Jersey films, Lara, 666 & Abbey Road

Well 06/06/06 has come and passed with no apocalypse (that I’m aware of)… I hope all you parents out there with babies born on that fateful day check your child’s head for suspicious 666 shaped birthmarks. Trust me, Damien is the name to go for a boy.

The remake of The Omen happened to be release on 06/06/06 and I happened to take a look on boxofficmojo.com and saw its opening night figure:

$12,633,666

A spooky coincidence, don’t you think!

Had a nice time in Jersey with Roz and Elliot, just seemed to go by so damn quick, before I knew it my holiday was over and I was back to work… I slightly overindulged on all you can eat buffet at the hotel and therefore suffered a bit on the last day, but apart from that everything went smoothly… even Condor was on time!

I managed to pick up a couple of extra Beatles albums in Jersey, namely Rubber Soul and Abbey Road. I’ve also since ordered the Beatles Anthology DVD documentary from Amazon a couple of days ago. Abbey Road has been rocketed to the very top of my best albums of all time list, alongside Sg. Peppers and The White Album. It really is quite something else, an end of an era record (this was the Beatles last studio album) and a much more joyous and less restrained album than Let it Be. It really is something else, Rubber Soul is also an excellent album, but I’ve been listening to Abbey Road pretty much no stop since I put it on my ipod.

My only annoyance is with my ipod. Why is it that the ipod insists on having a slight pause between tracks? This must only be for 1/10 of a second, but for some CD’s this can be annoying and Abbey Road is one of those. The final 11 tracks which formed side 2 of the original record are a collection of song which really form an seamless rock ballad. This makes the pause between tracks very noticeable and annoyingly so. Surely there must be some way around this, but as far I can see there isn’t.

Over in Jersey I managed to catch a few films at their vastly superior cinemas…

Films watched:
Silent Hill
This film varied from extremely unnerving and visually striking to pretty humdrum.

I was really hoping that this would be a spectacular game adaptation, the only problem is that for most of the film it felt very much like you were playing the game. The story was led very much by a poor clue A leads to clue B narrative, which whilst fine in a game, is a little dull in a film.

When things got surreal and dark, then the film came into its own and certain scenes (I’m thinking pyramid head and nurses here) really were pretty damn good. It’s just a shame that they felt the need to try and explain just about everything. The good thing about Silent Hill is that you don’t know what the hell is going on.

6/10

The Da Vinci Code
Okay, I really liked the book and overall this was a pretty fine adaptation.

Bits of the book were slightly watered down for the film and other parts were quickly mentioned, but overall the film slowed well and the performances closely matched the characters.

I think that really, like many book adaptation, it’s hard to convey so much within such a short period of time and whilst the book has the luxury to take it’s time, the film doesn’t and as such, much of the impact is lost.

7/10

X-Men 3: The Last Stand
It seemed that every critic wanted this film to fail after the departure of Byran Singer from the project, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt and I’m glad to say that in my opinion at least, this more than lives up to the previous films.

My only 2 complaints are that Vinnie Jones was quite frankly a stupid choice for Juggernaught and that the film could have been a little longer to fit in all the story threads.

If this is truly the last X-Men film (which I hope it isn’t), then this is quite some finale.

For any of you that have been put off by lukewarm reviews, I suggest that you give the film a chance, you might be surprised. Just sit back and enjoy the film, as pure entertainment, it can’t be beaten so far this year.

8.5/10

Games played:
Tomb Raider: Legend
Whilst in Jersey I picked this up at a very good price at Woolworths on the PS2

I managed to have a quick go at this last night and my initial impressions are very positive. It is very much a case of Tomb Raider meets Prince of Persia, but that is no bad thing. Also, the graphics on the aging PS2 really are quite impressive. The old Tomb Raider games suffered very much from a building block like structure to the levels, but this has been removed and the environments really are quite realistic as a result.

Even the combat is greatly improved over previous games… Something I hated in the old games and also Prince of Persia.