November 25, 2009

16 Sergio Leone, my videogame Ruin

Last post was dedicated entirely to the last concerts I attended. So this one will be about everything BUT music.

MOVIES Wall-E was awesome, loved the idea of a future human race that lives a lie created by computers (instead of living a lie in a hell created by computers ala Matrix), The Signal was ok, you really felt the characters were going insane, you felt sorry for them (sometimes, I guess not when they turned violent!), oh! I found the Rambo quadrilogy at work and took it home... hopefully I'll start with First Blood this month.
I also watched the Sergio Leone / Clint Eastwood trilogy I talked about on post #14, and now I know why they made Eastwood a western movie hero and why those movies started a genre. Classics. Especially The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, it was jaw-dropping, if a bit too long.
I still need to see Unforgiven (to close the 'western Eastwood' saga), the last two Dirty Harry films, Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino which I picked up this month. And with those, I will put my Clint obsession to rest (or will I?)

GAMES The Nintendo DS has driven me insane... at first I couldn't put the thing down, now I can leave it for a few hours but I still feel the urge to grab that thing, open it to admire its dual screens, and get sucked into another dimension; the gaming dimension! (oOoooh). My latest reasons for staying awake until 5am (it has happened more than once) are: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, Amazing Adventures: Forgotten Ruins and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Let me tell you, the fact that all 3 have the word ruin in their titles is a huge coincidence, it hasn't been planned. Funny, my favorite Lamb of God song is called... wait! I can't talk about music in this post, what am I thinking? See ya next time!

15 Johansen, Ripper, Exodus

MUSIC Has it really been that long since I wrote on my blog? Damn this thing, sometimes I wonder why I have one :)
I won't begin
with the band everyone around here has been waiting for... I'll leave that for a later post (hopefully before the concert, yes?), but I have a few shows I did attend that I haven't written about: Kevin Johansen (august), Tim 'Ripper' Owens (september) and Kreator/Exodus (october).

People outside South America aren't familiar with Kevin Johansen and it's obvious why, he mixes Argentinean slang with english and a few invented words and makes some kind of rock/folk that doesn't sound like anything else. He was accompanied by Liniers, a famous cartoonist from Argentina where they mixed visual art with music, it was a lot of fun. A friend of mine snuck into the backstage and got an autograph from Mr. Johansen, something a lot of my female friends are undoubtedly jealous about :)


Tim 'Ripper' Owens is a guy that yo
u either love or hate. I'm sure most hardcore Judas Priest fans go for the latter, and I feel sorry for them, really... can you watch the Live in London DVD and say Ripper doesn't sing well? Quit comparing him to Halford for F's sake, and listen to the guy. You'll see how good he is. Sure, his stage presence is mediocre, but did I pay to see him jump, headbang and make the horns, or did I pay to hear him sing classics like Painkiller and Livin' After Midnight? At least the 'Ripper' can still hit those impossibly high notes. That's right, I said it. Bring it on, Halford lovers. For the rest, a picture of the event.
...and that's me, on the front left side with a white t-shirt and big-ass sideburns :)

And last but certainly not least, the killer combo of American legends Exodus supporting German thrash-masters Kreator. I had only listened to one Exodus album, and it wasn't a good indication as to what their current direction was, so I'm glad I listened to Shovel Headed Kill Machine (2005), The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A (2007) and the remastering of their first album titled Let There Be Blood (2008) just in time for the show. Their setlist was comprised mainly of these three albums, so I had no problem following the songs and moshing along to them.
My second time seeing Kreator live was a slight disappointment, as they chose to fill the second half of their set with obscure (to me) songs, and I think some people felt like this too. Still, the first half was as killer as I had expected, with soon-to-be-classics like Hordes of Chaos and Destroy What Destroys You. Here's my friend jumping off the stage at the 11-second mark: