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Mad Men Series 3, Episode 9 - Wee Small Hours: A Review
19th March | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
This week the return of Lucky Strike scion Lee Garner Jr had dramatic repercussions for all concerned at Sterling-Cooper, starting with Pete who spent half his time in the episode having a coughing fit after being forced to smoke a cigarette. But what caused most of the kerfuffle was Lee’s drunken pass at Sal while they were looking over the edit of the new Lucky Strike commercial. Sal's subsequent polite...
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Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Fierce, Frosty and Thrilling
16th March | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
Considering the difficult commercial prospects of a two and half hour subtitled Swedish movie, the fairly wide release of Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo demonstrates just how popular late author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series of detective novels are (not to mention the forthcoming releases of parts two and three in the trilogy and a proposed Hollywood remake from David Fincher). And judging by the sophisticated and...
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Review: English National Opera - The Elixir of Love
15th March | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Sometimes misfortune can have its upsides. As any self-respecting devotee will tell you many opera plots revolve around the dramatic consequences of single quirks of fate. However, whereas these events normally are restricted to the goings-on on stage, Jonathan Miller's new staging of Gaetano Donizetti's L’Elisir d'Amore has had a fairly dramatic time behind the scenes as well. After opening to generally positive reviews, original lead John Tessier came down...
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Mad Men Series 3, Episode 8 - Souvenir: A Review
11th March | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
It’s fair to say that we’re into Mad Men’s mid-season lull, the quiet few weeks before everything builds up again to a dramatic climax. Not that there wasn’t much to capture the interest in this episode but, like last week’s one it seemed to be a subdued affair.
Really this was an episode where the women got the chance to shine, or more accurately their hair-dos did. From the shot early... -
Review: Crazy Heart - More Lazy Than Crazy
10th March | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
Crazy Heart is probably going to be remembered as the film that finally got Jeff Bridges an Oscar (38 years after his first nomination), but does it deserve to be remembered for more than that? It’s hard to imagine that this low-budget, unassuming portrait of a faded country star would find much of an audience outside of country music fans without him (and it’s debatable as to how much star-power...
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Review: Alice in Wonderland - Frankly Maddening
9th March | 4 comments | 1 person likes this
When it was announced that Tim Burton was going to turn Alice in Wonderland into a big budget 3D movie for Disney, there was a fair amount of excitement from both critics and the public. Although he has his fair share of detractors, it's impossible to deny that Burton has a distinctive sense of visual style and can create genuinely wondrous moments in his films, plus with the involvement of...
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Mad Men Series 3, Episode 7 - Seven Twenty Three: A Review
5th March | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
It was inevitable that this week’s Mad Men wasn’t going to live up to the explosive lawnmower related fun of the last episode, however, it still felt like a rather subdued affair – which is a bit surprising considering the episode’s director Daisy Von Scherler Meyer is best known for light-weight gaudy fluff like largely-forgotten Jimi Mistry-vehicle The Guru. Although the episode did include one major revelation, being that... Peggy...
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Mad Men Series 3, Episode 6 - Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency: A Review
26th February | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Anton Chekhov once said that if a gun is introduced in the first act of a play, it has to be fired by the end of the second act. I never thought that the rule would be applied to a John Deere mini-tractor, but Mad Men decided to give it a go (although as Roger Sterling later said something like this has at some point had to have happened before...
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Review: A Single Man - A Thing of Beauty
26th February | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
Given something of a boost following Colin Firth’s best actor win at the BAFTAs, A Single Man is fashion designer Tom Ford’s filmmaking debut, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel (hailed as a key work in the gay liberation movement) that follows Literature Professor George, an English ex-pat living in LA, through a day in his life. Although this is no ordinary day, still feeling the pain of losing...
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Review: Yeasayer - Odd Blood
25th February | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Brooklyn hipsters Yeasayer came to prominence among the Pitchfork reading crowd with their debut album All Hour Cymbals in 2007. Mixing Prog-rock instrumentation with Afro-beat rhythms and a general sense of doom-mongering, it’s hardly surprising that they didn’t reach a wider audience beyond that, despite high profile tours with the likes of Arcade Fire, MGMT and Bat for Lashes. In fact, after the brilliance of their live-show where the bizarrely...
