I watched the DVD of Chicago tonight, and I really wasn’t very impressed, and I certainly don’t even begin to comprehend why it got six Oscars. It was marginally than the stage version, but that’s not a particularly difficult achievement. Some of the acting was so wooden that I almost expected to catch glances of strings from the hands, and some of the miming was equally appalling. I’ve never been a fan of the music in Chicago either, which didn’t really help.

People have compared this with Moulin Rouge – it doesn’t even come close. Moulin Rouge was cinema at its best, reminding us all that cinema can be a true artform, and that it’s only made mundane by the manufactured poop that normally comes out of Hollywood. Chicago was just terrible. The way that the story was integrated with the stage songs-and-dances was clever, and worked well, but that’s about the only good thing I can think of from the whole film.

Not really worth spending a couple of hours of your life with, much less worth buying.

I didn’t expect much from G4. And I didn’t get much.

Bizarrely, the sound levels on the tracks are set so that the music is far too loud, so that the loudest notes sound no more impressive than any other pop singer mumbling along to some trashy hit. And their version of Nessun Dorma, possibly my favourite aria of all time, is horrendous. It’s awful. It has about as much feeling as an anaesthetised slug.

The highest this album ever soars is to the dizzy heights of mediocrity. The group sound deeply uncomfortable with some of the stuff they’ve had to sing, and it seems like it’s an attempt to please a very wide range of people. And they succeed in impressing no-one. At least, not me.

I’ve had this album for a while now, but never quite got round to reviewing it. So now is the time…

It’s an absolute masterpiece of an album, one of the best I’ve ever heard. I’m going to steal from the Amazon reviewer ‘Jules T’, because s/he puts it much better than I could ever hope to:

This is an album to dissolve into, a bit like the best hot bath you’ve ever had. As I have got to know it I have fallen deeply in love with it.

It consists entirely of Armstrong’s hands and a piano, this simplicity only adding to the intimacy conveyed by the mood of the music. It’s deeply emotional, more so than you would expect for a album entirely played on one instrument. And it’s incredibly relaxing and uplifting.

Armstrong plays the piano as no-one before, both in a spiritual and literal sense – he plucks, strums, and digitally messes about, as well as playing straight.

It’s just fantastic, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This was a faintly bizarre book, that wasn’t particularly good, but nor was it particularly bad.

Airframe is advertised as a thriller, but there were only about three short passage that could be classed as even vaguely ‘thrilling’, and they played only the most minor of roles in the plot as a whole. It was really nothing more than a particularly stressful week in the life of a woman who works for an aircraft company, with little bits and bobs about the life of a journalist thrown in here and there.

There really is nothing in particular to recommend about this book, but it’s so bland that there’s nothing particularly in there to criticise either.

Overall, I’d say that this was a relatively enjoyable but ultimately worthless read, which I wouldn’t especially recommend. I wouldn’t say that it was a book to particularly avoid either, though.

Having said all that, if you do decide to buy it, you can get a very competitive price using the link on the right.

They claim that Skype is free Internet telephony that just works. It is, and it does. I’ve just downloaded it to try calling phone lines, and the quality is just as it would be over a normal phone. And, even more surprisingly, it really does just work. No messing with sound settings, it just works.

The only problem with it at the moment is that it’s not widespread enough, so there’s no-one for me to call via internet telephony. But it could be very useful if people I knew did download it, as we’d be able to call each other for nothing. Extremely highly recommended.

This is one of the finest albums of any genre I have heard in a very long time. Almost the whole album consists of Emiliana’s beautiful voice and acoustic guitar.

It’s everything Norah Jones should be, and would be if she wasn’t so obsessed with very poor cover versions of inappropriate songs and over-cooked commercialism. Emiliana has an absolutely amazing voice, and a song-writing skill that blows me away.

This is certainly worth a listen, and I’d definitely recommend buying it.

As a big fan of the original, I expected that I would hate this – yet I was pleasantly surprised. I liked how the CGI characters had kept the look of the original puppets (not trying desperately to update it as with Thunderbirds), and I liked how they kept the plot line largely similar to the original. Though, having said that, I haven’t seen their hats being used very much, and in the original series Captain Scarlet was Court Martialed for removing his on a mission. I also wasn’t too keen on the freaky eyes of the Mysteron characters (surely that’d give away the difference between normal people and Mysterons far too easily?) and the inadequate explanation for how Captain Scarlet became indestructable but not (permanently) evil.

The new musical score was excellent, and the whole show had a lot more glossy drama about it than the puppet series, which actually added to the show, particularly with the much greater use of characters’ first names.

Lieutenant Green’s sex change came as a bit of a shock, and really makes you question how far we’ve come in the past few decades – the original Lieutenant Green was the token black character, whereas now he’s the token woman, in a typically subserviant and almost secretarial role to Colonel White. Are we moving forwards or backwards here?

I was very happy with the new version of this. It’s almost as good as the original (better in some ways), and if it wasn’t shown at a time when I’m normally in bed, then I would watch it regularly.

This was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. So this really isn’t a very positive review. The comedy wasn’t funny, most of the acting was terrible (save for Penelope Wilton and and Lucy Davis, who played relatively small parts), the horror wasn’t horrific, and the storyline was generally poop. Even the ‘subtle’ background stuff wasn’t subtle – or funny. The film was so bad that I felt I was battling to keep myself from switching it off, just in case the ‘good’ bit was coming up.

I usually like typically ‘British’ comedies, that most of the country fails to understand. This, though, I did not like. It was just bad. A complete waste of ninety minutes of my life (and, even for a film as short as it was, it didn’t seem to have enough plot to sustain interest).

This isn’t a film that’s worth watching, and much less a DVD that’s worth buying. It’s absolutely terrible.

I’ve been to see this film this evening. My main comment: It was long. The first hour was pretty terrible, with some less-than-brilliant acting, dodgy editing (why is this film up for an editing Oscar?), and bizarre special effects. After that, though, it really picked up and became a very enjoyable film.

Leonardo diCaprio was never very convincing as Howard Hughes, but all of his little twitches and things were absolutely excellent. I believed he had an obsessive compulsive disorder, but it still seemed to be Leonardo diCaprio who was ill, not Howard Hughes. He definitely doesn’t deserve an Oscar. By contrast, Cate Blanchett was amazing, and does deserve an award. The costumes and backdrops were incredible, and with a better leading actor, and the kinks in the editing and special effects worked out, this could have been fantastic.

Having said that, it still wasn’t a very deep film, very much a case of ‘sit down, and watch the story’. There was an awful lot more that could have been explored in terms of the condition and Hughes’s feelings, and I would’ve liked a more definitive ending to the film.

Overall, it’s worth going to watch, but it’s not worth eleven Oscar nominations.

I’ve started using this instead of Desktop Sidebar. It’s rather good, clearly takes up less screen space than Desktop Sidebar, and has one of the smoothest scrolling actions I’ve seen on any RSS program. And it’s free. If it had an option to shown only the last x stories on a particular feed, it’d be perfect.