RANT - Dredd

This was so bad, it should've been called Dread.

I don't know about you. but I hate movies that are shot with little or no lighting. No doubt the director thinks it's cool, but I think it just means the budget is so low, or the sets are so shabby, that s/he is ashamed to shine bright lights anywhere near the actions. Dredd is shot - surprise, surprise - in almost total darkness.

The plot - a city in the future, two cops: Dredd and a rookie, a huge block of apartments taken over by a cutthroat gang of, er, cutthroats - is choc full of cliches, stereotypes, and other ordinariness. 

It was crushingly dull, and the only reason I watched it to the bitter end was that I was strapped into my airline seat rather than free to step out of a theater at the drop of an uncomfortably heavy helmet.

RANT - Thieving Restauranters, Singapore

I still can't believe that in thirty years of international travel, this was the first time I have been knowingly ripped off by a restaurant. 

The place was called Marina Bay Seafood, on Boat Quay in Singapore. The receipt showed the more telling company name behind the restaurant, the Fuqing Seafood Company.

I was surprised by the brazen nature of the place. After all, we were six guys out for the night. We sat down at this place, ready for a Singaporean feast, but not for a royal Fuqing. We ordered nothing special - no Lobster - mine was Pepper Beef. With a selection of similarly ordinary appetizers - satay, grilled vegetables, prawns, and so on - plus six Tiger Beers, we had a great time until the bill arrived.

As if to telegraph the rip-off, the restaurant had charged us fifty cents for each towelette we'd used.

At something over six hundred dollars - more than one hundred dollars each - for food that according to the menu should have cost barely half that sum - we were certain the restaurant ripped us off. After a brief questioning of the wait staff, learning that these were apparently market prices for the portion sizes we had been served - even though those sizes and prices had never been explained or knowingly ordered - we shrugged our shoulders and decided we'd each exact our revenge. 

That "revenge" consisted of warning off the other five hundred or so IBMers who were also at the sales conference, and blogging our disgust at this Fuqing rip-off.

REVIEW - Forum Seafood, Singapore

It's not too shabby having a job that took me to Spain and England one week, then Singapore the next. Or so I told myself as I hopped on my Eva Airlines flight (Eva who?) from San Francisco via Taipei to Singapore. Twenty hours, and two calendar days later, I alight in steamy Singapore, where everything runs efficiently if maybe a little antiseptically. 

After a day or so acclimatizing - i.e. sleeping off the buzzing in my ears caused by the crushing flight - I got the subway into downtown Singapore, and wandered for a couple of hours around the Marina. I was looking for one of the Hawker's Markets - the collections of stalls selling local foods. But all I found was a massive mall housing Gucci, Prada, etc, all at the foot of the Marina Bay Sands - topped by what looks like a boat that spans the three towers.

By the time I wandered the mall, the Marina, the Towers, and everything around them, I was exhausted, hungry, and hot.

So I found myself at Boat Quay, a delightful setting to look out over the Singapore River and address all three - my exhaustion, hunger, and temperature.

That can be the only reason I picked Forum Seafood, because it otherwise displayed everything that would normally warn me off a place like this, namely: the name - I don't lust after Seafood; the setting - a line of tourist-centric bars and restaurants, featuring everything from "genuine British fish and chips" to tanks full of revolting looking molluscs and fierce fish. Worst of all, my chosen eaterie had that hated feature of many tourist Chinese restaurants, boards outside featuring photos of each of their dishes.

Despite all of that, hunger won out, so I settled down and chose the beef satay and the crispy chicken. Washed down by a couple of pints of draft Tiger Beer, it made the usually dull experience of eating on my own - even somewhere as agreeable as harbor-side Singapore - to be genuinely relaxing.

RANT - A Lonely Place for Dying

It wasn't just the twenty-hour journey to Singapore that made this movie tiresome. It did that all by itself.

Ruined by lack of relevance - it's set in 1972, during the war in Vietnam, but heaven knows why we need a film as small as this, today, and a lack of action - this was a low-budget inaction movie.

