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Flick Football
Games and Sports
6.0
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The most addictive flick soccer game ever! Get the global number one sports smash. GET FLICK...
Charlie Cobra Reviews (1840 KP) rated The Promised Neverland in TV
Jul 7, 2020
A Stand Out From This Spring Season Anime
The Promised Neverland is a 2019 dark fantasy/sci-fi/thriller anime directed by Mamoru Kanbe and written by Toshiya Ono, and music by Takahiro Obata. It was animated by CloverWorks Studio and originally aired in Japan from January to March. The series was streamed on Crunchyroll, Hulu, FunimationNow and Hidive by Animplex of America and aired on Toonami in April. A second season was announced and planned for 2020.
For Emma, an 11-year old orphan living in Grace Field House, life has never been better. Her and 37 other orphans enjoy gourmet food, plush beds, clean clothes, games, and the love of their "Mother", Isabella, the caretaker. The orphans are allowed complete freedom, except to venture beyond the grounds or the gate, which connects the house to the outside world. One night Emma and Norman (another orphan) find the dead body of an orphan who was sent away to be adopted at the gate. This is where they realize the truth of their existence in the orphanage and become determined to break out of Grace Field House and escape along with their other siblings.
This show was a welcomed change for me from the normal anime I watch and very different. I enjoy anime like this that make you think and have a bit of mystery to them. For those looking for something that doesn't involve fighting, powering up, blasts or transformations then this is something that you might want to check out. This anime intrigued me right away from the first episode by it's premise and what it alluded to. I really liked the characters and their personalities and they way they used their intelligence especially since they are all portrayed as children. I kept trying to figure out where the plot was going with it and happily surprised that I couldn't always guess where it was going. This is definitely one of the stand outs from the spring anime season. I give it a 8/10 and it gets my "Must See Seal Of Approval".
For Emma, an 11-year old orphan living in Grace Field House, life has never been better. Her and 37 other orphans enjoy gourmet food, plush beds, clean clothes, games, and the love of their "Mother", Isabella, the caretaker. The orphans are allowed complete freedom, except to venture beyond the grounds or the gate, which connects the house to the outside world. One night Emma and Norman (another orphan) find the dead body of an orphan who was sent away to be adopted at the gate. This is where they realize the truth of their existence in the orphanage and become determined to break out of Grace Field House and escape along with their other siblings.
This show was a welcomed change for me from the normal anime I watch and very different. I enjoy anime like this that make you think and have a bit of mystery to them. For those looking for something that doesn't involve fighting, powering up, blasts or transformations then this is something that you might want to check out. This anime intrigued me right away from the first episode by it's premise and what it alluded to. I really liked the characters and their personalities and they way they used their intelligence especially since they are all portrayed as children. I kept trying to figure out where the plot was going with it and happily surprised that I couldn't always guess where it was going. This is definitely one of the stand outs from the spring anime season. I give it a 8/10 and it gets my "Must See Seal Of Approval".
Antonio Banderas recommended Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in Movies (curated)
Fashion Salon™ - Girls Makeup, Dressup and Makeover Games
Beauty, Education and Games
8.0
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Hello everyone, here comes our new Libii game “Fashion Salon”, please say Hi to the 4 pretty...
What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man
Book
From the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel--a memoir (of sorts): artful, moving,...
Music biography
Waking Mars
Games
App
Apple's 2012 iPad Game of the Year Runner-Up! Bring A Sleeping Planet Back To Life Epic adventure,...
Cry Cry Cry by Wolf Parade
5.0
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Album Watch
The band's first album produced by Pacific Northwest legend John Goodmanson (Bikini Kill,...
alternative rock
Basic Yoga For Beginners - Home Workout Guide For Beginners, Weight Loss & Flexibility
Catalogs and Health & Fitness
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Basic Yoga For...
Mayhawke (97 KP) rated Bats In The Belfry in Books
Feb 26, 2018 (Updated Feb 27, 2018)
A Cosy Crime sleeper worthy of resurrection
I’m a huge fan of Cosy Crime, I cut my grown-up reading teeth on Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, so it should be no surprise that I’m a big fan of the British Library’s inspired decision to republish lost Golden Age novels.
Fifty-one re-issues in and I’m still stunned at the number of authors who had stellar careers as crime writers, were fully inducted members of the Detection Club, and had publication lists to rival Christie’s but who, within a few years of their deaths, had just vanished from the pantheon classic crime novelists.
Such a writer was E.C.R.Lorac, author of Bats In The Belfry. In his introduction Martin Edwards describes the pseudonymous Lorac (real name Edith Caroline Rivett) as enjoying a “low-key career spanning more than a quarter of a century.” It also produced a catalogue of over seventy novels, yet, cosy crime fan that I am I had never heard of her until her book turned up on my work intranet.
