The Artesea

Back in May I went and saw Mark Billingham at the Lincoln Book Festival. Whilst there I got his latest book Buried signed. However only last week did I actually finish the book. It’s not that I’ve been busy reading other books or that the book was a slow one to read, it’s just that I haven’t actually read anything for 3 months. When I finally got around to reading it the book was finished in 4 days. Unlike other Billingham books this one is centred around a kidnapping and not a murder. It still has Tom Thorne and the rest of the usual characters appear throughout the book.
If you’ve enjoyed any of the other books, you’ll definitely enjoy this one. 8/10

ps, anyone got any idea why the new book Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott isn’t on Amazon? I’ve just started reading it and had the book on my shelves for quite a while so it can’t be that new, but can’t add the link to my sidebar.

Been to the movies twice since my last review. David and I saw Miami Vice last week. I don’t remember the original TV show, but this was a great film. The camera work in the final battle was really good with handycams being mixed in with normal cameras. The film might have been a bit long in the middle and one of the plot lines was so obvious that you could see it coming from the first few minutes, but still it was better than a lot of the other films out at the moment and I want that boat. 7/10

The next film I’ve seen wasn’t on the list of films to watch this summer, but as we had Heathers niece and nephew over and Heather was at singing practice I agreed to take them to the cinema. They choose Monster House. The animated film is based around Halloween and has a House which eats people. I do enjoy watching children’s films, only on Monday we watched the Shrek 2 DVD, but the film wasn’t that great. The plot was boring, the animation wasn’t near the levels expected these days and the kids didn’t seem that excited once the film finished. 2/10

Yesterday after having enough of only being able to watch channels 1 to 4, I went out and bought a Freeview box.
I plugged it in, followed the instructions and got BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three/CBBC and BBC News 24. So I went from getting four channels to four channels.
So today I phoned for an aerial engineer called R W Parish, he was here for an hour. Installed a new aerial and replaced the coaxial cable as the old cable was pretty much damaged and now we have lots of channels.
I got Freeview because I wanted BBC Three, BBC Four, E4 and More 4 whilst I think Heather will be happy with just CBeebies.

Now we’ve upgraded the K750i to a K800i it’s no longer needed.
If you want the phone it’s on eBay until next week.

There are adverts on TV at the moment about the new lottery game Dream Number. In it they mention that “Winning just got easier”. The game has a 1 in 10 chance of winning and the most likely prize is only £2. In the small print it says compared to Lotto Extra, this game has now been removed, however it had odds of 1 in 13,983,816 and had one prize that was almost always over a million pounds. I’m sure that whatever concept they could have come up with would have resulted in more chances in winning.

Saw this on Wednesday with David. It was a great film. Lived up to the first two superman movies and Brandon Routh played a great Christopher Reeve. Rather luckily the little boy wasn’t anoying at all and Kevin Spacey pulled off playing Lex Luthor, both things I worried about whilst watching the trailers.
My only issue is why was Lois Lane dating Scott (Cyclops) from the X-Men? 8/10

Yesterday twelve of us went to see Pirates of the Caribbean. The film is a great action movie, with amazing CGI and stunts. The only problem, the film never ends. I’ve seen many films which are clearly made to promote a sequal, however they normally tie up most of the plot lines, leaving one or two to be carried over. In Pirates none of the plot lines end, so the film turns into a 2.5 hour trailer for Pirates 3. 5/10

The Omen, saw this on the 6/6/06. Unlike the orginal this isn’t scary. Instead of using music to set the scene, they have scary dream sequences. 3/10

Fast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift. Unlike Pirates this film didn’t really have much of a plot, nor any real twists. However it did have fast cars sliding around and that was the reason why we went to see the film. A great fun film to watch with the freaky kid from American Gothic all grown up. 6/10

The last film that I haven’t been bothered to blog is The Da Vinci Code. As a Catholic I didn’t find it offensive. The film was ok, but Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou were crap, you just couldn’t believe in their characters, whilst Ian McKellen was just playing the same character he always plays. Jean Reno was good though. 4/10

Next week, Superman!

…can’t wait!
May blog live, may be hiding behind the sofa.

The new Doctor Who is about to reach season three plus have a spin off Torchwood and they are already reusing the actors.
Torchwood is to have Eve Myles play a different character and now the new companion will be Freema Agyeman who only died last week!

I was going to write a long review, but can’t be bothered.
The film is great, the girls look good and stay until the end of the credits.