Archive for the ‘ Reviewlution ’ Category

Daft Punk “Random Access Memories”

image

©L.Richarz. No tour planned, but we can dream

David Bowie, Dr Dre, Guns ‘N’ Roses. The last few years has seen them return to the studio after it seemed they were done with recorded music output. They share many common strands: broken partnerships, massive delays, new sounds but the strongest common thread unfortunately is that all of these return albums (or in the case of Dre, a single or two and still no album) were somewhat mediocre. When it comes to once great artists taking these sabbaticals we do tend to forget that their output before the hiatus was less than stellar to begin with, Bowie being an exception.
Read more

About these ads

Clifford To Launch New EP At The Mercantile

gregGreg Clifford returns to the Dublin stage on Saturday June 1st to launch his new album entitled The Temple Lane Recordings.

Fresh from launching his debut album last December, the unique soloist returns with seven new tracks, supported by the ever reliable Ciaran Brennan and a session band.

Ahead of the event Irish News Review caught up with the former frontman of Elavator who is eagerly anticipating the date at the Mercantile Venue. Read more

The Great Gatsby

The-Great-GatsbyIt’s something we’ve all been through – you finish reading The Great Gatsby and think to yourself, yeah not bad, but it would be much better caked in CGI and set to a Jay-Z soundtrack.

Hunger no more. Baz Luhrmann has been handed the keys to Fitzgerald’s melancholy masterpiece and has gleefully smashed it straight into a wall. He was the obvious choice – after all, The Great Gatsby has big parties in it, right? No brainer: bring on the master of the cinematic blowout – the thrower of all-singing, all-prancing zoomfests; the man who can make vomit come out of your eyes; the man who can take his high-pressure stylistic hose and blast away all the annoying subtlety of the book. Bring on the Bazza. Read more

Republic Of Telly Primed For Screenwriting Success

cookerThe Republic Of Telly go head to head with fellow RTE show Love/Hate and Ràsai Na Gaillimhe tomorrow night at the Zebbie Awards after they were nominated by the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild.

The award which is named in honour of acclaimed American actor O. Z. Whitehead, acknowledges the best scripts written by Irish playwrights and screenwriters during the previous year.

Stuart Carolan gets the nod for the season finale of  Love/Hate series 3 while James Cotter, Dermot Whelan, Bernard O’Shea, Shane Mulvey, Jason Butler, Chris Tordoff, Damien Fox, Stephen Shields, and Luc O’Cinnseala share the nomination for the Republic of Telly Christmas Special.

Ahead of the big bash at Dublin’s Sugar Club tomorrow night, we caught up with Stephen Shields to discuss the Republic Of Telly’s nomination and ambitions for the future now that leading star Dermot Whelan has announced his departure from the hit show. Read more

Book Review: Pandemonium (Delirium #2)

paFollowing the devastating cliffhanger at the end of Delirium, Lauren Oliver returns with the eagerly anticipated sequel Pandemonium which surges the story forward and shows two polarized worlds on the brink of revolution.

This books switches between “Then” and “Now” conveying Lena’s story after she escaped past the barrier and into The Wilds at the end of Delirium.

The “Then” chapters focus on Lena’s arrival in The Wilds, where she is nurtured back to health by Raven and her group of Invalids – that is, those that are “uncured” or infected by the disease of love – and forced to reach deep within herself and call upon her inner survivalist in order to stay alive. The Wilds are wholly different to the world she once knew and she struggles on a daily basis with the thoughts of never seeing her family, her best friend Hana, or her lover Alex again. But to keep her momentum and hope alive, she settles on the fact that this is what she and Alex wanted: freedom; the option to make her own decisions and decide her own path. However, she soon comes to realize that her ideal of freedom is much more warped than she ever could imagine and life in The Wilds is not as perfect as she once thought it to be. Read more

Pilgrim Hill

“Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

So speaks John Givings, the lucid schizophrenic of Revolutionary Road. Jimmy, the farmer we encounter in Pilgrim Hill, would meet with John’s approval. As the forlorn hero of the piece, he shows real guts. Jimmy doesn’t speak like a hero, he doesn’t act like a hero, he doesn’t undergo a heroic transformation of character. But he does face the reality of his existence like a hero, seeing the hopelessness around him with perfect clarity, and it is this brave acceptance of his situation that renders him painfully sympathetic. Read more

Undefeated (Oscar Winner for Best Documentary 2012)

undefeated

“Lets see here, starting right guard shot no longer in school. Two players fightin’ right in front of the coach, starting center arrested. For most coaches that would be pretty much a careers worth of crap to deal with. I think that sums up the last two weeks for me.” The opening monologue of head coach Bill Courtney conveys the struggle he, and his team, suffer throughout the entire film as members of the Manassas Tigers high school football team in Memphis, Tennessee. This award winning documentary takes a completely humanistic approach to American Football with a focus on Southern American divides between the haves and the have-nots. Society is critiqued not through deceptive editing or creation of misleading situations but through simply watching this team and coach interact with the outside world on a daily basis. What unfolds is no doubt far beyond what the directors, Daniel Lindsay and T.J.Martin, could ever have hoped to achieve. Read more

Film Review: Evil Dead

image

©Films Inbound

In 1981 The Evil Dead hit theatres under the endorsement of Stephen King who called it “the most ferociously original horror film of the year”. It was a phenomenon, terrifying audiences and becoming one of the biggest “video nasties” of the time. Sam Raimi, director of the original, saw fit a few years back to authorise a remake of his classic much to the disdain of fans and there has been a nervous wait amongst devotees to see how this remake would turn out. Well, allow me to paraphrase King and say that what has been produced is the most ferociously original horror remake of the year.
Read more

The Walking Dead: Season 3 Review

image

So the little show that could, The Walking Dead, has now reached the end of its third season. Hard to believe really as it should have never found the audience it did given that it’s a cable TV show based on an indie comic and zombies were not yet back to being flavour of the month, but the figures don’t lie and with it breaking viewer records year on year and seeping into all popular media from memes to video games, t-shirts and it’s own panel discussion show. It is a series however that has infuriated fans at times as it drags at a horrific pace at times and takes extreme liberties with some favourite characters from the comics. So how was season 3? As usual, SPOILERS BELOW!
Read more

Film Review: The Host

Film adaptations of popular books are a regular occurrence in the world of cinema nowadays but oftentimes, aspects of the book fail to make the connection when on the big screen.  Andrew Nicholls’ attempt at transferring Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling book The Host onto the big screen suffers from this particular problem.

The Host is set in a time where Earth has been invaded by aliens – known as souls – that inhabit the bodies of humans, indicated by their glowing eyes. Humans are believed to be destructive creatures hell-bent on destroying the planet through warring and violence, and the souls’ solution to this is to take over the bodies in order to make the world a more peaceful place. Read more

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,575 other followers