movies + tv

Hannibal (Seasons 1+2): Very decent adaptation of the Hannibal Lecter franchise, though the gore factor is pretty full on.

Black Mirror (Seasons 1+2): anthology series of dystopian techno-tales of the unexpected by Charlie Brooker from The Guardian. "The Entire History of You" (season 1, episode 3) was particularly good.

Amazing Journey - The Story of The Who (2007): With the exception of "Pinball Wizard" — and my preferred version of that song is Elton John's version for the Tommy movie adaptation — I've never really understood why The Who were considered such a big deal. Their early yeah-yeah songs (a la "My Generation") just sound like Rolling Stones-lite, while their later concept album "Tommy" just puts me to sleep. Pete Townshend's place in the pantheon of guitar legends seems to be based more on his windmill strumming gimmick than anything else. And watching this documentary didn't really change any of that.

Before the Music Dies (2006): the premise of this fairly tedious documentary film is, in a nutshell, that the music industry has become too commercial and superficial. Unconvincing and overly nostalgic.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014): absolutely LOVED this film. It's the perfect sci-fi film: great action, humour and doesn't take itself too seriously. Tom Cruise is on a roll. 

Elysium (2013): okay, but not great.

Silicon Valley (2014): amusing comedy series about a bunch of nerds trying to get a start-up off the ground. Sort of Entourage meets The Big Bang Theory.

Fight Life (2012): documentary following the training of a group of mixed martial fighters in the lead up to a fight night. The dedication of these guys is impressive.

Los Cronocrimenes (2007): Quirky little time travel story from Spain, about a Peeping Tomas who gets into a spot of chronological bother and has to get his timeline in order.

The Tunnel (2013): British-French adaptation of the Swedish-Danish series Bron|Broen. Featuring Stephen Dillane, aka Stannis Baratheon from GoT. Pretty well done, but the adaptation so faithful to the original that, if you've seen one then the other won't hold any surprises at all.

The Rover (2014): post-apocalyptic Aussie flick, sort of The Road meets Mad Max. Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson give a good account of themselves but it's pretty slow going.

recent movies and tv

Things have been rather quiet on the movie front, but a few recent ones:

About Time (2013): schmaltzy Richard Curtis rom-com which explores some similar themes to Sliding Doors (and is also set mostly in London). The premise is that a young man discovers a family secret: all the men in his family have the ability to travel back in time to any moment from their past and relive things from that point on. Yet more proof that I'll watch anything with a bit of time travel.

Source Code (2011): low budget sci-fi flick featuring Jake Gyllenhaal, which explores a scenario very similar to the excellent Edge of Tomorrow.

Proof (2005): treacly yarn about a daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her brilliant mathematician father (Anthony Hopkins) who went mad in his last years. It's about the connection between genius and madness, as the daughter tries to understand how much of both attributes she has inherited. Jake Gyllenhaal once more rears his head as a young graduate student. It's not a great film, but you have to give it marks for including a reference to Sophie Germain prime numbers.

Coherence (2013): low budget indie sci-fi thriller flick that reminded me somewhat of The Man From Earth: dialog-heavy, no effects, mostly set in one room, but strangely gripping and thought-provoking.

Things have been more active on the small screen front:

Fargo (Season 1): loved it. The entire cast is excellent and the slow-burn drama and creeping inevitability are strongly redolent of both Breaking Bad and No Country For Old Men.

True Detective (Season 1): I'm not naturally a big fan of Matthew McConaughey so I wasn't chomping at the bit to watch this. Indeed, it took me a few episodes to get into it, but by the end it won me over. The performances by McConaughey and Harrelson are both excellent.

Veep (Seasons 1-3): Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as the ambitious Vice President surrounded by an entourage of no-less ambitious lackeys and gophers. It's very much in the style of The Office, with relentless fast-paced one-liners. Gary Cole from Office Space is excellent as the number crunching economics advisor, as is Timothy Simons as super-doofus Jonah ("Jonad") Ryan.

American Horror Story (Season 1): dripping with horror movie cliches but a strong cast sucks you in and keeps it interesting even as the plot starts to flounder.

Sherlock (Seasons 1-3): I feel like the last person on Earth to get around to watching this, but I wasn't disappointed when I finally did.

myRig

I’ve recently devoted a bit of effort to setting up a decent practice environment on my iMac. Here are the ins and outs of what’s working for me:

IN: Running my guitar direct into the computer via an Apogee Jam audio interface. It’s a quick plugin and the audio interface doesn’t take up any deskspace.

OUT: Running through any external pedals before the computer.  After several attempts I gave trying to use my multi-effects pedal (BOSS ME70) or loop station (BOSS RC20XL); the sound quality was mediocre (in comparison to Amplitube – see below) and with power supplies and extra leads the setup/packup effort is substantially increased.

IN: Amplitube 3 as a plugin to Garageband 10. I have found Amplitube 3 to be the best-sounding amp simulator for Mac OSX. Using it as a plugin to Garageband 10 requires a hack (which the good folks at IK Multimedia were happy to provide – it involves copying a certain plist file from one place to another). The best thing is, the basic app is free and comes with some great sounding amps and pedals. I am tempted to explore some of the paid add-ons at some point (Marshall, Fender, Orange, and others – together with a huge range pedals), but there’s no urgent need.

IN: setting up a generic project in Garageband with a number of channels for each type of guitar sound I regular want (e.g. heavy rhythm left/right, heavy lead, clean). I use this as a loop station for jamming along to some chord progression or practising a lead over a given rhythm. There is an irritating bug in GB10 which results in noticeable latency in the sound monitoring when first starting up. I find this goes away as soon as I record something in one of the tracks. Any time I end up with something I want to keep, it’s easy to export as mp3 (or direct to Soundcloud!) or save it off as a new project.

OUT: Amplitube’s loop station in standalone mode. The interface is extremely clunky and limited in features. My experience with Amplitube generally suggests that it’s an app that should be heard and not seen.

IN: Anytune Pro for slowing down and transposing songs, to transcribe by ear and play along to. I experimented with a few apps in this space, but this one has by far and away the most intuitive, well-designed interface – it’s simply a joy to use. The step-up trainer, which automatically plays a section repeatedly at gradually increasing tempos is incredibly cool and useful. It also allows you to quickly browse and import songs from iTunes (no more haplessly navigating the folders where the mp3 files live!) and remembers the various annotations and settings you apply. Overall, this app has dramatically sped up my workflow for figuring out songs by ear.

OUT: Amazing Slow Downer. The original program of its kind, but it has the most atrocious interface of any program I’ve ever used for anything, anywhere. Dropped it like a hot potato as soon as I found Anytune Pro.

IN: Guitar Pro 6, tablature word processor. Very nice, intuitive WYSIWYG editor. You enter the tab (with rhythm values) and it generates the corresponding music notation. I don’t really need the notation, but it looks cool. There are heaps of guitar-centric annotation (slides, hammer ons, tapping, pinch harmonics etc) – the end result is very professional-looking. And the best part is that you can play the score once you’ve written it out, so you can see if your rhythmic transcription is up to snuff. Should be very useful for writing out song arrangements to share with the band.

OUT: Lilypond. It’s the LaTeX of music notation editors. I love the idea, but it’s just not a realistic solution for quickly banging out a rough song arrangement.