• All This Mayhem

    August 28, 2014 - By 

    Nineties America saw a wider embrace of skateboarding by mainstream culture and exciting innovations in vertical ramp (‘vert’) skating technique, developments that were captured by the expanded availability of affordable video recording and playing equipment. New skaters and tricks were documented and distributed via series’ of home-edited compilation videos with colourful titles like Super Conductor, Super Collider (1993), Welcome to Hell (1996) or Tim and Henry’s Pack of Lies (1992). Skateboarding’s instinctive habit for showing off means that any documentarian of the sport has ample footage to furnish their narratives. In All This Mayhem, director Eddie Martin mines homemade and…

  • Lucy

    August 27, 2014 - By 

    After honey-voiced hardware in Her, a blank-faced alien stalker in Under Her Skin and a lycra-skinned super spy in Captain America: Winter Soldier, Scarlett Johansson continues her trend of playing characters who are Not Like Us. In Lucy she is the titular miniskirt-hugging party girl, who gets kidnapped by scowling Koreans and ingests a super-drug that transforms her into a reality-bending superwoman. It’s also another in a long line of unconventional and unstable heroines from Parisian writer-director Buc Lesson, who gained success with the memorably offbeat action of Nikita, Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, as well as spearheading the Liam Neeson renaissance with the gruff, workmanlike Taken series. Lucy is a jumbled…

  • Marcel Dettmann – Fabric 77

    August 27, 2014 - By 

    It’s been a busy year for Marcel Dettmann, a few months on from his inaugural Essential Mix and roughly 12 months after his most recent LP Dettmann II comes his effort in the renowned Fabric mix series. If the mix is anything to go by, the year will only get busier for Dettmann with a lot of the material on the mix forthcoming on his own MDR label. Dettmann is now one of the most recognisable names in techno and with that, there’s little pressure to prove himself. The last couple of years may have seen a resurgence in the…

  • The Front Bottoms @ QUBSU

    August 25, 2014 - By 

    The Front Bottoms are flying high at the minute, fresh off a support slot in the US with Say Anything and selling out a number of their shows on their current UK tour.  Renowned for bringing the fun with their live shows, stage props and all, and Brian Sella’s deeply personal lyrics doing the heavy-lifting. They have a lot of hype to back up on this show. Although the SU bar is hardly packed for the show the crowd here are ready to enjoy themselves and that alone makes the room feel more crowded. Indeed, It’s immediately clear that The Front Bottoms…

  • The Congress

    August 25, 2014 - By 

    As cut-throat a business as Hollywood may be, it’s inevitably a comedown from the horrible intensities of life in a warzone. The visually diverting but meandering The Congress is Ari Folman’s follow-up to 2009’s celebrated Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about former soldier Folman’s experiences during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon conflict. The Congress, inspired by Solaris author Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 science fiction novel The Futurological Congress, is an animated/live action blend which riffs on the movie industry’s superficial youth culture and delivers familiar dystopic warnings about society’s obsession with fantastical inoculations against the grim truths of real life. Robin Wright…

  • Bear In Heaven – Time Is Over One Day Old

    August 21, 2014 - By 

    Time Is Over One Day Old is the fourth studio album by Bear in Heaven. It is also their finest album to date, more relaxed than Beast Rest Forth Mouth or I Love You, It’s Cool, though certainly not a million miles away from these earlier outings. There are more of the rippling synths, the running basslines and coy vocal progressions which mark out Bear in Heaven’s sound. The formula has always worked and they have recognised this – it now works even better. There are many comparisons to be made with this album, yet it manages to be unique…

  • The Expendables 3

    August 20, 2014 - By 

    The Expendables 3, the latest in Hollywood’s action-star pension plan, confirms the series’ status as the modern action genre’s biggest missed opportunity. Star and story producer Sylvester Stallone has mined his rolodex for a beefed-up (emphasis on the beef) punch-a-thon for him and his bulging buddies and while there are some welcome roster additions, Stallone and new director Patrick Hughes remain unable to dream up material worthy of the star wattage on show. We’re three films deep, and the franchise has yet to deliver a single memorable set-piece. And that’s kind of a problem. At least the films have finally…

  • Deafheaven w/ No Spill Blood @ Mandela Hall

    August 20, 2014 - By 

    The stir of Deafheaven’s first performance in Belfast is one that few could have anticipated, and even fewer will have forgotten. It was 2012, and the San Francisco black metal outfit were on their first European tour in support of post-rock heavyweights Russian Circles. The band played to an almost entirely uninitiated Speakeasy Bar that night; it wasn’t long, though, until the sheer surprise of the aural viciousness emanating from the stage transformed to excitement and awe. The room, packed full of post-rock fans,  was audibly delighted with the performance. It’s unlikely that any other black metal band in the…

  • Hector and the Search for Happiness

    August 14, 2014 - By 

    Soon into Hector and the Search for Happiness, the baffling new leading man vehicle for Simon Pegg from director Peter Chelsom (The Hannah Montana Movie), I realised why the ‘dramedic’ inertia felt so familiar. Hector has much in common with last year’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a Ben Stiller film which was remarkable for recreating perfectly in cinematic form the polished emptiness of a high-end credit card commercial. Both are adaptations of a literary work (here, a popular 2002 novel by Francois Lelord), both use a well-known comic actor for a slightly straighter role, and both are about…

  • Boxcutter – Shea EP

    August 14, 2014 - By 

    London-based, Northern Irish producer Barry Lynn AKA Boxcutter, is back with a small helping of delightful, electronic treats with his latest release, the Shea EP. The self-titled opening track lures the listener right in with a catchy, looping female vocal sample and its incredible array of dynamics. With earphones in and volume up, you feel the full force of Lynn’s creation, and the specific points of detail within these tracks are nothing short of impressive. ‘Holoscene’ allows Shea to stand on its own merits. With an ambience of what seem to be the sound of crickets, it’s easy to find oneself getting lost…