Queens Of The Stone Age played Auckland’s Spark Arena last night, the latest stop on their The End Is Nero tour to promote latest album In Times New Roman, and it was clear the group are at the top of their game.
Taking the stage to a cover of Nat King Cole’s “Smile” (‘Smile though your heart is achin’ …’) the group didn’t say a word, instead driving an enthusiastic crowd wild by launching straight into hits “No One Knows” and “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret”.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
Just over a week ago, one of my favourite video essayists, Patrick (H) Willems, posted a video titled “Jurassic Park’s Sequel Problem”, in which he outlines why he thinks there hasn’t yet been a great Jurassic Park sequel – or at least one that lives up to the original 1993 film, and the first in the franchise.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
In a way, I’m glad I waited a week to write a review of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the latest anthology movie from Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm set in the Star Wars universe. As I walked out of the theatre last Wednesday night, following a sparsely attended midnight screening, I would have told you how much I enjoyed it, how it was a fairly straight-forward action movie, how I enjoyed the performance of leading man Alden Ehrenreich.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
I mean, if you needed a palette cleanser after that bummer of an ending (in a good way) of Avengers: Infinity War, you couldn’t ask for much better than Deadpool 2: a big budget blockbuster superhero movie packed with jokes and pop culture references that steadfastly refuses to take itself too seriously.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
A few more thoughts about Avengers: Infinity War after seeing it for the second time last night …
Okay, before we start, it was a lot of fun seeing it with a large audience. The first time I saw the film – last Wednesday – was in a much smaller theatre, with only around twenty people. Last night’s screening was a standard cinema, almost completely full with nearer to three hundred people. And it was really enjoyable to sit back and relax, and take in how much the people around me were enjoying the film – from the guy at the front who happily cried out “what the fuck” when Red Skull showed up on Vormir, to smatterings of applause when Thor arrives in Wakanda, to the audible gasp when Tony gets stabbed toward the end of the battle on Titan, the audience reactions added something to my own enjoyment of the film.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
Hey, no, seriously, don’t even think of reading this before you watch it.
People are going to talk about that ending for a whole year.
This is my main takeaway after watching Avengers: Infinity War. It may be the most visually stunning film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it may be packed with fantastic character moments and performances, and it may have set the standard for action scenes in superhero movies for years to come. But people are going to talk about that ending for a whole year.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
Well, that was intense.
A Quiet Place is the latest horror phenom – written and directed by John Krasinski (better known as Jim from the American remake of The Office), and co-starring his real-life wife Emily Blunt (Edge Of Tomorrow), the film follows a family of four as they move on with their lives in an isolated rural community while dealing with the loss of their youngest son/brother, Beau.
Oh, and there are creatures that hunt anything that makes a noise louder than a bare foot lightly walking on carpet.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
“It was Independence Day: Resurgence,” my flatmate said, as we started to leave our seats and head for the foyer.
After we saw the Independence Day sequel together back in 2016 (a lifetime ago in terms of blockbuster film releases), we had spent a large amount of time discussing the fact that it was essentially the same film as the original: scientists make puzzling discoveries in the first act, the aliens reveal themselves and move against humans in the second act, leading to a final confrontation for the survival of humanity in the third, complete with humans trying to escape the mothership.
Fair warning: considerable spoilers follow – read after watching.
There are two things that stick in my craw about this film, and both detract from how good it is.
Okay, so Annihilation is a pretty great science-fiction/horror movie; the latest film written and directed by Alex Garland – who was behind the incredible Ex Machina – and based on a book series by Jeff VanderMeer, the film stars Natalie Portman as Lena, a biologist who is recruited to a rescue mission into a mysterious (and otherworldly) area called The Shimmer, the same area where her recently-returned husband also went missing a year earlier.
It would be fair to say that I have not been the most committed or loyal Incubus fan.
Actually, it would be accurate to say that they were not my favourite act in the nu-metal movement of the late nineties; I much preferred their peers the Deftones, KoRn and Limp Bizkit, and later Linkin Park. It was all noisy, chunky guitars and a fairly straight-forward drum beat for me.
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