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Hymns for the Fallen: Combat Movie Music and Sound After Vietnam

Todd Decker

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Book

In Hymns for the Fallen, Todd Decker listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films...

SteamWorld Heist

Games and Entertainment

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App

10/10 - Touch Arcade: "A genuine must-have. Don't miss it." 10/10 - US Gamer: "Everyone should play"...

Summertime

Vanessa Lafaye

9.0 (2 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Tensions simmer as a small town, already divided by race, is torn apart by the deadliest of...

Mothergamer (1546 KP) rated Death on the Nile (2022) in Movies

Apr 22, 2022

I really wanted to like this because I grew up on Agatha Christie books and watching the PBS Poirot series with my grandmother. I love Poirot and I like this book, but the screen adaptation is odd. There were strange decisions like including the character Bouc when he's not even in this book and having something happen to him that is not part of the story at all. The pacing felt off with the movie feeling boring and slow in some spots and then a few moments of interesting sprinkled here and there. There didn't seem to be a lot of chemistry among the cast and the actress with four credits to her career so far did a better job emoting and acting than longtime veterans. Branagh did great as Poirot, he was great in the first movie too, but the movie took so long to get going and then when it got to the big reveal it got better. It felt so uneven and I was disappointed. It's not a complete disaster, but it's not stellar either.

Kudos

David McK (3425 KP) rated Rebellion (Eagles of the Empire #22) in Books

Apr 4, 2024

Entry number 22 in Simon Scarrow's long-running Macro and Cato series, and we're finally at what has been building for a while: Boudicca's Rebellion.

Which, like the French with Napoleon at Waterloo, if you knew nothing about British history you might be forgiven for thinking she won (she lost).

The majority of the novel is taken up with the impact the Rebellion had on the Romans in the south of England and (in particular) in London, with Macro and Cato still separated at the start of the novel and with the former in captivity amongst Boudicca's army following the fall of the veterans colony in the former novel, and facing quite gruesome execution.

I have to say, I was actually surprised how little of this novel was spent on the final pitched battle between the Romans and the Britons, with more of it spent on describing the sense of desperation and the breakdown of law and order (well, that's what the Romans would have said) as Boudicca's horde descends on London.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017) in Movies

May 11, 2018

Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017)

2017 | Adventure, Animation, Fantasy

7.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating

A Familiar Tale

If you were a newly-formed Japanese animation studio and somebody said that your first film was good, but not quite up to the standard of Studio Ghibli, you would probably still be quite pleased. Unless you were Studio Ponoc, a newly-formed Japanese animation studio making use of the talents of many Studio Ghibli veterans, with the expressed intention of continuing the Studio Ghibli tradition.

Yet here we are. This is a very good-looking film, with many classic virtues, and a doubtlessly intentional resemblance to the Wizarding World money-making machine - lonely child finds herself transported off to a school for witches, where various adventures awaits. But the animation is sometimes simply very good rather than Ghibli-standard immaculate, the story is rather simplistic, and the characterisation thin. Where Ghibli films are charming, this one is sometimes just a bit twee. It's by no means a bad film, but by positioning itself as 'the Ghibli successor', and copying the Ghibli house style so closely, Studio Ponoc has basically created a set of expectations which - in this film at least - they struggle to meet.