THANK FUCK ITS FRIDAY!!!

Yep, i've still been slacking hard on posts recently despite saying i was gonna step it up. Blame it on too many late nights followed by entire days watching dvd's. While on the subject of watching stuff, i watched this documentary below last night which i saw on Louie Knuxx's blog and would definitely recommend it.

This guy has spent bare time taking snaps and film around the lower Eastside of NY, they surely need some sort of museum for it all i swear down! Its a really interesting watch and if i was better with words i'd say something profound about how he's managed to document a period in time that will never be repeated and how the world is changing for the the worse etc etc, but someone else will do it better than me...anyways, watch it, its big!
http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/captured/">WATCH HERE


There's been bare things happening recently, not least last weekendS epic Heavy Innit!! at Hi Fi bar. Absolutely rammed, all the dj's tore it down, crowd was on a madness, i was in a state by the end of it, its all good! There's a few things coming up which i will try and post about, but before i forget, tomorrow night Raiden from back where i'm from will be doing a one-off totally free gig along with Lex, Johnny Hoves, Xehpa, Killswitch and more at a warehouse/factory in Maribnyong, right next to Highpoint. Raidens gonna be on early in case the cops show up, so i'd get there earlyish (not least because its gonna be a roadblock!)

SMS 0418187409 for location details either tonight or tomorrow morning

ALICE IN WONDERLAND MOVIE

Just heard about this, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, its gonna be proper!

DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE

Anyone that know me knows i watch and read anything to do with Italian crime. Its always been a huge interest of mine so much so that at one point i was gonna write a book (which i gave up on 'cos i realised theres too many good books out there already and i didnt think i could offer anything new to it) and spent months compiling stacks and stacks of research which i stored at the back of a wardrobe. One evening my door was very rudely kicked off its hinges and i was detained in the kitchen of my flat in cuffs for a few hours while they had a little search and then along with some other things brought all my 'research' thru and dumped it in front of me asking, 'well whats this then?'. As if this was the basis for some sort of international crime caper i was planning! All i could do was laugh and say, 'nah, i was gonna try writing a book'. They looked a little foolish at that point.

Anyway, when i heard about 'Gomorrah' i was hyped to say the least, especially knowing it was gonna deal with the Camorra rather than the Scilian Mafia. Pretty much every review i read bigged it up as some sort of masterpiece too so i'd been waiting anxiously for it to arrive and was pleased to see it showing at the Nova on Lygon.

Well, what a dissapointment! It just seemed to try far too hard and came across as way too disjointed. It followed 5 unrelated stories when i really think it would have been better off sticking to 2 or 3 and just didnt interest me. As the minutes ticked past i kept thinking 'nah, its been a bit slow so far, but it'll get better, it cant let me down', but then after i'd been sitting there for 90 minutes or so i just wanted it to end. I think a lot of other people felt the same as quite a few people bounced way before the end. I think it lost something in translation also as the Italians in the audience - of which there were a number - were laughing hard at some scenes that left me thinking, 'are they watching something else'.

There were definitely soome good scenes and characters - Marco and Ciro in particular - and i thought some of the locations really added some grime to it all, but overall it just didnt do it for me.

THE BIGGIE MOVIE...

Was surprisingly good! Guaranteed loads of people will get all anal about it, but i thought it was really entertaining and the lead actor was real good as BIG.

NOTORIOUS

I got the movie this morning, but didnt have time to watch it all grrr! Contemplated a sickie, but thought better of it in the end. Gonna watch it in the park tonight if the weather keeps up, will report back...but the 20 mins or so i watched looked good!

PIZZA-CHECK, BEER-CHECK, BEANBAG-CHECK

So I actually stayed in on Friday night, madness I know, but I decided I fancied having a Saturday morning hangover free for the first time in about a year. I don’t generally watch TV so I got my download on and grabbed a few movies for the evening.

First up was ‘Cass’, a film based on the life of notorious football hooligan Cass Pennant, one of the leaders of the well documented 80’s West-Ham crew the ICF (Inter-City Firm). Pennant has built up a reputation over the years as a bit of a celebrity hooligan after penning a few books about his times in the firm so I was quite looking forward to it. There’s been a number of hooligan films in recent years from the ok (‘Football Factory’) to the absolutely awful (‘Green Street’), but none of them have matched up to ‘I.D’ which I think was the absolute daddy of them all and always seems to be overlooked (I left my copy on England and cant find one over here, gutted). The fight scenes in ‘Cass’ were spot on I thought as was the depiction of the 80’s hooligan fashion – love the bit where he asks for a Lacoste tracksuit in prison haha.
Being a part of that whole scene in the 80’s where racism was rife it’s kinda mad how a black man managed to be such an integral part of the firm and I liked that it didn’t try and pull the sentimental card too much with the scenes with his family. He was adopted and brought up by a white family with no idea of his heritage and the scenes with his fam were kinda sad, but in a good way. The soundtrack captured the period real well, lots of Desmond Dekker and the like, overall a pretty wicked film I’d say.

Then it was on to ‘Adulthood’, the follow up to ‘Kidulthood’. Now I thought ‘Kidulthood’ was pretty awful to be honest, really tried too hard so I wasn’t expecting much out of this one, but I was pleasantly surprised. They still had the blatent product placement throughout (Puma this time instead of Boxfresh), and a couple of the actors were pretty bait, but definitely an improvement on ‘Kidulthood’.
For those who have seen the first one, this one carried on 6 years later when Sam gets released from prison for the murder of Trife. The basic plot is that he’s had a bit of hard time in jail and comes out a changed man. He gets moved to by one of Trife’s relatives in an early scene and spends the rest of the film hunting out Trife’s friends in an attempt to find out who if any are gonna be seeking retribution for the murder. The film looks at a few of the characters from the first film and what they’re up to now 6 years on as well as bringing in a couple of new characters. Danny Dyer makes an appearance and does his usual ‘geezer’ role, Plan B has quite a major part too and aint as bad as I thought he would be actually. The film does feel at times a little bit moralistic and I suppose with the climate of crime in London at the moment the director Noel Clarke would have felt a little bit of pressure in this regard. Soundtrack again is much better than ‘Kidulthood’. Pretty entertaining film I reckon.

Lastly I watched a documentary from 2004 called ‘Searching for the wrong eyed Jesus’. I wanted to go watch this at Fed Square on Friday but ended up downloading it instead so I could just cotch on the sofa instead . I’m a documentary person and so out of the three films this was the one I was looking forward to most, but also the most disappointing. The film follows musician Jim White on a road trip through the deep South of the states looking at the poverty, craziness and fundamental religion of the south all set to a backdrop of the local music. It had so much potential but apart from a few scenes I found it soo boring. It just tried too hard and instead of being the raw sort of film I was expecting they ended uptrying to make it too glossy and staging too much. For example they’re on a boat drifting through the swamps and all of a sudden come across a house on stilts with a couple playing guitar and singing in what is clearly a pre-prepared scene. Another time someone’s being interviewed in a barbers and then this dude starts performing a tune with everyone watching on looking at him, half laughing and smiling to themselves like ‘blud, what the hell are you doing!’ I ended up deading it with 20 minutes to go and went to bed. Glad I never paid to go see it!