Twin Peaks

Generally I'm not a massive fan of television. Quite allot of it is shite, there's no denying it. I'm thinking of the Big Brothers, the Geordie Shores, The TOWIEs of this world as the absolute dross. Then follow that up with the 3,457 singing and dancing shows and that's probably about 40% of the TV listings covered already. Sometimes it feels like clever, inventive TV has died, and now only only production value that matters is appealing to the lowest common denominator so lots of chavs will watch then go on twitter saying how lush Fred is cos like he's so like cool. That strategy works, they do, and that the lord my twitter allows me to filter out and ignore keywords. It's like soooo awesome.

Occasionally I find something I like though. Generally it's long after it was on TV and using the media of DVD, Blu Ray or Netflix. Such media has presented me with the likes of Dr Horrible (not really tele I know), Firefly (I never got round to watching it at the time, but now I know 'tis awesome) and many more. Most recently I watched Twin Peaks.

Now I was 8 when it was on first, I wasn't getting it then, I watched it half heartedly in the late 90s, but never saw it all. So now I thought, let's go, who did kill Laura Palmer? 30 episodes later I finished what must be one of the finest TV series ever made, it was funny, clever, dramatic, sometimes confusing, usually a bit odd, but of the highest quality. David Lynch and Mark Frost, take a bow.

I'm not going to post anything potentially a bit spoiler-y, although out of context not much would help. So I'll leave it with just a recommendation, go watch, it's a decent reason to get the Netflix free month on its own.

Then once you're done with that there's the film. A prequel! Fire Walk with me just had a new Blu-Ray and DVD press just for when I finish the series, what are the chances!?!

I shelled out my cash and I have a copy, it's flawed, technically I mean the audio track slows down randomly a few times, which isn't ideal but it doesn't bother actually watching it. It's much... harsher than the series, the tone is darker and it shows things (violence, nudity) the series generally only hints at. Nevertheless it's good stuff and well worth a watch, but series first or it'll spoil the who-done-it part of the series. And it'll make little sense at times.

OK it makes little sense at times anyway, but it all pulls together in the end. Plus for some reason Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Isaak and David Bowie all turn up (briefly).

Go on, give it a go. They really don't make TV like this any more. Plus with Lynch cold on the idea, can't see it happening again, even though there is a line in the script which leaves it wide open.

Amazon reviews

From time to time, and on a massive total of 32 occasions, I have written reviews for a website some of you may have heard of... amazon.co.uk. I do it for the same reason I write this, none in particular, but it's a nice diversion every now and again and with a bit of luck, the stuff I write does occasionally help somebody decide whether something is worth buying. The whole process is quite basic, but the weird part of it is their rating system.

Well not so much the system itself, but maybe some of the users.

Amazon works on a 'Was this helpful? yes/no' type scenario. But I get the impression a minority, but a vocal minority, of users read this is 'Do you agree? Yes/No', and as a result I do sometimes feel reviews are marked as unhelpful for not giving a popular item 5 stars. Also there's also some cases where people review an item, then mark the other reviews of the same item down, to hopefully push theirs up to the featured review. The Internet is a reasonably twisted place for self promotion.

However most reviews don't get any votes at all, I've only ever received 52 votes over my 32 reviews (40-12, 77% helpful, which is quite shit).

I honestly think this isn't the best way of running a rating system, especially if you're going to run some kind of league table off it to introduce competition. Why have a no button at all? Yes or ignore would be fine and remove the possibility of bitching. Or maybe require some kind of reason or feedback to go along with a negative vote? If people have to back it up...

But hey I'm sure the amazon dudes know what they're doing.

Well this morning I went up 100 or so places to crack the top 10,000 reviewers for the 2nd time (someone marked a review down straight away last time, so I dropped again) at 9,955th. This means nothing of course and I'll probably drop straight back out tomorrow, but for now I have a picture visible and everything. If anyone's interested here's a link to my 'public profile' but I'd imagine after making it this far, you're sick of my attempted wit and typos already:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A3SIES8A01NZAN?ie=UTF8&ref_=ya__56

Off topic, well kind of... kindle is amazon, there was just a guy getting off the train, reading his kindle intensely, but the screen saver was on, I could see it from here. It was the picture of John Steinbeck.  Some people are weird.

Facebook 'friends'

I actually had a look at my Facebook profile for the first time in god knows how long today. First up it decided to spend about an hour telling me about all the security changes, but I powered through and caught a glimpse at my friends list:

Friends (203)

it said.