Nikolai Dzerzhinsky holes up in an abandoned prison on the US-Mexican border, waiting for his contact from the Washington Post. Apparently, he's got some key evidence against the CIA, and he wants to trade it for asylum in the US.

Special Agent Robert Harper is there to meet the Russian, take his documentary evidence, and kill him.

If that sounds a little contrived, wait until you see the movie. Or don't, because it's tediously slow, dry as parchment, and not worth waiting for nothing to happen.

If that's a bad case of double negativity, forgive me. I could have included a lot more.

REVIEW - Killer Joe

A rare departure from Mathew MaConaughey's usual, dreary romantic comedy fare. That in itself doesn't make this film good, but at least it's a somewhat original story. 

Matthew McConaughey plays Joe Cooper, a Dallas police detective who moonlights as a contract killer. He's hired by Emile Hirsch to do a number on Hirsch's mother, with the agreement of her ex-husband, Thomas Haden Church, and their daughter and Hirsch's sister, Dottie.

Hirsch intends collecting the insurance money on his mother's life, with Dottie the alleged benefactor of that insurance money. Because he can't raise the money to pay the killer up front, Dottie is given to McConaughey as a retainer.

What follows is a mixture of hillbilly-style mayhem - McConaughey moves into the family trailer, to start taking payment of his retainer - and everything goes pear-shaped from then on.

I'm not sure why this got an NC-17 rating - unless our Matt's butt isn't deemed worthy of being seen by the general movie-going public - but the film's worth seeing if you like your cops dirty and your families hick.

RAVE - Supermercado San Miguel, Madrid

This was the absolute 'find' of our week in Madrid.

'Supermercado' only loosely translates as 'supermarket', the kind of place one normally avoids like the plague, and is generally only useful when one is running low on toilet paper or other such mundane but essential items.

In Madrid - and maybe other enlightened countries - the term Supermercado can mean anything from the giant Carrefours, to the relatively tiny grocery store.

This one, the Supermercado San Miguel was a medium-sized (fifty thousand square feet) market busy with fifty or more stalls, counters and mini-shops serving beer, wine, champagne, and every kind of food delicacy the worn traveler might desire.

We desired champagne from one stall, cheeses from another, port from another, olives, mojitos, candies and chocolates from others, all in a fabulous, crowded atmosphere that was a million miles removed from the 16th Street Safeway in San Francisco.

Next time I'm in Madrid, I'll know to make straight for this place and skip some lesser eateries.

RAVE - Casa Lucio, Madrid

It looks like all of these reviews of the restaurants we tried in Madrid are going to turn out as RAVES. How else can you vote, when you're working in Madrid and every evening is like being let out of the asylum?

Casa Lucio was our taxi driver's response to our request for a place that served Paella. At least he got us here quickly, because in every other respect he failed. After waiting 10 minutes to be shown to our table, which seemed to be through a warren of empty-table-filled rooms, up two flights of stairs and to the back of another empty-table-filled room, we sat down, ordered our cervezas, looked at the menu to find no paella, not even tapas.

Our enterprising foursome proved upstanding and resourceful however, so we ordered - and mostly shared - the Chorizo, Huevos Estrellas, Ensalada Lechuga, Cordero Asada, Merluza Romana, and Cochinillo Asado. That lot proved to be mostly pork, ham, and eggs. All were equally outstanding, and we left through the now bustling and completely packed restaurant, at close to midnight.

RAVE - Riofrio, Madrid

One of our less successful finds in Madrid, at least atmosphere-wise, where it had less of that than one can expect on the surface of the moon. 

Riofrio is a huge place of indistinct architectural heritage - too much glass, brass, and shiny, indiscriminate wood around to make out what era they were going for. The place seemed like it would happen at any moment but never quite did.

But at least the food was great, if not exactly as planned. I had the Jamon Croquetas, which I worked out using schoolboy Spanish meant Ham Croquettes. So far, so good. Then my Triangulos Cochin - which I translated as Triangles of Pork - turned out to be (and I should have guessed this) the only pork pieces that are naturally triangular - namely, ears!

