jeff leopard

damn straight! great horror films have a habit of coming out of no where and don't have 2,3,4,5,6 attached to their name. evil dead 2 was great but that was a comedy version of ed1. I hope 28 months later will be decent but it won't be the end of the world if its rubbish (ironically). The only horror these films will possess is how shockingly p1ss-weak they'll be. And honestly, who above the age of 12 cares about the Saw films?

For anyone who's enjoyed Pans Labyrinth and The Orphanage lately, you've got to watch The Devil's Backbone. It was made by the director of PL in 2001 and follows a similar story, this time it’s a young boy trying to survive the Spanish Civil War. He gets shipped off to a bording school in the middle of the Spanish desert and soon is hearing things going bump in the night. Its sh1t your pants scary, utterly riveting and a touch better than Pans Labyrinth IMO. Enjoy!

'Arry just had a dig at Adams, quoted in the Guardian as saying 'if i was still manager at p/muff i wouldn't sell him'

it takes a bit to get going for sure, but yeah, the first round of the game in particular is a real sweaty palms moment. everyone dies happily ever after oops, SPOILER WARNING! Move back...nothing to see here...

Just watched episodes 5,6, and 7 of season 2 and the tensioned is definately being cranked up. I love the way the show isn't afraid to kill off major characters, plus there was some top comical moments.

Exactly, its pretty insane to think of him as a Leftie. Brown (maybe at a push) but never Blair. Lets not forget that the straw that broke the camel's back for Blair was when he refused to critise Israel's ineffectual attack on Lebanon. Making Blair a middle-east peace ambassador is a sick joke, of course.

thats interesting as I'm about to watch episode 5, so far season 2 has been quite slow building but definately going somewhere. absolutely loved season 1.

Isreal are the tail wagging the dog, fo sho. The policy of bombing terrorist organisations away does not work, it simply provides future generations of bitter arabs and jews, ensuring this sh1t goes on and on. This will only ever be resolved politically. As with their previous terrorist campaign against the Lebanon, Isreal will fail to make any real change or score any decisive victories. Their people will get sick of an ineffectual campaign being fought by a 'weak' leadership and demand even more insanely right-wing leaders and more bombing. All the time this goes on, Hamas will continue to fire rockets into Isreal, primarily to show the world they still exist. We can only hope Obama wont be such a knuckle head and actually challange Isreal on its actions.

i remember queing a couple of times before getting in. i absolutely loved it and playing with the original figures/toys is a cherished memory. but are the films really worth all the fuss? so many of my friends are properly obsessed with star wars and empire, which i admit is a decent film and worth a watch for the crackling sexual energy between Han and Lea alone. but really, there are better films to absorb yourself in (2001, for instance). the irony is that lucas was one of the wunder-kids of new hollywood in the 70s, along with spielberg, coppala, scorsese, da palma, shrader, de niro et al. their coke binges and break-downs are the stuff of cinematic folklore. and yet the success of star wars (and the failure of heavens gate) effectively killed the art-house based New Hollywood movement and condemned us all to bland gung-ho blockbusters up to, well, the dark knight i guess.

damn straight! its the only thing keeping my faith in football going at the moment :goodman: may they crash and f_cking burn (ideally before we do)

cheers for the tip off! i got some quality tunes for free!

And God looked at those that fought on the water and said 'I will call you seaman, as that what you all have dribbling down your chins'. God Bless our brave fighting boys this Christmas (but the girls can f_ck off cos its God's will that they should stay at home and everyone knows they show up more on enemy radar and attract torpedoes and confuse the emotionally retarded, raw-arsed sailors even more).

i saw their first few tracks at bestival, they were surprisingly unawful and just the thing to cleanse the palet between big name acts. the whole tent went very gay, i could feel myself turning...

Very good! 'one of santa's helpers preparing to spread christmas cheer to the people of plymouth'

Purely because i'm writing about 21st century revenge cinema I watched 'outlaw', made by Nick Love, a man who makes Guy Richie look like Orson Wells and Tony Scott look like a highly advanced alien god-head sent to earth to single-handedly advance the evolution of mankind. It's like Death Wish, but minus all the excitement, humour, subtly, political maturity and artistic merit. Its got sean bean as a pale immitation of Paddy Considine's character in Dead Man's Shoe's, its got the guy who played ian curtis in 24 hour party people as this lone nut who watches a bank of cctv screens all day (a shamless stealing of the main character in Red Road (brilliant art-house revenge film)), and danny c_nting dyer as an annoying c_nt (has there ever been a more fitting surname?). They set about ridding London of nonses and cartoon mockney villains in the dullest and least affecting manner possible. It confuses slow burning story-telling and thought provoking sub-text with having absolutely no plot and e-n-d-l-e-s-s shots of everyone staring moodily into the distance like they're about to cry. All these poor souls abandoned by the legal system get together to fight back against the rotten society. and then they split up, then get back together, then split up and then get back together...this goes on for what feels like several lifetimes and then for the last ten minutes everyone's running around the woods with machine guns in a hilariously unconvincing shoot-out with the police who are like really horrible people. Remember the paint-balling bits in spaced? Its like that but much much cheaper. And the film ends and deep inside a small part of you dies forever. Your belief in humanity has been gang-raped and the taste in your mouth could only have come from Michael Winner's chocolate starfish. Luckily, there is a way to see this film for free, get a large bucket, put some old editions of the daily mail in there, then contract that vomiting virus and spend two days throwing up and sh1tting into the bucket. Then mix it all up and stare at it for 90 minutes, occasionally rubbing it in your eyes for good measure. and crying and whanking.

