Tag: live music

2025 films and stuff

Music contd.

Turns out I was wrong about not listening to as much music this year as last year, but only really because I ended up listening to a lot of music during December. Unsurprisingly my last.fm playback reveals that I listened the most to AFI (my favourite band, who released a new album at the end of October), closely followed by Sleep Token (who released their album in May and I do love them, but they’re not AFI). I also went to 5 gigs last year – Dave Hause (combined with a nice mini-break in Brighton), Deathboy, Sea Power, Viagra Boys (who I don’t even remember seeing) and Samia.

Films tho.

I saw a lot of new films. It was probably time for it after 2023 and 2024 didn’t really have that many. Nature is healing etc.

In reverse order of how much I liked them, as usual:

  • Rose of Nevada – This was interesting, but I just didn’t like what happened.
  • Ariel – Looks good and a cool idea but meandered a bit to boringly to be anything more than just fine.
  • Always – Kind of a painting of a film that could I thought would be more poetry
  • The Amateur – I’m glad I didn’t get around to seeing this in the cinema because it’s firmly a watching from the sofa film.
  • Captain America: Brave New World – My Mum enjoyed it but she doesn’t really follow the Marvel films in any particular way – she just sees what I happen to take her to see and likes action films. I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if it was a standalone film and these were non-Marvel characters.
  • Mother – I particularly liked the bit with Lordi’s Eurovision-winning hit, “Hard Rock Hallelujah”. Otherwise, pretty much what I was expecting from a film about St Teresa of Calcutta.
  • The Fantastic 4: First Steps – This was fine. The 1960s-ish alternate universe setting was good, as was the actual family vibe of the F4.
  • Frankenstein: The Anatomy Lesson – A DVD extra of a film that I don’t know really counts for the list, but it’s there on Letterboxd. Interesting to see the work that went into it, but I feel like social media also fed me the 70% of this via clips before I even saw it.
  • Ballerina – The action in this is really good.
  • BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions – This film grew out of a video art installation and I should probably watch it again but with the internet so that I can look up stuff at the same time.
  • Super Nature – I’m neutral on the whole super 8 film thing but it does provide an interesting limit for all the people involved in making this.
  • Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere – Like the Springsteen film I saw last year, I didn’t learn anything about Bruce that I didn’t already know yet it was still an enjoyable watch.
  • Train Dreams – In some ways this reminds me of Little Forest, which I also saw at LFF and was also a kind of quiet, enduring the passing of time and all that comes with it kind of film.
  • Jurassic World Rebirth – Did I rate this one so highly because it was better than I was expecting? Maybe!
  • Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey – Pangolins are so cool and maybe Kulu is the coolest.
  • The Choral – I still don’t really get what everyone seems to like about Alan Bennett’s work but I did enjoy watching this.
  • Silent Friend – I don’t know what I thought this film was going to be about when I bought my LFF ticket for it, but it certainly wasn’t what I ended up seeing. There’s always at least one like this for me and I’m glad did see what is essentially a film about a tree.
  • The Testament of Ann Lee – I kept hearing that this was a musical but I feel like it’s more like a film that happens to have singing in it.
  • Below the Clouds – I have visited Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum at least 4 or 5 times in total, but you will not catch me actually go up Vesuvius. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live there. The highlight was the fire department’s call centre.
  • Frankenstein – Astoundingly like my experience of reading the book when I was 15 – starts strong, Victor gets more and more tedious and annoying to hear from and then the Creature shows up to take over and improve the story. Fantastic to look at.
  • The Accountant² – The lack of actual accounting is made up for with line-dancing.
  • Superman – This has a way better Clark Kent than the other recent Superman films – far more sincere and optimistic as a character and way more human.
  • Karate Kid: Legends – I saw this as part of my Mum’s multi-day birthday film extravaganza, so it was all films that she wanted to see or I thought she would like and this film was both of those things. We had a great time./li>
  • Wake Up Dead Man – Benoit Blanc is like if Lt. Columbo had a fashion sense. There are a bunch of moments where I thought “huh, no one Catholic looked at this part of the script” and “are these lighting choices too obvious???” but still a great film.
  • Thunderbolts* – They literally won with the power of friendship.
  • Rental Family – Definitely the film I most enjoyed in a year with actually a whole bunch of films I really enjoyed (at least the top 20 out of all the new films I saw and even the remaining ones on the list were fine). Heartwarming, funny and moving.

The Rest

Went on my usual English seaside town holiday. Ate an incredible pizza with roast potato on it. Visited Norfolk as usual. Read 10 books. Took my Mum to to the Saturday race of the London e-prix and was invited by McLaren FE with a bunch of other fans to hang out for the Friday free practice session. Visited the Wallace Collection and someone took a funny (in a iykyk way) photo of me there. Saw the Tim Burton exhibition at the design museum. Saw Sigourney Weaver in The Tempest (it wasn’t great :/). Saw Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in Much Ado About Nothing (which was great).

And for 2026? I’ve got a handful of gigs planned, but that’s all so far.