Anyhow, I can testify that pig's ears taste fabulous. Cooked that is. Cooked crispy, with one side pork-cracklingly tasty, and the other side succulently porky. Now there's a description you're unlikely to find in this month's Bon Appetit magazine.

RAVE - Kitchen Stories, Madrid

A whole week in Madrid, Spain. (I have to add 'Spain' as many Americans will assume I meant Madrid, Texas, or somewhere 7,000 miles from Espana).

This was a business trip, so I spent most of the week enclosed in a dreary Airport hotel, only venturing out into the cold each evening. Each adventure required a twenty minute cab-ride into the city, so what with the vagaries of an unknown city plus and equally unknown driver, we experimented by pointing to one of the numerous big plazas on the map and said "there" in broken Spanish (i.e loud, belligerent English).

This restaurant was a lucky find, as Reggie and I were looking for somewhere near the Supermercado San Miguel (more of that later).

Kitchen Stories is an all-white place, which at first looked a little stark for us, but it soon warmed up as we downed a bottle of Mar de Frade.

Our spicy tuna, berenjenas (egg-plant, or aubergine), guacamole and hummus wouldn't necessarily tax the average host, but proved an ideal base for the gastronomic festivities we had planned for later that night. Everything happens "later that night" restaurant-wise in Madrid, as each evening most restaurants are empty until 10:00pm, when everyone seems to descend en masse to the city's eating places.

We were determined to catch them out by trying to talk business early each morning, but we seemed to be less able to do the "dine 'til midnight, rise at dawn" thing than the average Spaniard.

REVIEW - The Words

4 stories in one - Dennis Quaid is the narrator, telling the story of Bradley Cooper, a writer who finds someone else's manuscript in an old briefcase bought from an antique store. Cooper types up the manuscript, word for word and gets it published as his own work. Then Jeremy Irons shows up as the guy that wrote the original manuscript. He confronts Cooper, telling him how he used his life in wartime Paris as the basis for his manuscript - this is boring me writing the review almost as much as the movie did.

Some say this film has been "sadly overlooked". For me if falls short on several fronts. 

First: the outcome is obvious from the start. You know it's not going to end well for the plagiarist. Second, it's basically a romance film thinly disguised as a literary drama. Third, it's tediously slow, and not helped by the plodding narration, first by Quaid and then by Irons.

I'd like to say that something arresting happened to bring this to a dramatic finale.

RAVE - Escape from Camp 14, by Blaine Harden

The story of one of the few people ever to have escaped from a North Korean political prison. Shin Dong-hyuk was one of around 200,000 people held in North Korea's brutal prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin's Soviet political prisons and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps.

Shin was born in prison - his parents were imprisoned for some minor mistake, transgressing any one of the numerous illogical and inhuman rules of this backward nation - and after years of working in the prison's coal mines, sewing machine factories, and pig farms, he risked everything to clamber through electrified fences and basically walked and hitched rides across thousands of miles of North Korea and neighboring China, to eventually make his way to South Korea and true freedom.

This story brings us right up to date - Shin is now living in the USA - and details the horrors of murder, starvation, cruelty, and back-breaking work heaped on so many of his kind.

Not as flashy as many, similar escape stories, but nonetheless it's a vivid account of the desperate lives of so may thousands who are still held against their will by a repressive government.

RANT - I Want My MTV, by Rob Tannenbaum

Billed as "The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution" this was little more than a few hundred pages of quotes from musicians, producers, and directors who participated in the creation of the videos we all used to love, or hate, back when the M in MTV stood for Music.

Those quotes rank from the genuinely insightful: "Tom Preston: We were like an Internet start-up. We were lean and mean and didn't know what the hell we were doing. At the beginning, we were working out of a couple of rooms at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown New York. My first office was a soda storeroom. People thought I was delivering soda to the building" ....

Through the self-serving "There were no rules. We had a policy not just to break the rules, but to blow up the ****ing rules" ....

To the downright banal "Nancy Wilson, Heart: Everybody wanted their MTV so bad. I remember craving it like crazy".

But after a while, I got sick of reading stuff like "Man, there was so much coke. We were out of our heads for the whole shoot".