Bats, British Library’s inaugural Crime Classic for 2018, is also the first of Lorac’s novels to be given the British Library treatment. It couldn’t have happened to a better book! One of the dangers of republishing books that have disappeared in the mists of time, at least if you are republishing them for the mass market, is that some of them will prove to have been ‘lost’ with good cause. Not that the writing need be poor or the plotting weak, but there are social aspects that can be critical to the development or fundamental premise of the story that change over the course of half a century. When that happens there is a danger that the reader will at best be disgruntled with a puzzle they were unlikely to be able to solve because they didn’t understand the clues they were being given, or, at worst, that the whole premise will seem beyond ludicrous to modern readers. Of the twenty or so BLCC’s I have read only one has fallen into the latter category, and whilst there have been one or two which were a bit plodding thanks to such issues they have largely been a pleasure to read, and I have been able to joyfully pit my wits against the authors’ intrinsic challenge to solve the mystery before the denouement.
Bats in the Belfry most definitely falls into this class of Crime Classic, so much so that it’s a surprise to find from Edwards that it was a bit of a non-starter when it was first published in 1937.
A failing writer, his actress wife, his ward and a selection of friends are collected one evening following the funeral of the writer’s cousin. Shortly thereafter the writer himself has vanished, his suitcase and passport left in a darkly sinister studio known variously as The Belfry, and The Morgue. The story is as dark and twisty as any you could hope for from a member of the Detection Club, and it plays nicely on themes of the time. Broken marriages, financially emasculated men, and the requisite ‘strange foreign man’ all appear, and even aarchaeology gets a look in. As the main characters sit and incautiously discuss ways to bump off someone and hide the body there is brief verbal tussle over the usefulness – and even existence of – dene holes, ancient subterranean storage areas that provided writers of the time with endless possibilities, most notably in Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. Lorac’s plotting is flawless and deceptively simplistic, and she leads you back and forth from suspect to suspect. She is brutally unsympathetic to her characters, and her writing bundles you along until you finally reach the conclusion, to discover how good you are at detecting. Or not.
Fifty-one re-issues in and I’m still stunned at the number of authors who had stellar careers as crime writers, were fully inducted members of the Detection Club, and had publication lists to rival Christie’s but who, within a few years of their deaths, had just vanished from the pantheon classic crime novelists.
Such a writer was E.C.R.Lorac, author of Bats In The Belfry. In his introduction Martin Edwards describes the pseudonymous Lorac (real name Edith Caroline Rivett) as enjoying a “low-key career spanning more than a quarter of a century.” It also produced a catalogue of over seventy novels, yet, cosy crime fan that I am I had never heard of her until her book turned up on my work intranet.
Bats, British Library’s inaugural Crime Classic for 2018, is also the first of Lorac’s novels to be given the British Library treatment. It couldn’t have happened to a better book! One of the dangers of republishing books that have disappeared in the mists of time, at least if you are republishing them for the mass market, is that some of them will prove to have been ‘lost’ with good cause. Not that the writing need be poor or the plotting weak, but there are social aspects that can be critical to the development or fundamental premise of the story that change over the course of half a century. When that happens there is a danger that the reader will at best be disgruntled with a puzzle they were unlikely to be able to solve because they didn’t understand the clues they were being given, or, at worst, that the whole premise will seem beyond ludicrous to modern readers. Of the twenty or so BLCC’s I have read only one has fallen into the latter category, and whilst there have been one or two which were a bit plodding thanks to such issues they have largely been a pleasure to read, and I have been able to joyfully pit my wits against the authors’ intrinsic challenge to solve the mystery before the denouement.
Bats in the Belfry most definitely falls into this class of Crime Classic, so much so that it’s a surprise to find from Edwards that it was a bit of a non-starter when it was first published in 1937.
A failing writer, his actress wife, his ward and a selection of friends are collected one evening following the funeral of the writer’s cousin. Shortly thereafter the writer himself has vanished, his suitcase and passport left in a darkly sinister studio known variously as The Belfry, and The Morgue. The story is as dark and twisty as any you could hope for from a member of the Detection Club, and it plays nicely on themes of the time. Broken marriages, financially emasculated men, and the requisite ‘strange foreign man’ all appear, and even aarchaeology gets a look in. As the main characters sit and incautiously discuss ways to bump off someone and hide the body there is brief verbal tussle over the usefulness – and even existence of – dene holes, ancient subterranean storage areas that provided writers of the time with endless possibilities, most notably in Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. Lorac’s plotting is flawless and deceptively simplistic, and she leads you back and forth from suspect to suspect. She is brutally unsympathetic to her characters, and her writing bundles you along until you finally reach the conclusion, to discover how good you are at detecting. Or not.
Lee (2222 KP) rated Black Christmas (2019) in Movies
Dec 13, 2019
Back in 1974, a low-budget Canadian horror movie by the name of Black Christmas was released and was one of the first to define the slasher movie template that we've now become so heavily accustomed to. Black Christmas already got a remake back in 2006 and now we have another, coming this time from powerhouse movie studio Blumhouse and directed/co-written by Sophia Takal.
