All Change Here

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As I write this it is the 9th of May, 4pm on the dot. The countryside of the English Midlands is shooting past at 125 miles per hour, the Virgin Trains Pendolino eating up the hills and crests like a particularly hungry steel caterpillar.

Things have been quiet on this blog as of late, and for this I can only apologise if you’re in the habit of checking in on here every day or two (and if you are, thank you). The past few days have been an extraordinary cluster of events and new information and my mind, as such, hasn’t been able to comprehend the concept of putting words to paper during this particularly busy time. But I have a moment to share with you now my current plans, and invite you to join me in some of them.

As of today, I have began discussions with my current employer, Hamleys Glasgow, in order to terminate my contract. I have been offered, and have accepted, a job with an independent games developer in Edinburgh in a community and social media role, the details of which I am not ready to discuss yet. It’s with a very heavy heart that I resign from the toy store, and would like to share some of my experiences in another post on another day - but hopefully my new work will be just as exciting, fun and satisfying to do.

I write to you on board this tilting train because I am en route to a hopefully sunny Brighton on the south coast of England for The Great Escape independent music festival, which takes place from Thursday 10th through to Saturday 12th. I am, truth be told, extremely nervous; 7 Bit Arcade has seen fit to outfit me with a rather important-sounding delegate pass, putting me on par with record labels, promoters and other companies and persons of note in the music business.

The key theme of The Great Escape is to essentially keep an eye out for The Next Big Thing: Adele, CSS, The Fratellis and countless other notable music acts have cut their teeth at the festival before moving onto bigger and better things, giving the event a very good reputation for hosting tomorrow’s big music stars before they even know it. But as I have done nothing of the like since last year’s Eurogamer Expo, I am excited to be back in the world of what I hate coining ”live journalism” - but you’ll have to forgive me, because I can’t think of better terminology at this point in time. To be in the midst of something as exciting and as promising as a music festival without the persistent air of shrink-wrapped record producers and forced party atmospheres is perhaps me of the greatest treasures the UK music scene currently has to offer; 30 venues in a fairly close-knit area of Brighton will keep the surroundings varied, and there’s no stigma attached to opting for a smaller act over someone more mainstream and popular - because such a scenario doesn’t really exist.

The majority of my writing will be found at 7 Bit Arcade for the next few days and I expect it to be fragmented, hard to understand and ultimately of a lesser quality than you’d like. But hopefully It entertains and informs in equal measure, nd points you towards the next big music acts you should be listening to. And if you do read what I do and like it, please drop me an email, or a tweet, or anything - it’d be good to know if I do anything right. The train’s bing-bong announces an imminent arrival at London Euston. Catch you over on 7 Bit for the extended present.

Film Review: Gone (1/5)

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Gone is one of those rare films in which everything that can go wrong does. Jill Conway (Amanda Seyfried) is a woman convinced that she was abducted and left to die in a hole a year previously, but the police and her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) are sceptical, owing to her time spent in a mental institution. Then Molly disappears, and Jill’s appeals for help fall on deaf ears - so she turns private eye and essentially falls at every hurdle in her attempt to track down the kidnapper.

But the storyline of Gone is not the biggest issue at hand. It’s tedious, generic, as grey as the landscapes of Portland it depicts, and a better third act is sandwiched between the wanting quality of everything that came before and a poorly thought-out ending. The title is, I’d hope, a reference to the audience after the first ten minutes.

The meat of the tale involves Jill’s pursuit of her nameless, faceless killer after the police send her on her way, save for the new kid (Wes Bentley) who offers to help her out. He’s played out as a shifty type, like he might be suspicious, but like many things in the film he is misrepresented and poorly constructed, and it turns out he doesn’t really add anything to the film save for a few minutes of vacant stares. Much of the film is like this, but Jill’s private detective work is painfully ill-conceived.

From a run-down locksmith store to a hardware vendor and beyond, all whilst evading the law after pulling a gun in public, Seyfried plays Jill as a wide-eyed moron who wildly flails about and squeals like an irritated child. There’s nothing to like, nothing to root for, and the connections she makes are constructed with the laziest of links. There’s too many convenient things for her to pick up on - a discarded receipt, a shop assistant who knows that little bit too much about a random stranger - and the red herrings bore rather than surprise, as you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody will show up with an all-too-handy hint showing where to go next.

