Posts Tagged ‘Music’

I picked up the DVD of Casino Royale at the weekend and watched it for the first time since seeing it at the cinema. Definitly still the best bond for a long time, hope they keep their nerve with the next one. Watching it again I was able to pay more attention to the sound track this time. The way the score moves from the opening theme to the use of the famous Monty Norman theme at the end mirroring Bond’s development in the story is a treat. While television shows can change their musical style over time in an organic way (Alias moving from techno with orchestral backing to orchestral springs to mind) few film series are long enough or when they are maintain a strong musical theme for long enough to pull this kind of move off. Which is why it seems so short sighted that the sound track CD lacks the song.

Veering back to the old style cold war bond this story on the BBC web site about a nuclear missile complex for sale is worth a read.

There was a letter through my front door this morning addressed to Mr Pizza Lover. Junk mail from Domino’s Pizza (a national chain of pizza shops) announcing their new outlet near here. The leaflet says Save Over £176.37 (the 37p is a nice touch although I’d say rounding it to £176 isn’t going to make many people change their mind about how good an offer this is) so I thought I’d have a read. It includes 25 vouchers for various special offers: the ususal stuff money off, free pizza, free garlic bread, free bottle of coke etc. The offers expire on September 20th and today is 15th. So I have 5 days to use 25 vouchers. No more than one voucher can be used for an order. They are open 12 noon to 11pm seven days a week. In order to use all their offers I’d need to place 5 orders a day. I havn’t worked out how much pizza I’d have to eat or how much I’d have to spend but it’s a lot. I’d have to order a pizza each evening to have for breakfast cold the next day. Maybe I can have a couple more pizza cold on the 21st. All in all it doesn’t sound like a very healthy diet. In fact it sounds more like a Weird Al song…

1. Robert A Heinlein – Particularly for the Past Through Tomorrow stories but also his novels (which I’ve read most of)
2. Harry Harrison – For The Stainless Steel Rat novels, Make Room! Make Room! and pretty much everything else except the Bill the Galactic Hero stories that I just can’t get into
3. Frank Herbert – Dragon in the Sea, the Dune series and many of his other works
4. JRR Tolkien – For The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit but I’m not bothered about the rest

5. Bernard Cornwall – The Sharpe novels which are easy to read

6. Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye but mostly for his style of prose

7. C.S. Forester – For the Horatio Hornblower novels, The African Queen, The Gun and all his other novels I’ve read (which is most of them)

8. Wilfred Owen – The only poet to make the list. His work is still so moving almost 100 years after his tragic death

9. Dumas – For the swash and buckle of D’Artagnan Romances and The Count of Monte Cristo

10. Alistair MacLean – For all his thrillers and adventure novels

11. Terry Pratchett – For being funny, clever and prolific

12. Ian Fleming – For Bond but particularly the short stories and novella which tell you more about Bond than many of the novels

13. Nevil Shute – For Slide Rule and A Town Like Alice

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1. Architecture – The waterfront, the cathedrals and William Brown Street are often mentioned but there are many more distinctive buildings throughout the city
2. Music – From the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to a band you may have heard of called the Beatles
3. Sport – Notably Liverpool and Everton football clubs and the Grand National at Aintree
4. Visual Arts – From the varied collections in the city galleries to the SuperLambBanana and Turning the Place Over
5. The night life – Although I’ve not been out clubbing in years
6. Education – There are the three Universities (the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Hope University), the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and an assortment of schools and colleges.
7. The people
8. Poetry – including famous poets like Roger McGough and Adrian Henri
9. Eating out – the choice of types of food to eat in Liverpool is excellent and so wide I can’t list even a fraction here
10. Museums – Liverpool has Merseyside Maritime Museum, World Museum Liverpool, the International Slavery Museum, National Conservation Centre and Sudley House
11. FACT – A great little cinema
12. Festivals and Events – from the 800 celebration this year to the capital of culture next year and the various regular festivals there is usually something happening
13. Did I mention the people?

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1. You’ve Got To Laugh – Nik Kershaw. Arrived this week from Short House Records and in my CD player a lot since then. Includes a warning that it may include traces of irony. Traces? Some might say that alone is ironic. The tunes could be mistaken for pop. The lyrics are a little more complex than that.
2. The West Wing (Season 1). If there is one show I find my way back to over and over it’s the West Wing.
3. Bat Out of Hell 2 – Meat Loaf. Because Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.
4. The Very Best of Incantation. I’m not a big listener to pan pipe music but Incantation are far too good to pigeonhole and ignore.
5. Mr Benn. It was research for something I was writing, honest.
6. The Way It Is – Bruce Hornsby and the Range. Have you noticed I like my lyrics complicated yet?
7. Set Me Free – Marion Raven. Nik’s knocked Marion out of my CD player but she’ll be back soon I’m sure.
8. Battle Star Galactica (Season 2). The only reason I’m not on The West Wing’s second season. Really enjoying this despite still thinking they should have kept the original shows theme.
9. A Cock and Bull Story. Not sure what to make of this. It was either brilliant or utter rubbish. I think I’ll lean towards the first of the two.
10. Local Hero Music by Mark Knopfler.
11. The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War – Thaddeus Holt. A heavy weight and slightly very dull history book but between the bickering over who commanded what when it does actually include some interesting history.
12. Sharpe’s Escape by Bernard Cornwell. I’ve barely started this yet because The Deceivers is taking a lot longer to read than I expected.
13. Carrotblanca – Bugs Bunny and Friends do Casablanca. Somehow it works. Don’t ask me how. It would be quicker to just watch it for yourself and see.

