Bruno Nicolai is often cited as Ennio Morricone’s conductor for many of his soundtracks. I get the feeling that the two, as they both cranked out giallo scores, literally borrowed from each other during the early seventies. Les Cauchemars has the free-form experimentalism of your standard Italian thriller soundtrack. Many of the songs alternate between being based around a disjointed, percussive honky-tonk piano sound and ambient violin notes. Although there’s no catchy title song, the CD good for what it is… a party ender.
Witcher 3 is a massive open world RPG that’s full of detail in terms of visuals and story. It’s was no surprise that it would take weeks for me to finish. As of right now GOG is telling me that I spent 100 hours to complete the main story line and I still have two expansions to complete. There’s just so much to explore and do.
I played on a normal difficulty, so the combat was just enough to be challenging but not a bottleneck to the story. I felt like I wasn’t as reliant on potions and magic as I was in Witcher 2. That game had some truly challenging boss fights. This one was much more casual feeling. I could pick up and play at any old time.
The strength of this series is the characters and story. Even NPCs from minor side quests are given a little story blurb in the character logbook. There’s so much rich backstory, at times it get to be a little overwhelming.
An entertaining read that pretty much says everything funny that can be said about food. I’ve read a couple of these books by comedians lately and the problem is that the inner voice in my head that is reading these books just doesn’t have the comedic timing of a Jim Gaffigan.
The destruction of this venerable brand continues in this latest reboot sequel. This is not the contemplative sci-fi of the original series. It’s balls-out action all da way. As such, it’s enjoyable trash but the chemistry of the original crew is gone and the plot is your basic “stop the doomsday device” trope. The use of a Beastie Boys song in the climax is the worst of the worst. Simon Pegg should be ashamed.
I originally bought this dual soundtrack CD because I wanted the music from La Tarantola Dal Ventre Nero. That soundtrack is great and I eventually got a better. more complete version of it. The highlights from that score are included here. The other score included, I Malamondo, has a decidedly lighter tone to it. At times it sounds like a sixties sitcom theme song or circus music. Not my favorite of the Maestro’s work.
The follow-up to Tombs of the Blind Dead is only slightly less bad than the original in that there is more gore, a little more tension, and there’s this guy:
Nothing better than a b-movie creep-a-zoid. Still, the blind dead are even less of a threat than slow-moving Romero zombies. Just run away ya idiots.
Spain’s answer to Night of the Living Dead is slow moving and pretty stupid. These aren’t straight-up zombies. They are the reanimated Knights of the Templar complete with swords and horses. There’s a skeletal hand prop that is used about twenty times over the course of the movie to reach around corners and poke through window panes.
The third and final(?) Apes reboot sequel isn’t quite as epic as the title suggests. All in all, I enjoyed it but the Apocalypse Now references were just a bit too on-the-nose and distracted from the story. Glad to see Hollywood effects companies have mastered the ability to make an animated ape scowl through 99% of its virtual performance.
Another comic’s memoir, but this time it’s actually funny. The first half is really is much better, in which she details her life in rural Canada. The rest is about finding success in show business as a comedian and it is not quite as interesting.
Pretty daring for a mainstream big budget sequel to be mostly subtitled. Kiddies, if you download this from the dark ‘nets make sure you grab the .SRT file too!