I love the dulcet tones of Dave Merrington. If it wasn't for him i'd be nailing the old chap to the kitchen table right about now.

It hasn't been a great year. I cant think of anything released this year that’s really gripped me and blown my mind. Some albums have been very good (the chap), some interesting (the dodos/tv on the radio), some sounded great for a week and then withered away (hot chip), some were quite nice in a 'my mum would like this' kind of way (fleet foxes/vampire weekend). But nothing has come close to touching me up (upstairs and downstairs/front and back) in 2008 then these old records - Clark - Body Riddle (2006) Keith Fullerton Whitman - Multiples (2005) Holy **** - LP (2007) Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin'... (1963)

Being 2-0 up against AC Milan is without doubt P_mpey's high water-mark, not just for this season but also for a generation (if not ever). From here on in, the only way is down :smt041 I hope Blackburn employ Avron Grant, I don't like the thought of him taking the fish-fanciers' post when Adams is sacked.

I'm currently balls-deep in my annual Low binge. things we lost in the fire, the great destroyer, trust (my fave low album) and the curtain hits the cast. All tickling my fancy and bought for a just few of pounds each on amazon.

I've got three adorable ratties... this is cooper domino doing his van morrison impersonation cooper again, keeping warm and more cooper and lastly, cooper (worshipping me) and moss (bowing down to me) the newbie in the house

I love sounding w_nky! I've not seen Intacto yet but its pretty high up on my 'to do' list. Its themes of fate/luck remind me of a French black and white film that came out a couple of years ago about a highly secretive mass game of Russian roulette where for a huge cash prize, the players form a circle, are given a gun with a single bullett in it and, on a given signal, put their gun to the head of the person on their right and pull the trigger. The survivers then play again with two bulletts etc. I was pretty sure it was called '13' but that’s a girlie drama so maybe someone can tell me what is was called. I watched '2001: A Space Odyssey' again last night, man, I'm worrying obsessed by that film! I'm now certain that it is a bone-dry sex comedy all about birth/death/re-birth. The space ship is obviously a giant sperm heading toward the egg of Jupiter, all of the corridors inside it can be described as strongly vaginal. The bit where Dave Bowman fires himself into the airlock is akin to a baby crawling back up the fowl smelling wizard's sleeve. And HAL plays the role of the soon-too-be-dumped jealous lover, determined not to let mankind make contact with its alien overlords. For other freaky obsessives, check out this article on the facinating connotations of HAL singing 'Daisy, Daisy' to Dave as he is being disconnected. The first couple of paragraphs are a bity pointless but then they hit a seem of the good stuff http://djardine.blogspot.com/2006/03/ben-and-i-get-lost-in-stanley-kubricks.html

i didn't get out much this year due to uni commitments but i was rocked to phuq by... My Bloody Valentine & zombie zombie@ bestival Spiritualized & Caribou @ the green man the chap @ a tiny venue in brighton Jayetal @ the railway inn a couple of weeks ago the limes @ various venues gig i really should have gone to but didn't for lame-o reasons... Holy F_ck & Four Tet @ some Brighton festival

I wasn't a fan of the tracks as such but I really liked the way the film used them to map out the major scenes and set their tone and pace. And the fact it would play the whole tune instead of the usual 'here's 30 secs of something in the background so we can bung it on the cd'. Have you seen 'The Lives of Others'? That’s also quality.

Tell No One A highly rated French thriller from last year. A loving husband's wife disappears on a holiday and is kidnapped and murdered by a serial killer. Or was she? Is she even dead? The first 40 minutes are quite ambigious and artsy as we move backwards and forwards in time as we try to guess whether the husband is actually the killer (as the police and his father-in-law seem to suspect). The film then lurches into action thriller mode, this could have proved fatal to the film but it gets away with it due to a brilliant chase scene through Paris which brings back memories of the French Connection and the great thrillers of the 70s. It all trundles along quite nicely until the last 20 minutes when the plot gets overly conviluted. Its still got a sprinkling of great moments and considerably better than 99% of current Hollywood thrillers. It reminded me a fair bit of Hidden (Cache) which is a fricking hardcore/mind-phuq of a film.