A beautiful end to the year

First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and have a happy new year. For my part, I got a £20 Steam code and bought a ton of new games with it, of which more next week. More importantly, around Christmas I saw two absolutely wonderful movies, and that's what I want to talk about here.

Beautiful Games

The past month or so I've been playing a lot of new video games, because it's amazing what you can find for free if you know where to look. I'll go into some detail down below, but before that I want to say: it's amazing how beautiful you can make games in a short amount of time.

Why I kinda hate superhero movies. And trilogies in general...

Okay, so I don't know what started off the whole trilogy thing. Maybe it was the Godfather, or the Dollars trilogy. Answers vary, some even dating as far back as Boris Karloff's stint as Frankenstein in Frankenstein(1931), Bride of Frankenstein(1935), and Son of Frankenstein(1939). I couldn't say for sure, of course - I haven't seen enough films to say for certain, and even if I had my opinion is a drop in the film-review ocean - but what I do know is this:

I utterly hate them.

Two Toms on top form, in two very different movies

Having adjusted to uni life, it's been nice to relax and unwind this past week. Since yesterday, I've seen two films, and it's remarkable how good cinema has become now the summer blockbuster season is over. The two films I watched bridged the gap between vacuous action movie and Autumn Oscar-bait, and it's interesting to see the contrast, but also the stand-out performances which really make both films. So here we go: my review of Thor: The Dark World and Captain Phillips.

News, I guess...

Okay, so I haven't posted anything up here in, like, FOREVER. But there's a very good reason for that right now.

I'm waiting for Robocop to come out in cinemas before I do another movie review.

Trying to Get Lost in the City of Love, Part 3: street pianos and the quest for a cider...

Montmartre, for those of you who don't know, is a place of steps. And if it's not a place of steps, it's a place of hills. This I truly learned as I made my way up the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, the vast cathedral which stood at the top of the hill and overlooked the rest of Paris, sprawling out far below and far away.

Trying to Get Lost in the City of Love, Part 2: Making Music

Rewind now; not far, just to the night before.

The scene: a restaurant not far from Notre Dame, Paris, owned by a friendly, if overenthusiastic Portuguese man. There is a row of tables set up outside, brought together to seat eight people, but for now all the seats are empty. Piano music emanates from inside - Simon sits at the little upright in the cramped quarters of the lower floor bar, while Molly sings "I got Rhythm" accompanied (partially) by me. We'd met Molly and her friends earlier that day, at breakfast in the hostel. It was their first day there, and our last full one, and it being the fourth of July it seemed like a good reason to get together for a drink. She was there with Waller and Chiara, all the way from Rome where they'd been studying.