The Great Dictator
The first three things that strike you about the rerelease of Chaplin's The Great Dictator are that his voice isn't really that bad, that his acting is really that bad, and that movies have gotten a lot better in the last 60 years. It's an influential film (my eyes couldn't help seeing Mel Brooks' villains in Chaplins' blustering Adenoyd Hinkel) and a brave one - enjoyably loopy in places, and features a fine turn by Henry Daniell as scene-stealing SS controller Garbitsch. None of this changes the fact that there are too many gags set up too long in advance, too many speeches directly to camera and too many wrong-headed choices (having Chaplin's other character, a Jewish barber, tip a pile of coins belonging to his sweetheart into his pocket or compressing the non-cartoon violence of the Jewish persecution into a few hours' car-ride) to recommend it to anyone today. If you have two hours to kill, the price of a ticket in your pocket and a wish to enjoy a film rather than study it, you could do much better.

andrew posted on 10.09.03 @ 03:43 PM GMT [link] [No Comments]

The weekend's haul
included the new Broadcast album Haha Sound. I heard the first track Colour Me In on Fluxblog, and it sounded like a bunch of psychedelicists making beautiful noise with modern production tricks. And that's what the rest of the album is like. Nice.

Also El Diablo's latest, The Crooked Straight, with more country. Fast country, slow country, tough country, soft country. Nothing really stands out, though the final song, Country Ghost, makes effective use of the three different voices.
andrew posted on 02.09.03 @ 10:58 AM GMT [link] [1 Comment]

Separated at birth
Westlife's new Single "Hey Whatever", available here is Relish's Rainbow Zephyr with the serial numbers filed off. Apparently they liked the song and asked if they could cover it and change most of the words. So instead of a hippie ode to a the oneness, you get a vaguely hippie ode to "hey, whatever". Dicks.
andrew posted on 01.09.03 @ 03:21 PM GMT [link] [No Comments]

The posters are up..
Andrew WK is playing in TBMC on Monday Sept 29th

ROCK!
eamonn posted on 01.09.03 @ 09:10 AM GMT [link] [1 Comment]