Posts Tagged ‘Review’

30 Jun

Album Review: Living Things – Linkin Park

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , , , .

The latest major offering from the ever-present Linkin Park came out last week and I’ve been listening to it pretty heavily so I could form a proper opinion on it before the end of the month.

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Released: April 2012
Label: Warner Bros
Genre: Alternative/Electronic Rock
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Mummy... thing

Typically abstract stuff here.

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TRACK LISTING

1. Lost in the Echo
2. In My Remains
3. Burn It Down
4. Lies Greed Misery
5. I’ll Be Gone
6. Castle of Glass
7. Victimized
8. Roads Untraveled
9. Skin to Bone
10. Until it Breaks
11. Tinfoil
12. Powerless

I have been a Linkin Park fan ever since I started buying music. My first musical purchase of any kind was Meteora back in 2003, an album I still revisit from time to time without as much as a second thought. That would make me a fan of the band for the better part of a decade, so I’ve been used to their relatively slow release schedule for a while. When I heard that the band was set to release their fifth studio album a mere eighteen months after their fourth, literally half the time they waited between their previous major releases (2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010) I was a little shocked. I didn’t have much of an opportunity to psych myself up for it and in what seemed like no time at all, I had the first track of Living Things blaring from a pair of speakers. I was confused yet pleasantly surprised by what I got. Continue reading →

28 Jun

Game Review: Gravity Rush

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, PS Vita. Tagged: , , .

It has been a long time since I did a game review, mostly since the games I’ve been playing lately are on 3DS and grabbing screenshots of those games is a nightmare. I’ll still get to them in due time, but for now, here’s a review of the recently-released Playstation Vita game Gravity Rush. It came out on June 14th.

The PSN delay made this a long one.

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Platform: PSV
Developer: Sony Japan Studio
Rating: PG
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Is she sideways?

The case is a lot smaller in real life.

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Yes, it’s that game.
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The one I ranted about as the primary reason why I wanted a Playstation Vita. The one I complained about when it was absent from the system’s launch. The one I’ve been waiting for since, well, since I first heard about it almost a year ago. That game. I’ve almost set myself up to be disappointed by Gravity Rush just due to the sheer weight of expectation I’ve placed on it over the last few months alone. Well, now I’ve played it, and yes, now I’ve finished it (something I rarely do at all with games these days, let alone in under two weeks). Read on to find out how it fares. Continue reading →

16 Jun

Movie Review: Prometheus

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

I saw this highly anticipated Ridley Scott epic last Tuesday. Thoughts follow!

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Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron
Director: Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner)
Rating: M
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If you were Sir Ridley Scott, director of such massive critical and commercial successes as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down and architect of one of the most ponderous sci-fi films ever made in Blade Runner, you could probably do whatever you wanted with your late career. So thirty-three years after he practically reinvented the horror genre by sending it into space with Alien, Scott figured it might be a cool idea to revisit the fictional xenomorph-infested universe he built himself with a new film, Prometheus. In doing so he whipped up a storm of hype and, as so often happens with these things, all kinds of questions started flying around fan circles. Would the film be a direct prequel or just set in the same universe? Why that odd title? How would the advent of CGI impact the atmosphere of the film? And perhaps most importantly, in what new direction would Scott take the series? Continue reading →

29 Apr

Movie Review: Battleship

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

Back to back madness! Here’s a review of the latest “blockbuster” effort from Hasbro’s association with Hollywood. It came out in Australia two weeks ago. The Avengers it certainly ain’t.

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Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Rihanna
Director: Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock)
Rating: M
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Who could possibly have expected to see something like this in theatres? Toy company Hasbro, who pushed the Transformers film franchise into existence and rebooted the My Little Pony television series into its most successful edition ever, must have been so confident in their ability to put their toys on screen and bums on seats that they thought a celluloid adaptation of a board game was viable. Now, after a huge marketing push, Universal Studios have released the multi-million dollar project in cinemas. The results are what you might expect. Continue reading →

28 Apr

Movie Review: The Avengers

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

I saw this hugely anticipated film on Wednesday when it came out, leaving a couple of days to think it over before posting a review. Enjoy.

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Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Samuel L Jackson, Mark Ruffalo
Director: Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly)
Rating: M
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And so it is that the superhero project seven years in the making finally arrives on our screens, carrying with it the kind of hype that can only be generated by five prior films loaded with teasing elements. The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger have all come and gone. While some of these films were more obvious in their hype-generating efforts than others (*ahem* Iron Man 2) and suffered for it, such trivial matters are in the past. The reality is that Marvel Studios’ The Avengers is one of the most ambitious action films of our time, attempting to tread the unprecedented ground of adapting a much-adored comic book super-team concept into a movie that doesn’t fall to pieces.

The reason it succeeds, more than anything else, is because it avoids just that.

Continue reading →

25 Mar

Album Review: Born to Die – Lana Del Rey

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , , .

This girl seems to be everywhere at the moment, so I thought I’d throw in my 2c on her debut album.

