Various reviews, the Buffy Quiz and 45 minutes of Romeo and Juliet

[lathany]

It's been about a month since I posted reviews of things, so this seems like a good time to catch-up.

On books: Just the one new book - Absolute Midnight, the third book in the Abarat fantasy series by Clive Barker. Very interesting, a complete turnaround from the first two books and totally incomprehensible if you haven't read them.

On films:

• Kingsman - For Christmas, my parents-in-law had bought bateleur and I a couple of cinema trips. So, on venta's recommendation we went to see this. It was very good, a James Bond spoof based on a comic book. Excellent turns from all the leads (I loved Colin Firth), some lovely action pieces and clever writing. You do have to been able cope with gore though and the pre-credits ending was slightly disappointing. However, really good overall.
• Ender's Game - I haven't read the book, so really liked the film. Nice piece of sci-fi humans vs aliens. The lead (Asa Butterfield who was also Hugo) was excellent. The special effects were great and the game playing and tactics were very good.
• Near Dark - This was the first big film directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker) in 1987. It's an American vampire Western horror film starring Adrian Pasdar (Nathan from Heroes). It was a flop on release, but gained more credit as a "cult" film afterwards. It's quite good, but works better if you haven't played Vampire the Masquerade.

On computer games:

• Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches - I've written a full review over on GameFAQs. The short version is a nicely creepy point-and-click adventure game with a good story, but easy to get stuck on.
• XCom: Enemy Unknown - A turn-based strategy game where you control the operations against an alien invasion (mainly running a squad through scenarios). It's a good piece of work with some decent enemy actions and moves. It also has some nice mechanics. However it needs a frequent save, has a very odd save file ordering and doesn't prompt the player enough about what their next step should be (or perhaps does, but only if you don't play with long gaps).

On roleplaying:

• Star Wars - Right, what happened? Someone attacked the ship we were on to steal a cryo-frozen doctor. We escaped with the doctor and got blamed for Just About Everything. So we're fugitives, we're being hunted and we're not sure what's going on. Except it involves Maraber the Hutt.
• 100 Secrets - We began in Eyestone Hill where we were attacked firstly by troops (and we now have a converted one - Estin Rafe) and then by summoned shadow monsters. We moved on, back to the Klome, the tunnels and the desert where we rescued and finally separated Ingenuity Tevis from his centipede mirror-self. As ever, the question is what to do next.

What else?

Well, I went to the Buffy quiz with verlaine, miss_newham and Ewan. Given that we did not watch all 144 episodes beforehand (and, in particular did not watch Once More With Feeling which was the double-scoring round of the six), we did respectably. I came away with a Mutant Enemy badge and was very pleased verlaine had invited me.

Last week, bateleur and Bea's friend Paladin was over for a few days. This involved chatting, board gaming, computer gaming and cheese. It was good to meet him and he was a pleasant, undemanding guest to have.

Last Friday I finally attended a performance at the Bridewell Theatre. This was a "lunchbox" performance of Romeo and Juliet (ie. 45 minutes and you can bring your own sandwiches although no-one did). I enjoyed it. They did manage to get all the main bits into the time allocated (with things like the balcony scene barely being cut). Also, they turned out to be more accurate than some of the audience believed (the girl two rows in front of me was complaining that they'd added Romeo killing Paris; I don't know the play well, but went back and checked - they hadn't, it's in the original). They also had a nice little bar and whilst I bought myself a bitter lemon it also sold alcohol (not well stocked, but all the basics). So recommended. I might post the next time something interesting comes up.

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[lathany.livejournal.com]

There aren't many of us on here now. However, I like the diary format so I'll probably stay with this (and link in from elsewhere).