2023 Films and Stuff

While February 2023 feels like it was only a few weeks ago and I’m sort of wondering what I could have done all year, I also know that I did do some stuff.

I spent Eurovision week in Norfolk and another couple of weeks in Malaysia. I saw Loveless (twice), Asgeir, Dave Hause, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, Hozier, ThxSoMch and Sleep Token play live (and have already bought tickets for a few gigs next year). I went to the penultimate e-prix of the season in London and saw FE cars whizz about making their souped-up milk float noises (affectionate).

I did not really see that many new films – last year there were 25 and this year there are only 13. Partly, I feel like there just wasn’t a lot I felt like seeing at the London Film Festival but also, I did have kind of a general meh feeling about going to my local cinema. Was there even anything I might have seen in another year? I can only think of “The Marvels” and maybe there wasn’t anything else or I just didn’t hear about other films to make me go and see them.

Anyway, those 13 films in reverse order of how much I liked them, as is customary for such things:

  • The Monkey King – I get that Monkey is kind of annoying, but I’d thought other interpretations had a kind of loveable scamp quality to him on occasion that this one just didn’t have. It was kind of limp.
  • Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine – This was just an hour long documentary about the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which did its job and told me about that but you can see how The Monkey King had to be poor to be less liked than a film that was merely efficient and functional.
  • Behind the Mountains – There’s some weird pacing choices and the main character just kind of gets angry sometimes and doesn’t really seem to talk to anyone about why he does the stuff he does.
  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – Kept things going at a reasonable pace but might have benefitted from reusing stuff from previous films a bit less.
  • Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre – I saw this on the flight back from Malaysia, so I expect I must have seen an edited version but this is the same airline that edited out the word “Jew” from Sandman but not the word beginning with C meaning vulva. I don’t think any edits would have made too much difference in all honesty since this film delivers everything you’d expect from a Jason Statham film directed by Guy Ritchie.
  • The Pigeon Tunnel – John Le Carré does have a very interesting life story, and is an excellent storyteller as you might expect from someone who has written so many popular books. I’m not sure I’m entirely sold on Errol Morris’ interview technique generally, but the contrast between them was entertaining at least.
  • One Life – I already knew about the Kindertransport and Sir Nicholas Winton before I saw this film and I’ve seen the relevant clips on youtube a few times – so nothing happens in this film that I did not expect but it was still worth seeing how some man just slogging away at paperwork managed to impact so many lives.
  • The Book of Clarence – Since this one is related to Jesus, I took my Mum to see it at LFF and she had a great time, particularly since the director was there to talk about the film. I liked the choice to make it in that 50s/60s biblical epic style.
  • Fingernails – This was good, but like I’ve said elsewhere, I never want to see it again. I also feel like not everyone in the screening I saw was expecting a science fiction kind-of-dystopia setting.
  • Barbie – I mean…she’s everything.
  • John Wick: Chapter 4 – For a lot of the year, this film was at the top of my 2023 list and it’s only because I saw two outstanding films in October that it’s in third place. Like the previous films, this is full of deeply satisfying action, beautifully shot and exists in a universe where you don’t need to question how John Wick gets to the places around the world that he shows up in, he just does.
  • COPA 71 – FIFA are literally the worst and these footballers are absolute legends. The amount of archival footage was fantastic, especially since the entire event basically got deleted from football history.
  • The Taste of Things – I could live in this film. Ok, not literally in that time period because I do enjoy having a microwave, but just put me at those dinner tables. A film about love, that feels like the smoothest, most velvety chocolate ganache and I would absolutely devour it, if you could make the experience of a film tangible.

Definitely see that last one.

Chapel Club @ Shepherd’s Bush Empire 18/10/11

Confession time. I only really know the one Chapel Club song – All The Eastern Girls. This will be important later on.

So – Elephant. Two guys and a girl. One of the guys had a fascinating jumper & Mr T-style gold chain combo going on, which was a tad distracting. The other guy… he kept disappearing. No idea why. The girl had an elephant pendant on a really long chain. Other than that, and that one of the songs had purring in it… I can’t remember their music at all. Sorry guys.

Other Lives on the other hand were amazing. Everyone in the band appeared to be a multi-instrumentalist. Their music is pretty epic (possibly in part to the breadth of variety of instruments available – kind of sweeping and layered and generally rockin’. I’d definitely see them again.

The main event of course was Chapel Club. I’ve already admitted that I only really know the one song (though I do own it on vinyl and took the trouble to record a mp3 of it for ease of listening), so it’s no surprise that I was a bit wary of the musical plan for the evening – there was a first set of entirely new music and a second set of old music. The new stuff was less guitary than the Chapel Club I’m used to, but ok. The old stuff (if music probably at most 2 years old can be called old) was pretty much what I was expecting. Chapel Club have a sort of warm languid sound – something like being tucked up in a warm bed on a cold day. I left after All The Eastern Girls, even though I think there was probably another song left at least…mostly because I was tired and wanted to buy Other Lives’ album.

All in all, it was pretty ok.