Tales from a Ticket Stub - Give it a Name 2009

I’m incredibly awful at sticking to anything, so it’s no surprise that I haven’t updated this in about six weeks – so much for weekly updates. Unfortunately the real world (This is the true story... of seven strangers...) got in the way. So work, the plague, general laziness and a subscription to Marvel Unlimited took precedence. However this is the official return of Tales from a Ticket Stub.

Tales from a Ticket Stub - Give it a Name 2005

I’ve been ridiculously bad at keeping to my resolution since I last posted. I pretty much succumbed to the evils of alcohol on Wednesday through to Sunday and did fuck all that could be considered constructive. I was determined to get back on track this week though and spent last night wiping the sin from my flat and drew a new ticket from my bag to write this week’s Tales from a Ticket Stub – Give It a Name 2005.

If I remember rightly this was my fifth ‘proper’ gig, and my first all-dayer, so it had the potential to go very, very wrong given my penchant for drinking for more than I could handle. Luckily this was kept in check firstly by my good friend Steph, who quite frankly would rarely put up with me being a state, and secondly by excruciatingly long queues for the bar.

Introducing...Tales From a Ticket Stub

I made a resolution this year to try and write every day but I, rather predictably, managed to fail within 24 hours. So instead I decided to challenge myself to do something productive outside of work everyday. It doesn’t need to be anything massive – it can be try a new recipe, watch a new film, start a new book or simply write. I’ve stuck to it pretty well thus far and quite frankly it feels great. It sounds obvious but life just seems a little better when you aren’t just hiding under a duvet waiting for work to begin again. This challenge coincided with finding a big old bag of nostalgia when I went home for Christmas – a rather large selection of gig posters, set lists and ticket stubs. This serendipitous event gave me an idea to ensure that I had something to write about at least one day a week. I call it “Tales from a Ticket Stub”.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turd-les...

I only ever tend to write about films that I either really loved, or that I really despised. This is mostly because I find it a lot easier to write about something I have strong feelings for rather than something that didn’t stir up anything in me. Last night I went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knowing that I’d definitely be writing about it afterwards. The question was which side of the fence would the film fall?

Even More Film Reviews

This weekend was one of those times that I really made the most of my Cineworld Unlimited card, after a rather lax September in which I basically avoided the box office. I took in I three films, a rather eclectic collection of films actually, and I’m glad to say that they were all pretty decent. One of them I’d recommend to everyone, another I’d recommend to a handful of people and the other I actually wouldn’t recommend to anyone despite the fact I did enjoy.

Chef

It’s rare that I leave a cinema feeling, for lack of a better word, happy. That’s not to say there aren’t lots of films that I enjoy, this year in particular has been a great one for cinema. Under the Skin was brilliant but I left the cinema feeling rather disturbed and uncomfortable. Twelve Years a Slave was incredible but everybody left the cinema in complete silence, unable to put into words how harrowing the film was. When I left the cinema after watching Chef I was happy, “Ow my face hurts from smiling and I feel warm inside” happy.

The Edge of Tomorrow

I went into the Edge of Tomorrow with low expectations, and I can honestly say that I didn’t come out disappointed. Whilst it didn’t have me on the edge of my seat (see what I did there?) it did manage to keep me in it until the end of the film…just about.

Oh I've done a blog entry.

So let’s talk about Captain America: Winter Soldier. I sat down in the cinema with low expectations, Captain America’s flag-waving patriotism has always belonged in ‘golden era’ of comics in my mind, out of touch with contemporary thinking. That being said Brubaker’s run on Cap was exquisite, as is more or less everything the man does, and I was hoping that Marvel would take this on board with this latest instalment in the Captain America franchise.