A place for things and stuff
Happy Arrested Development Day! Just in case you aren’t aware this is the day that the new season of Arrested Development comes out! If you don’t know what Arrested Development is than lucky for you it is free and streaming on Netflix! I recommend it. It is a very funny show. It is about man (Jason Bateman) who must try and save his formerly rich and very corrupt family from living on the streets, and he is mostly successful.
I am going to start off by saying Mumford and Sons puts on an amazing show. They rocked Holland Park in Surrey B.C. for a good hour and forty minutes, but I will get back to that.
The venue Holland Park is great place to watch a show. The area has cheap parking nearby at the shopping center and the Sky Train station as long as you get there when gates open. It is open and there is space to move around, plus they have a ton of good food vendors. The biggest downside is that the stage is not tall enough or they need to dig out the stage area, so it is easy to have a large person or a girl on someone’s shoulders block your view. but it does handle the 25,000 guests well.
The first band the Mystery Jets went on just an hour after the gates opened, so we were still milling around and getting food during their show, but it was good. They have a very 70’s rock feel, and play and sing well.
The next band or singer I should say Michael Kiwanuka has a good soul voice, and was great to hear. I will be on the lookout for his stuff in the future. My only problem with his show is that he needs to pick his set list better because he started off with some great crowd moving tunes, but then went really slow and soulful, which was good, but sucked the life out of the crowd.
That brings us to main event. Mumford & Sons put on amazing show from beginning to end. They played all the songs off their last two albums, and the order they put them in really kept the crowd in to it. They sound better live than they do on their CDs. It was great! Their set design was sweet with cool light rigs and the sound guys did a fantastic job, so atta’boys all around. If you ever get the chance to see them live, do it! You will not be disappointed.
It was a great night and a lot of fun, but a word of advice. If you are ever thinking it is midnight so it should be ok to take the Peace Arch crossing, DON’T! It took two hours because they only had one lane open, and with the new red light turn your car off policy it felt even longer.
“Manos” The Hands of Fate is considered among the worst movies of all time. Most lists have it as number two below the classic Plan 9 from Outer Space, but you could defiantly make a case for Manos as number one. Though number two may be a good descriptor for the movie. It was written, directed, and stared in by Insurance and Manure salesman Harold P. Warren in 1966, but it was almost completely forgotten until MST3K found it, and it is one of their best episodes.
The movie starts with a young family on their way to a vacation at Valley Lodge, but they get lost and end up in the desert, so they ask to stay with the creepiest looking hillbilly of all time named Torgo, but at first he doesn’t want to let them because The Master doesn’t like dogs or kids (even though The Master has a dog), but he relents and lets them stay. What will happen when The Master finds out?
You know your in for a good movie when the movie starts off with like fifteen minutes of camera out the window driving shots, and the characters have to beg to stay with a creepy guy who works for a person he calls “Master”.
Everything is bad about this movie. There is no script and the “actors” have to repeat the dialog to fill time, and to call it dialog is an insult to writers everywhere. The sets are someone’s small living room, and a place in the desert with pillars where The Master and his Wives live.
I hope Warren was a good Manure and Insurance salesmen because he was an awful director. He never framed his shots, and anytime he showed the “actors'” faces they were bad close ups it is like he had never seen a movie before and he was making up something new as he went along.
It is safe to say the Joel and the Bots had a field day with this movie. Every seen has so much to make fun of, and the movie is so strangely bad that you can take your eyes off of it much like a train crash.
“Manos” The Hands of Fate is so bad that I think everyone should watch it at least once it will make you appreciate how good most movies are. This is streaming on Amazon Prime so there is no reason not to see it, other then fact it is really bad.
This is my first music review and I am not a music connoisseur by any stretch, so I would not expect them very often, but for certain bands I will make an exception, and one of those groups is Daft Punk. Their new album Random Access Memories came out two whole days ago, and I love it.
The album has a very 70’s disco feel, but it doesn’t get stuck there. It explores all kinds of music from rock to orchestral, and they are really pushing the boundaries of what Techno/Electronica can be. I know some people are disappointed by the fact it is not a straight up techno album, but it is fun to hear artists explore their craft. Like most electronica albums some songs outstay their welcome, but it is a small nit pick.
I am sure I am not the only one who’s best stereo is in their car, and the first morning I got the album I thought of calling in sick and taking a drive just so I could listen to more. Instead I had to go to work and listen to it at my desk.
This album may not be for everybody but it is for me.
Flight is a 2012 film by Robert Zemeckis, and it was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Actor (Denzel Washington), and Best Original Screen Play (John Gatins). For me, it did not scare me to fly, but it did try awful hard to put me to sleep.
The story starts off with Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) drinking and taking cocaine, and then jumping in the cockpit and flying a plane. As the plane nears its destination it starts to fall apart, and Whip through some amazing maneuvers is able to crash land the plane in an open field and save most of the people, but since there was a crash there will be a toxicology report, so will he or won’t he get blamed for this and go to jail.
I have to start off by saying Denzel is great in this movie, and it is easy to see why he gets an Oscar nomination for it, but the movie is two hours and eighteen minutes long, and the plane crash is over in the first thirty minutes, so then you are forced to watch Denzel drink and lie about it for an hour and forty-five minutes. They needed an editor to cut this down by at least a half hour, but as it is it just a way to see that Denzel can act, and see if the audience can stay awake.
I wanted to like this movie because I like most of the people in it, and that made it, but it is just too long for the subject matter, so I would say pass on it unless you are an Oscar movie buff and just want to see Denzel’s role.