Addiction, death, and superstar martyrs

In light of the death of Amy Winehouse there have been so many hours devoted to it on the news that you'd be forgiven for thinking she was well into her dozenth album, had toured into double figures and was far older than her twenty-seven years. Instead, as it has also been widely reported in most stories about her as a positive thing, she had only released two albums. These may have sold excellently, far and wide helped along by the digital age we live in, but they remain two.

Two albums regarded much more highly than perhaps they should be. Though it now appears to be a worse crime than telling many of the dark Sickipedia jokes that have sprung from this (e.g. What was Winehouse's biggest hit? Her last) for her lifelong and posthumously outspoken devotees, I'll fly against the wind. I didn't care for her music. Not the genre, because I love jazz. Not the band, who were great. I didn't care for her voice all that much, she wasn't bad but not the heavenly instrument people made her out to be and have for the last few days insisted upon. It's not a popular opinion, but it's not a cruel one before anyone tries to tell me otherwise. I just don't think she was that good.

NOTW eclipses other, better space-happenings and farewells

It's a sad day today. The reasons for this, much like the reasons for the box, are threefold.

Today, I graduated from university, and it sort of forced me to realise I'm not going back there. Maybe for a few flying visits to see friends in other years or guys and gals who are doing Masters courses or (hats off to them) medicine degrees, but those three years of being immersed there are gone. It's a little more sobering and sad in that because of the university's collegiate system, and the fact that unlike at Oxford and Cambridge college places aren't largely assigned by subject, faculty or discipline, the majority of the people I graduated with I didn't know well and the majority of the people I'd have loved to have seen for a last hurrah were saying their farewell in a silly hat and gown on different days. The few who I knew well and will miss "terribly, everso" from the college were great to chat to, but if all the people I shared a trio of years with could have been there it would have felt a bit less surreal and open-ended, I feel.

So that's the mushy, soft-hearted reason number one out of the way.

Ein experimenten- Ze varied wunderbar effects of having nuzzing to do after university

It's great how different people have reacted to the sudden lack of grounding that is our release from the woes of higher education. I should state in this first paragraph that all of these following observations have been made by myself in both real life and, unfortunately, through the great universally accepted spy-network Facebook

"Strangers don't last long here"- Rango review.

Rango,the first Nickelodeon animated feature film in the same vein as Pixar and Disney have been making for over a decade, comes out on DVD this Friday. Which is good, because it means I'm able to finally publish my review of this exceptional film, the one I started when just after I'd seen it in the cinema months ago. So, seeing as it's high time to give Rango the going over it deserves, let's get started.

Any initial quality of the film that you infer from the size of the audience when I went to see it (I was one of only two people in the cinema, let alone the screen, and the second person was that one I'd gone to see it with) should be thrown away. The lack of an audience can be put down to the facts that the only showing that week was at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Friday, when most kids would be in school, and that as poor students we'd both been waiting to have the money to go, so we were five or six weeks past its release.

Film review- The Adjustment Bureau

One of the benefits of being back at my parents' house is that they like to rent DVDs most weekends. That means that all the films I've seen pass by the cinema and thought "I really ought to see that" are now re-emerging and I'm working through them.

Did I know how many there were? No. Not until I was wandering the aisles of Blockbusters with my dad and started picking up case after case, telling him what each of them was about, pointing at others, assessing whether they've been rumoured to be critically good or not.

The first film rented was The Adjustment Bureau. It stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, but I think the person who steals the scenes they're in is from the supporting cast- one Anthony Mackie as Harry Mitchell, a member of the bureau who is disillusioned with their work and helps Damon's character, politician David Norris. It's no small feat to be the stand-out actor in this film, however- both Damon and Blunt offer solid and nuanced performances, Damon in particular, and the supporting cast from which Mackie rises includes the cornerstone actors Terence Stamp and John Slattery as Mitchell's seniors within the bureau. Despite that, he still stands head and shoulders above his colleagues.

It is worth noting that, in watching this with my parents, the concept behind the film is exceptional, brilliantly mind bending and yet easy to follow, as evidenced by the fact that my mum didn't stop once to ask what was going on. As yardsticks of overcomplicated narratives go, Mum is top-notch. If an audience won't get it, mum says so. However, having followed the premise that every single person has a Plan written for them to control their Fate along with the less strong Chance and Free Will (used for minor decisions, such as "your toothpaste, or what beverage to have with lunch"), Mum then stated the film was "creepy and mades you feel funny". In that the ideas behidn the film made her question if such a thing could happen with that sort of thing. Don't worry, it's not going to have that affect on you, it's just a hypersensitivity she alone possesses- me and my dad were fine. It's a cracking premise, though, and as I've said, the performances are more than worthy of carrying it.

Which is why, as is so often the case now, the resolution and the third act really just disappoints. It had so much that went before it to run with and, in a neat and hastily resolved quarter of an hour (if that) threw away any chance of being exceptional and daring with it. Which is ironic, as Mitchell states that the humans who the bureau have diverted away from greatness could have been so much more, were it not for the unquestioning execution of the Plan for each of them. Had the script not been so blindly followed and a more daring, deviating conclusion been thought up it would have been an exceptional film, deserving of the quote the DVD cover and TV adverts are repeating ad nauseum. "Bourne meets Inception" it wasn't, but could have been.