Yes, it was a revolution. But surely it could have been made to sound a little more intelligent.

RANT - The Imposter

A true story, told documentary style, of a 13-year old boy from Texas who disappears, never to be found again.

That kind of gives away the ending, as does the title and the fact that when a guy claiming to be the missing boy is found 3 years later, in Spain, he has a distinct French accent.

These facts, and the plodding speed of the whole thing, fly in the face of one fan - presumably someone connected with the production - who pronounced on IMDB.com that "you're pretty much open-mouth and on the edge of your seat throughout the film's entirety". 

The only open-mouth-inducing element of this film was how on earth this imposter duped the authorities, and even the missing boy's family for so long. I'd stopped bothering with that conundrum long before the film ended, so it's a bug thumbs down from me.

REVIEW - John Dies At The End

It's hard to categorize this little number.

A friend said he was reading the book, and was confused ... was it a comedy, or a horror story?

I've just seen the film, and I'm similarly perplexed. It's hardly a comedy, although there's a light-hearted, if not flat out comical way the story unfolds. And it's hardly horror, although there are "monsters" and other such ingredients.

The shame is, in the end it's neither of those, nor is it that rewarding.

Two college dropouts experience a new street drug - they call it Soy Sauce - which opens up the users' minds, allowing "things" from other dimensions to enter ours, and vice versa. 

Sounds interesting, and starts off that way. Trouble is, it turns out to be less than gripping. In fact, it sent me to sleep at least twice. I had to repeatedly restart the movie to catch up with what I had slept through, and almost wish I hadn't bothered.

REVIEW - Safety Not Guaranteed

The title comes from an advertisement posted in a Seattle newspaper - "Wanted. Someone to go back in time with me ... Must bring your own weapons"

Fueled by that alluring advertisement, a journalist and two interns from the newspaper set off to track down the individual who posted the ad, and find out more about the proposition.

The film is ultra-low budget, but not in a way that detracts from the story. 

Rather than being a sci-fi extravaganza, it's a warm look into what makes an apparently unbalanced individual tick - he claims he's time-traveled once before, after all - and how one of the interns gets involved in the preparations for a trip back in time. It turns out - as it often does - to be the scent of a woman that's enticing the main protagonist to risk life and limb in a home made time-traveling, er, boat.

It hardly requires a 3D cinema experience to enjoy this - my iPad aboard a trans-Atlantic flight was enough for me - but it's nevertheless worth watching. If nothing else, to see whether there's anything to this offer.

RAVE - The Sessions

Inspired by the true story of a guy who uses an iron lung, and decides he wants to lose his virginity. He has five or six sessions with a professional sex therapist, who not only fulfills his wish but develops a serious relationship with the intelligent but deeply incapacitated patient.

Fantastic performances by the able-bodied John Hawkes - I had to check he wasn't an iron lung user in real life, such was the perfection of his acting - and the newly re-appeared from the ashes Helen Hunt - who braved the critics and the cold by playing this role.

This film was funny - but not a comedy; touching - but not a weepie, and in the end rewarding. A low tempo but high skin-quotient affair that had me wondering how on earth the therapist was able to deliver such services while being - apparently happily - married, albeit in the 1980s Republic of Berkeley.

REVIEW - Here Comes The Boom

Not a film I'd like to brag about seeing, but when you're sat in an uncomfortable Delta Airlines seat for five and a half hours, you have to find whatever diversions exist, and this one was a film I'd downloaded to watch on my iPad.

I'm sure you've all seen the "hilarious" trailers: school music program faces cuts thanks to a lack of funding, so the normally lazy biology teacher (Kevin James) decides to rekindle his high school wrestling skills and enter a 10-fight series of mixed martial arts bouts in an attempt to win the $50,000 needed to save the program.

His honorable intentions, buoyed on by his thus far failed attempts to win over the heart of school nurse Selma Hayek - what school, on what planet, ever had a nurse that looked like Selma Hayek? - meet the highs and lows that can be easily predicted from a Kevin James film.

Better than having needles inserted into my eyeballs by a miserable seventy year old flight attendant with a lousy job, but only just.