I'm not even sure I know 203 people, let alone consider that many to be 'friends'. In fact I'd imagine people I actually consider to be good friends, so I should be sharing masses of personal information with would struggle to number 30. Add family to that and it doesn't add up to 200+.

Looking round though, my one is quite low (sob sob) there are people with 500, 600, even more than 1,000, and looking at some of these people.. really?? I doubt it.

Just having a nose through as I type and, yes I do know most of these people, can't remember the last time I spoke to many of them. Can't remember the last time I wanted to speak to quite a few, but it's some kind of twisted manners that I continue to tell them when I'm on holiday, when I'm in Tesco, when I've got a headache etc (actually that makes me sound like I update my status every 10 mins, believe me I don't) it's a fact that each of these people would have had the opportunity to gander at photos of me in a dress, a couple of times.

Saying that it's a miracle they haven't removed me. Bt equally I also have to wade through their shite on a daily basis, stuff I'm not really interested in, even question the integrity of much of the time.

So far I've removed a massive one, but come lunchtime there'll be a cull, if I can be arsed. Or I may pop to HMV and see how much Rocky Horror is on Blu-ray. I'm disgusted with myself I don't own it.

This is why I prefer Twitter (@andrewdrisc don't be shy!) yes I still make stuff public, I can easily control who reads it if I wanted too, but I only read what I want too (well there's still some there that need to go, but anything like the same kind of scale.

Maybe Facebook should give us some google+ (still not really used that, am signed up) style options, so I vcan have friends, family, and... other...

Battle: Los Angeles and How To Lose Friends & Alienate People

Over the last couple of nights I've been flexing my blu-ray muscles and have rented a couple of films I quite wanted to see ion the cinema but me 'n' the wife (got used to saying that now, it just kinda rolls off!) never got round too it.

Thanks to a few (rapidly expiring) blockbuster vouchers we have from when we bought the player we went down and picked up, Battle: Los Angeles and How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, two slightly different films no doubt.

Well first up was Battle: Los Angeles.

I quite like my alien invasion sci-fi films (shocking I know), Independence Day is overly cheesy but remains a favourite to this day, I even quite liked the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds... sorry. I was expecting a cliché ridden, over the top, 'Go America!' film, with minimal character development and stuff blowing up all over the place, ending with a initial victory for mankind but looked like it would result in overall glory.

Got what I was expecting.

It's by no means a bad film, the predictable plot and the flag waving patriotism are hallmarks of a bad film no doubt, but I didn't go in thinking it was going to get many screenwriters guild nominations. After a bit of a slow start, which set up many of the clichés from the outset (1 guy close to retiring, 1 guy's wife having a baby so fighting to protect it etc) it is action packed, the constant action to action movement with the narrative done in the lulls was very video game in it's style, shame then the game of the film, as with so many film tie ins, sucked ass.

The acting was very standard for the genre, I'm pretty sure Aaron Eckhart's jaw has never been so square for so long ever before, and (unless there's a sequel of course) wont be ever again. But overall I think the film worked on most of the levels it went after, stuff blew up, mankind started to win, a good time was had by all. I've made it sound like a very by-the-numbers 3 star film, and yes I think that's fair enough and sometimes that's all you want from a film.

Second, and on the following night, was a British film, ropey territory for a start, set in America How To Lose Friends & Alienate People.

For which I didn't really know what my expectations were. I'd wanted to see it purely as Simon Pegg was the lead and he's usually pretty good, but had never got round to it. From the box office (quite a heavy loss) I wasn't the only one.

Turn out this film was pretty good. I wasn't aware of the support cast, but to be fair once they were on screen they were mostly good, Megan Fox (who was awful, but it suited this part), Kirstin Dunst, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston, Bill Patterson, even 2 of the 3 leads from the IT Crowd, Miriam Margoyle and James Cordon were in it.

It was mildly funny where necessary, I didn't think all the slapstick was really required, but it kept the film moving along. It got quite predictable towards the end when it was always easy to see who would end up as the love interest, but it was a good watch. Pegg was very good, Dunst was good as she tends to be in a more supporting role (E.g. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Bridges was a little subdued but was funny on a number of occasions.

Bonus - no game to slate, it'd be awful anyway, just assume.

Battle: Los Angeles took better advantage of the blu-ray looking better, but then it's an sci-fi slash action film not a comedy, it would!

Of the two, it's hard to compare, but if it came down to watching one or the other again, I'd go for How to Lose Friends. It just worked better as a story, as it actually had a concrete not 100% predictable one. Go watch, if enough people do, it may one day break even!