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Released: January 2012
Label: Interscope, Polydor
Genre: Pop
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Blue n' White

She's deadly serious.

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TRACK LISTING

1. Born to Die
2. Off to the Races
3. Blue Jeans
4. Video Games
5. Diet Mountain Dew
6. National Anthem
7. Dark Paradise
8. Radio
9. Carmen
10. Million Dollar Man
11. Summertime Sadness
12. This is What Makes Us Girls

Amidst this refreshingly anti-Gaga pop music landscape where female vocalists can be successful by relying on their voices and their voices alone, and building on the success of the likes of Adele and her terrific efforts, New Yorker Lana Del Rey (not her real name) has emerged in a hurricane of hype. In no time flat she has amassed the sales success to back up this hype thanks to her first major label release Born to Die. After happening upon this album through a family member’s wallet, I have only two questions. Where on earth did this come from and how can I get more? Continue reading →

24 Mar

Movie Review: The Hunger Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , , .

Yes, the wait is finally over. Whether or not you are a fan of Suzanne Collins’ insanely popular teen novel trilogy, you can now check out the “next Harry Potter/next Twilight” phenomenon in cinemas (it came out on Thursday and I’ve already seen it twice). I suggest you do, lest you become bitter from the hype and turn into a hater.

This could be a long one…

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Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth
Director: Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Big)
Rating: M
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the-hunger-games-posterI do not read novels. Like, ever. Snails move faster than my eyes across a page and so I generally find my leisure time better spent with other forms of entertainment media. So when my brother recommended I read Suzanne Collins‘ post-apocalyptic thriller The Hunger Games in January of 2010, it was only out of desperate boredom that I complied. I was hooked within minutes on its insanely fast-paced first person narrative style and over the next several months I made my way through the entire trilogy. Little did I know that I had stumbled upon what would soon be hailed as “the next big thing” in book-to-film translation.

Yeah, I liked it while it was underground. What of it?

Fast-forward two years and after months of anticipation, I found myself before a screen watching what was once confined to my imagination take shape as a shining example of how to do justice to literary source material while creating a unique identity as a film. There is nothing in the world that quite feels the same as the relief of justified hype. Continue reading →

14 Mar

Movie Review: John Carter

Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: , .

The movie reviews on Vagrant Rant finally get started today with John Carter, a film I saw last night in the cinema. It came out on March 8 and you should see it.

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Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong
Director: Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E)
Rating: M
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John Carter Poster
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It’s always interesting to see the results when a film director known almost exclusively for one type of work tries his/her hand at another. Filmgoers got a taste of this phenomenon earlier in the year with gangster movie extraordinaire Martin Scorsese‘s family film Hugo, which won several Oscars despite its director’s violent screen reputation. In a similar vein, Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton tried his hand at making a live action film recently and the result is John Carter, which was one of my most anticipated films of 2012. While it certainly isn’t Academy Award material, the big budget Disney blockbuster is an admirable first effort.

Continue reading →

11 Mar

Album Review: Evanescence – Evanescence

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , .

What’s that? You didn’t realise that Evanescence released a new album last year?

Exactly.

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Released: October 2011
Label: Wind-up
Genre: Rock
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Ooooohh

That’s a lot of cool colours (Thank you, Year 4 art class)!

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TRACK LISTING (iTunes Deluxe Edition)

1. What You Want
2. Made of Stone
3. The Change
4. My Heart is Broken
5. The Other Side
6. Erase This
7. Lost in Paradise
8. Sick
9. End of the Dream
10. Oceans
11. Never Go Back
12. Swimming Home
13. New Way to Bleed (Deluxe Only)
14. Say You Will (Deluxe Only)
15. Disappear (Deluxe Only)
16. Secret Door (Deluxe Only)

One-time symphonic rock superstars Evanescence arguably peaked just as they were getting started. They won a Grammy in 2004 for Best New Artist after their wildly successful debut album Fallen hypnotised much of the Western world. It brought the niche subgenre of hybrid orchestral movements and snaring guitar riffs into the mainstream through powerful singles such as Bring Me to Life and My Immortal. But dynamite lead vocalist Amy Lee was the catalyst for internal trouble in the band which delayed the release of their next effort until 2007. The Open Door didn’t see the success of the first album but it managed to build well off the strength of Lee’s voice while employing a great deal of variety in melody and themes. Continue reading →

25 Feb

Game Review: The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword

Posted by vagrantesque in Games, Wii. Tagged: , , , .

I know it has been three months since the latest Hyrulian adventure was released, but like I said I’m not going to be able to post a whole lot of game reviews near release. I finished Skyward Sword just over a month ago and hey, people are still playing it, so here we go.

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Platform: Wii
Developer: Nintendo
Rating: M
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Golden!

Still going strong after 25 years.

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I’m going to come right out and say it.
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The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is only just behind Majora’s Mask as my favourite Zelda game of all time. Read on to find out why. Continue reading →

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