When the action turns from a hunt into a direct pursuit, there’s actually a little masterstroke of tension to be found. The latter scenes take Jill down a darkened forest path with just the headlights of a 4x4 and the voice of a potential abductor on speakerphone for company, and there’s slight relief when things reach a conclusion. But the sequence and the ending that follows are both so mind-numbingly bad, and badly scripted, that any plaudits which came before evaporate into the ether, replaced by frustration at director Heitor Dhalia for messing up so much.

Gone joins the ranks of films such as The Devil Inside in that it was not screened for critics. That distributor Summit Entertainment saw fit to blank reviewers speaks volumes about their confidence in the film and in Dhalia. I keep my fingers crossed in the hope that he isn’t given any work for a while.

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Read more film reviews, including The Cabin In The Woods and Battleship.

Film Review: This Means War (1/5)

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The latest project from McG, he of such great films like Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle and Terminator Salvation, This Means War manages to make those previous works look excellent in comparison to this drivel fest that doesn’t know if it wants to be a kooky rom-com with a unique hook or an action-oriented spy film. It fails at being both, thanks to a dismal script and total disregard for a plot which makes terrible use of the stellar leading cast.

The film takes a genre-typical love triangle story and gives it a two-timing twist, sprinkled with the flavour of a spy flick - and all of the surveillance equipment that comes with the latter. CIA agents FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy) are two equally lonely men for differing reasons. FDR is a constant, hollow womaniser and Tuck the estranged divorcee - well, he might be but, like a lot of things in the film, things are generally left messily ambiguous. Tuck signs up for an online dating site to cope with his loneliness and finds himself paired up with Lauren Scott (Reese Witherspoon), a consumer product tester with an equally lonely heart whose dating profile is set up by her best friend (Chelsea Handler). Or it might be her mom; she looks old enough and, like everything else, isn’t really described as either.

Lauren and Tuck hit it off, but when she runs into FDR at a nearby video store and he turns on the charm - and the pestering - she finds herself taken with him too, thus generating the love triangle and a spy story generally creepier than it is funny. As Lauren dates both men at once, unaware of their friendship, they both use their CIA resources to implausibly track one another’s dates and listen in on the girl’s chats with her best friend/mom to work out where they’re going wrong. At no point does the film suggest this is creepy, and the holes in the story that result are hilariously jarring - one of the main themes of the film is trust but nobody bats an eyelid at keeping surveillance of a girlfriend a secret from her for the entire hour and a half runtime - which, by the way, feels much, much longer.

As an action film, This Means War is an atrocious mish-mash of shaky jump-cuts and laughable motion blur effects which make the action of Safe House (review) look amazingly followable in comparison, lined with CGI from a made-for-TV thriller, produced by an 8-year-old. (No offence to 8-year-olds.) The flimsy spy subplot which ties everything together is addressed in a grand total of four or five scenes and is otherwise forgotten.

As a comedy, the jokes barely go beyond shooting hyper-muscular men in the crotch with paintball guns and gags about tiny penises. The script is forgettable, the score so typical of a bog-standard spy flick that you could parody it a-capella style as you read this review and probably be spot on; the ending so horrendously godawful and predictable that it renders the previous hour and a half redundant as both men end up very happy anyway, despite fighting over one girl stressed as being of do-or-die importance.

That Pine and Hardy are wasted on this is a shame - the sooner they get back to films like Star Trek and Warrior the better. Even Witherspoon should be in better films than this. If McG ever wishes to improve this film, he should bring the spy subplot to the forefront and have the archetypal Russian baddie turn up and kill everybody involved in the first twenty minutes, before rolling the credits. This film is impossible to save from damnation and really does mean war - against pretty much everything you’d care to like about rom-coms and action flicks. Save your pennies and your time - watch a dedicated film in each genre instead.

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Read about more of the latest cinema releases in my other film reviews.