Skip to main content

It's time, once again for Matt's capsule reviews!

You know the drill, it won't necessary be relevant or contemporary, merely what media I've been consuming recently.

Strong Words - modern poets on modern poetry (Bloodaxe)
Excellent collection of essays by poets both famous and less so, which I suspect may do not a little towards informing this poetics movement we all have to work with these days. Particularly outstanding are essays by Yeats, MacNeice, Edwin Morgan and Sean O'Brien. Andrew Motion, as always, contributes fuck all of interest. One for Mr Cibula, I think.

Get Shorty
I just rewatched this film for the first time in several years, and can't quite get over how unbearably smug the whole thing is. Entertaining, but smug. Gene Hackman's laugh always makes me want to tear his arms off, and I will never, ever buy Travolta as a figure of cool. Have you seen Battlefield Earth?

That new Fatboy Slim single
You know the one, slash dot dash dot etc. Either Mr Slim is an evil genius or he has run entirely out of ideas, more than one listen inclines the listener to the latter theory. Bemusing.

The Bill
It's got a couple of cool detectives with one-liners in now! OMG! It's like Miami Vice in polycotton suits with added "issues"! It's still fucking terrible!

The fight outside my window at two thirty a.m.
SMASH! A bottle goes tits-up. Five points! SCREAM! A drunk girl wails "Leave it, Darren! He's not worth it!" Ten points! BELLOW! Two ben shermaned lads grunt imprecations at each other whilst backing away from each other. Fifteen points! FLASH! Drunken girl falls over, giving the boys (and me) a glimpse of what they've been fighting over. GOURANGA! Twenty five points! A classic, it had all the elements. But one word of advice to the girl in question, even in this sultry weather we're enduring, going commando is not the best thing to do in conjunction with alcopops, the phrase "badly opened tin of cat food" leapt to mind, as it so often will. One the other hand, the draught was quite pleasant on a muggy night.

Shrek 2
It's good. I mean, Shrek was good, so's this. Somewhat chillingly precisely well-made. So yeah, it's good. Scary, but good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down. One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees. I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you. So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oh! Are you on the jabs?

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...
Post a Comment
Read more