Movie Review - The Guard

One of my favourite movies of recent years was In Bruges, in which Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play two feckless Irish hitmen laying low in Belgium after a job gone wrong. I haven't laughed so much at the cinema since the Dude and Walter went bowling. So I was excited by the prospect of The Guard which sees Gleeson back on familiar territory (and back in his Irish homeland) in a story from the...

Alphabetical Meme

Because I've not done one of these for a while...Stolen from Sunday Stealing. A. Age: 39 and a half. For the rest of my life.B. Bed size: Daddy bear.C. Chore that you hate: All of them. D. Dogs: Bollocks.E. Essential start to your day: Green Tea.F. Favorite colour: I wear black on the outside...G. Gold or Silver: Not even bronze.H. Height: 6'1".I. Instruments you play: Piano, tenor horn, record, harmonica....

Book Review - Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Anyone who's read John Ajvide Lindqvist's previous novels, Handling The Undead and Let The Right One In will know that he's an author hugely influenced by Stephen King at his best. We see this again in the opening chapters of Harbour as Lindqvist introduces us to a strange community who make their home on Domarö, a haunted island in the Stockholm archipelago. There's Anders, whose six year old daughter...

The Mixtape Lives On...

...is the name of my new music blog which launches today. I've been writing about music here on Sunset Over Slawit since the very second post but lately those posts have become longer and longer and taken up a much bigger part of the blog than is healthy. Things like my musically themed Top Tens and the What I'm Listening To posts take ages to write and are probably of limited interest to many regular...

Going South (2): Monkey World

When we first arrived at Monkey World, we were worried a better name for the place might be "Spot The Monkey World". It was a windy, chilly day and despite having large enclosures full of climbing frames, nets and other exciting outdoor toys, most of the chimps were huddled up inside. Fortunately the sun soon came out, and so did the monkeys.Monkey World is an Ape Rescue Centre dedicated to combating...

Movie Review - Jane Eyre

So there's another Jane Eyre adaption doing the rounds and it's really not bad. Certainly better than that awful TV version of Wuthering Heights we had to suffer through a few years back. (I was going to write "last year" until I checked the post and discovered I'd written it in 2009... which scared me a little, to be honest.) If I had to pick a Brontë sister to lock up in my attic, it'd have to be...

The Teachers Are Afraid Of The Pupils

So here we go with the next step of my master plan: teacher training.What, you say? Rol, you say? Are you insane, you say? Putting you in a classroom with a mob of cheeky young oiks... that's a recipe for disaster! Fortunately, I'm not training to teach young people. That job lost its appeal since they abolished corporal punishment. If I could have been Bullet Baxter in Grange Hill, I might have been...

Going South (1) Avebury Vs. Stonehenge

We were heading for Dorset, but our first stop was in Wiltshire at the huge prehistoric henge monument that dominates and defines the village of Avebury. It includes one of the largest stone circles in the world, well over 1000 feet in diameter, built over a period of a thousand years by 40 generations of Neolithic Britons. Long before the Parthenon, the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China were even...

Music I Haven't Been Listening To This Week

I haven't actually been here this week. I've gone south... quite a long way, but not quite as far as France. This may also explain why I haven't popped over to your blog to be as abusive as I usually am. I've been elsewhere. All this week's posts were written last week and posted by the SOS Rol-bot. That's why there isn't a Music I've Been Listening To feature today. I'm stopping writing about music... in fact, I'm going to be writing about it more...

Book Review - How To Leave Twitter

How To Leave Twitter is a hugely pointless book. But then, it's a book about a hugely pointless subject. Grace Dent makes you realise what an enormous waste of your life twitter really is (as if you didn't already know) but despite the title, she has no intention of actually leaving. She's a twitter addict. And like any addict, she's tried to quit, gone cold turkey, sometimes actually managed to walk...

Posters On My Wall

Looking through some old photographs, I came across these pictures of my bedroom wall when I was a young boy. As you can see, my heroes back then weren't pop stars or sporting heroes like you'd find on a lot of boy's walls, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) the same comic book characters who still provide me entertainment and reassurance thirty years later. If I couldn't get to sleep, I could always glance...

Movie Review - Cowboys & Aliens

Hey - you like westerns, right?How about sci-fi films?Yeah?What about Daniel Craig? Harrison Ford? Thirteen from House? Sam Rockwell? The Kurgan? Walton freaking Goggins?Imagine them all in the same movie - wouldn't that be incredible?Erm...I had high hopes for Cowboys & Aliens, but it just didn't work. The two genres mixed like oil and water, with the western floating about on top only to be...

Music I'm Listening To This Week

The Countryside make a mellow, mournful, haunting sound on their debut album, Beggars On Horseback. It's the brainchild of Irish singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Graeme Slattery (former guitarist with The Devlins) and charts his journey from city dweller to his new home in a converted 17th century stable in the countryside of County Wicklow. As someone who's lived most of his life staring...

Book Review - Dark Steps

Dark Steps is a short anthology of stories from fellow blogger and writer Martin Pond, available to download or read on old-fashioned dead trees, if you're a traditionalist like me. The collection opens with The Waiting Room, a scary slice of future-shock spiced with sharp ideas and a chilling, utterly unexpected, denouement. It's probably my favourite story here, but that's not to detract from the...

There's A Huge Spot On Daniel Craig's Neck

So we're watching the film Defiance on DVD the other night. It's not the greatest thing Daniel Craig's ever done, but it's a hell of a lot better than Cowboys & Aliens*. It's the tale of three Jewish brothers who escape the Nazis in WWII and build a community of exiles in the Belarussian forest where they survive for years until the end of the war. It's based on a true story, one of those "triumph...

Comic Reviews - Verity Fair, The Grinning Mask & Thunder Brother: Soap Division

It's great to have Terry Wiley back on the small press scene, after far too long away. On my recent trip to Caption, I was lucky enough to catch up with the first two episodes of his new comic Verity Fair, and to meet Terry in the flesh for the first time. Verity Fair follows the hilarious and slightly creepy adventures of out-of-work actress Verity Bourneville, a woman of a certain age with no off-switch...

Movie Review - The Skin I Live In

Rol's first rule about promoting movies with plots that hinge on a huge, monkey frightening twist: don't. Don't mention the twist at all. Don't let reviewers mention the twist at all. Shoot every audience member as soon as they've watched the film so they don't tell anyone else about the twist. This is the only way your movie will ever be enjoyed as you intended it.There's nothing worse than going...

Title Fight - Drive - And the winner is...

Thanks to everybody who voted in last week's inaugural Title Fight post to find your favourite 'Drive' song. There were six very different songs to choose from, all with the exact same title - by The Cars, REM, Incubus, Rialto, Alan Jackson and The Gaslight Anthem. As expected, it was a tightly fought battle between the first two artists, with some support for Incubus and token votes for Rialto and...

Music I'm Listening To This Week

I was intrigued by the promo email for the debut single by new American band Dreamers of the Ghetto because it screamed BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN all over my inbox. These PR people, they know how to get my attention. Lead singer Luke James certainly has a classic hoarse power rock voice, but that's where the Springsteen comparison ends for me. Not to say I didn't enjoy it, Tether builds like a bastard and...

Book Review - The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

I've been on the look out for a copy of The Hollow Man (or The Three Coffins, to give it its alternative US title) for some time now. I'd heard it described as "the greatest locked room mystery ever" and as I'm a sucker for whodunits I was particularly interested in reading chapter 17, "The Locked Room Lecture" in which Carr's legendary detective hero, Dr. Gideon Fell, lays out his treatise on how...