So what are you listening to / reading / watching at the moment?

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My copy of Marion Raven’s album Set Me Free came from Amazon last week but in all the excitement of the week end I didn’t get round to blogging about it. A good mix of different style and even the tracks I didn’t like at first are growing on me. Her sound isn’t ground breaking or particularly new but it’s well constructed well performed rock music.

A picture of somewhere on the Wirral I took from a Dakota last Saturday.

Just back from watching Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the second part of the two part follow up to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Enjoyed it. Plot was twisty and did some interesting things with the characters. Great action sequences. Interesting characters. I would have liked more Chow Yun-Fat and Jack Davenport but with so many characters it’s hard to fit them all in. A fair number of characters removed from any future story arcs. Well as removed as any character is in a setting where pretty much anyone can be brought back from the dead and where gods can be trapped in human form.

Some people think there wasn’t enough Jack (Sparrow not the monkey) and that he didn’t appear early enough. However by saving him for awhile they were able to build up plots, other characters’ stories and anticipation. Sometime too much of a good thing can spoil it. The rest of the cast (even the over the top pirates) are the straight men for Jack to bounce off. He’s one of the things that makes Pirates of the Caribbean special. Too much of him though and he’d become annoying or worse ordinary. He is a character who is in danger of suffering from what Gamers refer to as Monty Haul – something many film series suffer from. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Great ship battles. In a realistic film a well fought ship of the line should have held up to two smaller ships a little longer especially when the two smaller ships have just gone toe to toe. But this wasn’t Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World it was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and two large frigates can take a ship of the line in a single pass…

The music was a real overblown, bombastic treat and has move further away from The Peacemaker score that the first Pirates film wasn’t many themes different from.

The post credits sequence while nice story telling didn’t really add a lot. I hope Kim and Darkdwarf and everyone else I went with will forgive me wanting to sit through the credits to the end.

If I had time I’d love to work out how many character triangles there were at work in the plot. Jack, Will and Elizabeth is the most obvious and in many ways is like the love triangle at the heart of Star Wars IV – VI, although in this case (spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t seen Star Wars and still might) Han doesn’t get the girl the nice boy (turned rebel to save the world) does. A couple of others that spring to mind (although not all big triangles now) include Will, Elizabeth and ‘Bootstrap’; Will, Elizabeth and Norrington; and Beckett, Jack and Davy Jones. Each of these triangles interact to push the story in different directions. Sometimes you don’t know which triangle is driving a character when there are two acting on them at the same time – a situation that affects both Will and Elizabeth at different times and sometimes the same time.

So should they come back for more? I can see there is milage in some of the characters and they’ve set them up for more potential adventure. If they do I hope they are careful not to try and top this one – you can only have so many sea battles in whirl pools. Focusing on a smaller number of characters wouldn’t hurt so they can give them a bigger chunk of screen time each. Avoid the trap of going down the Monty Haul road.

Its taken me most of today to get to this which given today was a rather gloomy bank holiday it shouldn’t have. I split yesterday between wxPython in Action, Boston Legal and Mambo.

Mambo in some ways was the easiest of the three as I got it up and running with only two references to the support documentation. One to get the WYSIWYG editor working and one to get SEO friendly URLs working. I’m not going to use it for the impworks site but I’ve been asked about it at work a couple of times and it seems like it might be the tools to help friends who want to make web sites but don’t want to fuss around with learning html create their own sites.

wxPython in Action is a well written technical guide to using wxPython! By the end of the day I’d ploughed my way to past page 100 and not written any code. I have covered a lot of theory which given my past track record with learning to code GUI applications is not a bad thing.

Boston Legal has given me a convenient opportunity to relax between chapters. Kim recommended it to me. Well more told me I had to watch it. Repeatedly. She was right. Other than the annoying theme music I’m really enjoying it.

1. Thieves steal 250,000 Flake bars: The police are looking for a gang of attractive, long haired women moving in slow motion. The gang were heard chanting about the quality of the chocolate at the scene. A senual, warm rain shower followed the gang as they made their escape until they passed under a waterfall where the trail goes cold. Police refuse to confirm all CCTV footage of the crime has been affected by a technical fault so it is in soft focus. A dead lizard was found at the scene.
2. wxPython in Action: Arrived from Amazon on Wednesday. Swishier interfaces on my python scripts as soon as I’ve digested it.
3. Blogging: When I should be doing something more useful instead.
4. Marrion Raven’s music: Here set as support at Meat Loaf at the MEN on Saturday night was great.
5. Nottingham Forest: Will they get promotion in the play off this year or spend another year in the first division?
6. Guardian Great speeches:
   I picked a few of these up in the paper but missed most of them so being able to read them online is great.
7. Darwin’s Letters: Not just evolution but his correspondence from the age of 12.
8. TT and WW: Need I say more?
9. Ms Mira Muffet: Who suddenly turned out to have an interesting story all of her own in my Fairy Tale Noir. She was supposed to be a bit player in the story. Bo Peep, the Pied Piper, the Spider, a refuge ginger bread maker and Jo, a taxi driver, all tried to make a bid for fame but Ms Muffet is the one with the real drive.
10. gatineau rumours: Microsoft planning Google Analytics competitor
11. TV: CSI, New Tricks, ER, Hustle, Doctor Who and Great British Menu.
12. Vue: Sometime I just get an idea and want to try it out to see what kind of picture I create.
13. Raymond Chandler: I’m enjoying The Long Goodbye at the moment.

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