions were both interesting. What I really liked was the Small Collections Room. Changing collections in four cabinets with draws filled with art that you can open and discover whats […]
Stephen Fry at the Royal Albert Hall Review
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010I saw the most astonishing arse today. No stop it. I don’t normally comment on such things. I’m a gentleman who keeps such thought private while others utter them without the aid of a quantity of strong drink. Stay with me a little there is a point to all this. It might even relate to […]
The Expendables
Sunday, August 29th, 2010Potted review: The Expendables is OK but a bit of a missed opportunity – was Stalone been eating Quiche while writing? I went to see The Expendables last night. I had worried that the Arnie, Bruce Willis and Stalone scene was going to turn out to be flan; that the whole of it might have […]
Review: Salt
Saturday, August 21st, 2010Salt the Spoiler Free one line review: Salt is a good action film but slightly generic and not quite as good as I’d hoped for but certainly better than a lot I’ve seen. My spoiler filled longer thoughts on Salt follow this picture… Salt isn’t a bad action film and I don’t think it suffered […]
The A-Team
Saturday, August 14th, 2010The trailers and the Orange advert had built up my expectation for The A-Team. The reviews and past experience of remakes (I’m looking at you The Dukes of Hazard) had dampened my hopes. It starts out well – the origin story for the team is nice if a little light and sets up the characters […]
Why I Write Reviews
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Why do I write what I call reviews? The short answer: Because it helps me think about my own writing. The long answer: I used to write what I’ll call proper reviews, they’d appear in Valkyrie and Ragnarok. My review of 7th Sea produced at short notice got me the writing gig with Valkyrie so […]
Inception
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Normally I write these things I loosely describe as reviews the same night as seeing a film or TV show. Waiting any longer risks thinking too much about the subject or forgetting a detail. That’s why I didn’t write about Sherlock last week and why I almost didn’t write about Inception that I went to […]
Doctor Who: The Big Bang
Saturday, June 26th, 2010Tonight’s Doctor Who, The Big Bang, was farce. Not quite pure farce. More like 90% farce. Not bad farce. Proper farce. Farce in a good way. In a The Importance of Being Earnest or Noises Off kind of way. It could take its spiritual importance from the second half of The Importance of Being Earnest’s […]