Black Christmas retains its campus setting as a group of sorority sisters, all seniors at Hawthorne University, prepare for the end of term and the Christmas holidays. While a group of girls are celebrating one night, one of their friends is being terrorised by a robed killer as she walks home alone down a quiet snowy street, adorned with Christmas decorations. It's all pretty generic stuff so far, and in terms of horror and suspense, that's all we get for about the next 30 minutes or so while the movie shifts down a few gears and tries to introduce us to some characters and some kind of plot.
Riley (Imogen Poots) is one of only a couple of characters who you'll remember come the end of the movie. After passing out at a frat party a few years earlier, Riley was sexually assaulted, and she and her friends are now preparing to sing at another frat party which her accused rapist will also be attending. While looking around the house for a friend who seems to have gone missing, Riley opens the door on a hidden room where she observes a strange ceremony - pledges, wearing medieval robes and masks, are being daubed with some kind of black goo that's oozing from the eyes of a bust depicting the University's founder. She leaves them to it, and heads back to the party, not before rescuing her lost friend from the unwanted advances of another frat boy in his room.
Riley goes on to perform with her friends, a routine which turns out to be a carefully choreographed prank song - worded as a call out to the toxic masculinity and frat rape culture that Riley and so many other girls have experienced first hand. Needless to say, this doesn't go down too well with the boys, even more so when a video of the routine goes viral the next day.
Meanwhile, another one of the sisters is currently in the process of gathering signatures for a petition, in an attempt to get their English professor (Cary Elwes) sacked for not including enough diversity in his curriculum. So, when some of the lesser known female characters begin disappearing, and our main cast begin receiving mysterious and threatening messages on their phones, there are certainly plenty of potential suspects to choose from. Eventually, the killer makes it into the sorority house where Riley and her friends are, and it's up to them all to work together in order to outwit and defeat the killer.
I'm a big fan of the 'final girl' movie, where the seemingly indestructible female lead goes from downtrodden victim to badass warrior (see 'You're Next', or this years hugely enjoyable 'Ready Or Not'), remaining as sole survivor once the dust has settled and the movie comes to its satisfying conclusion. I was really hoping for Black Christmas to follow in that vein, and it's clearly what the filmmakers were aiming for too. But, despite its well-intentioned premise, Black Christmas completely fails to deliver. Death scenes are rushed, not even particularly inventive, and because it is so drearily written and poorly directed, you barely know or even care who most of the victims are anyway. Following a slow and messy first half, the movie then takes a turn towards the supernatural, culminating in a frankly ridiculous final act and cementing this movie firmly in my worst 5 movies of 2019!
Black Christmas retains its campus setting as a group of sorority sisters, all seniors at Hawthorne University, prepare for the end of term and the Christmas holidays. While a group of girls are celebrating one night, one of their friends is being terrorised by a robed killer as she walks home alone down a quiet snowy street, adorned with Christmas decorations. It's all pretty generic stuff so far, and in terms of horror and suspense, that's all we get for about the next 30 minutes or so while the movie shifts down a few gears and tries to introduce us to some characters and some kind of plot.
Riley (Imogen Poots) is one of only a couple of characters who you'll remember come the end of the movie. After passing out at a frat party a few years earlier, Riley was sexually assaulted, and she and her friends are now preparing to sing at another frat party which her accused rapist will also be attending. While looking around the house for a friend who seems to have gone missing, Riley opens the door on a hidden room where she observes a strange ceremony - pledges, wearing medieval robes and masks, are being daubed with some kind of black goo that's oozing from the eyes of a bust depicting the University's founder. She leaves them to it, and heads back to the party, not before rescuing her lost friend from the unwanted advances of another frat boy in his room.
Riley goes on to perform with her friends, a routine which turns out to be a carefully choreographed prank song - worded as a call out to the toxic masculinity and frat rape culture that Riley and so many other girls have experienced first hand. Needless to say, this doesn't go down too well with the boys, even more so when a video of the routine goes viral the next day.
Meanwhile, another one of the sisters is currently in the process of gathering signatures for a petition, in an attempt to get their English professor (Cary Elwes) sacked for not including enough diversity in his curriculum. So, when some of the lesser known female characters begin disappearing, and our main cast begin receiving mysterious and threatening messages on their phones, there are certainly plenty of potential suspects to choose from. Eventually, the killer makes it into the sorority house where Riley and her friends are, and it's up to them all to work together in order to outwit and defeat the killer.
I'm a big fan of the 'final girl' movie, where the seemingly indestructible female lead goes from downtrodden victim to badass warrior (see 'You're Next', or this years hugely enjoyable 'Ready Or Not'), remaining as sole survivor once the dust has settled and the movie comes to its satisfying conclusion. I was really hoping for Black Christmas to follow in that vein, and it's clearly what the filmmakers were aiming for too. But, despite its well-intentioned premise, Black Christmas completely fails to deliver. Death scenes are rushed, not even particularly inventive, and because it is so drearily written and poorly directed, you barely know or even care who most of the victims are anyway. Following a slow and messy first half, the movie then takes a turn towards the supernatural, culminating in a frankly ridiculous final act and cementing this movie firmly in my worst 5 movies of 2019!
