The Grax Domain - Review

LifeAsRose dot Ca review

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:50:00 +0000

iPhone 3G Activation Guide

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:10:00 +0100

iPhone 3G Review

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:15:00 +0100

Kieronononon Review

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:08:00 +0100

If you can't watch the video review above, you can read what I said below:

Sometimes you can get bored or frustrated with the common bands and genres in the mainstream music society. People turn to Internet Social Networks like MySpace to satisfy their needs for something totally random. Sometimes they get lucky and discover a band like Kieronononon.

Band members Orta, Float Star Point (pronounced (float*)(p->x) ) and Goat-Boy spewed out a new music genre for all to enjoy; Brutal Techno Punk.

Kierononon's brutal techno punk sound is an angry, aggressive sound, with a hint of odd humour. Now you might be forgiven to think that this a bunch of random noise because it's unlike anything you will ever hear in the mainstream charts, or even outside the mainstream charts. To me when I first heard Kierononon, it sounded like three guys with a couple of guitars and a drum synthesizer kit making random noise, and I didn't really give it the time of the day. But then I gave it a second chance and I listened to it again. And then somehow it fitted together and actually started to sound decent. Now I could see that it was three guys just messing about with a couple of guitars and a drums synthesizer producing and recording something decent.

Kierononon have improved with time and experience and this is evident in their newest album "Brutaltechnopunk". The sound quality is vastly improved compared to their earlier albums "More Interesting than nik Naks" and "More boring than Poison". It's as if one of the band members was fiddling about with the sound editing software, found some new settings, unticked the "suck ass" checkbox and cranked up the "bad ass" slider to max.

However the music is only part of the story. You see Kierononon at their best when they play live. I watched Kierononon perform live at a local pub in Leamington Spa. This was their final ever tour... just like the last tour... and the tour before that.... There's something about the thumping noise from the big speakers, the bass player Float twanging his strings and fiddling with knobs, the front man Orta screeching and mincing in front of everyone, the Goatboy being all.... Goatboy-ish that brought a smile to my face. You can tell that they're enjoying themselves on stage and that only helps to improve the music.There was a large crowd surrounding the stage area at the begining of the show. By the end of the show the number had shrunk to about half. But that's ok, Kierononon is only for awesome people.

When you first hear Kierononon you might get put off and decide to run from it like a mental patient running away from the doctors with their medication and their straight jackets. But this band is a grower. Give it a few more tries and it may broaden your mind to what can be done with music.

If you're not put off initially by the sounds of this brutal techno punk then that makes you pretty awesome.

To find out more on Kieronononon head to their MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/kieronononon or head to their record label's website at http://www.roxxor2.co.uk/.

Man someone should really write a wikipedia entry for this band.

Iron Man movie review

Thu, 15 May 2008 23:00:00 +0100

They release a movie based upon a comic character that you're not exactly a huge fan of. Oh sure you might have a couple of their issues and they may make the odd cameo appearance in your usual comics, but nothing that would make you take notice. Then you see the trailer for said comic character that makes the movie look totally kick-ass (like the trailer is designed to). What do you do? In my case I took a risk and watched Iron Man at the cinema.

Fortunately Iron Man was just as good as the trailer promised.

There's lots of different sides to the story. Yes there's Iron Man in action. But there's also Tony Stark, the arrogant yet loveable prick that makes people smile because he's that damn good. There's Tony Stark, the guy who get the life changing experience and gains the responsibilities of a super-hero (as you do). Robert Downey Jr. does a fantastic job in his role.

The pacing of the movie was good too. They did the old 'Tell the whole origin story but condense it into a short space of time and yet lose none of the details' trick, which makes it very accessible for everyone. You've not going to get lost with confusing in this plot. On the other hand there were lots of tibbets for Marvel fan that'll make 'em smile, not to mention all the hints they drop that scream "sequel!" (which they're gonna do) or "spin-off!" (which I believe they are also gonna do).

Iron Man is a movie I can easily recommend to people to watch. Even more so to comic fans. It had me smiling throughout. This movie has helped to restore my faith in Marvel movie again. Maybe now they'll stop making bad Marvel movies like Daredevil and Spider-Man 2 & 3 and keep making high quality movies like Iron Man.

Whatever you do, stay till after the credits.

Waking Life movie review

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:05:00 +0000

Waking Life is the story about a man who is experiencing a series of dreams one after the other. That's the best way to describe it because there isn't really a plot in the movie in the traditional sense. Throughout the movie is a series of shorts that talk about deep, philosophical ideas, ranging from life, reality, consciousness, religion, society, dreams, and many other subjects. You not so much watching a story but more like taking part in a deep intellectual exercise.

And the way movie presents itself can only be described as art. Rather than being traditional video, the movie is essentially hand drawn over each frame of the video to create a cartoon, art experience. This allows for some very artist effects. The scenery shifts and changes, peoples features become exaggerate as they speak, clouds of symbolism appear subtly out of peoples mouths. The whole thing really does look like a dream.

This is not a brain-dead movie that you sit down to and mindlessly enjoy. Yes you can simply observe the pretty colours and movement but then you miss out of so much depth. If you take on board the assault of big words and expressions then you discover a whole world of ideas that, even though you mind not have heard of them often, somehow it makes perfect sense and you wonder why you don't hear it more often.

I really enjoyed watching this movie and I cannot recommend watching this enough. It's one of those things that people should experience at least once. At the end it'll make you think about life in a different way and think "Hmm, maybe I can give this whole 'waking dream' thing a go".

GRAX RATING : 5/5

TMNT review

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:55:00 +0000

There really isn't that much to say about this film, which is about four mutant turtles getting caught up in an ancient warrior's desire to create a vortex to a parallel dimension to harness its power, whilst at the same time Leonardo and Raphael having their own brotherly feud.

The animation style reminded me of The Incredibles, which pleases me.

When things really heated up between Leonardo and Raphael it pleased me.

The fact that Donatello and Michaelangelo got disproportionately less air time than the other two brothers displeases me.

The story itself is adequate, though it's not going to win any awards.

The whole thing is quite serious and not childish, which pleases me. The fact that the movie is nothing like the 90's cartoon series pleases me even more.

In summery TMNT is a good film to kill around an hour and 15 minutes of your time. Certainly worth a rent but unless you are a huge fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles it'll probably only get watched once or twice.

Still, it would be nice to see some kind of sequel of TMNT.

GRAX RATING: 3/5

Transformers The Movie (2007) review

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:00:00 +0100

I didn't want to like this. When I first heard that they were gonna be making a live action/cgi movie on the transformers, I had feelings of dread thinking that they would ruin the franchise. And yet I heard on the streets that Michael Bay has done a good job at it. Even the more harsh critics thought it was good. So I had no choice but to brave it and sacrifice £7 to see what all the fuss is about.

It's actually a good film. A really good film.

It's not 'drag your girlfriend' good, but still very good.

Obviously the effects are spot on, but there's more to it than that. Shia LaBeouf is good, and has funny moments too. Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime, is in it. The transformers, though each have new looks, they all look realistic, like you would accept that it would happen in the real world. There are Transformers quotes in the movie.

There's lots of nice touches that made me smile on more than on occasion.

It's definately one of those films that you can quite happily see more than once. A feast for the eyes.

Sometimes I hate being wrong about things.

GRAX RATING: 4/5

Spider-Man 3 movie review

Mon, 14 May 2007 08:55:00 +0100

Sometimes it can be a pain being a comic book fanboy, especially when it comes to movies. It makes you go to the cinema to watch the movie adaptation ignoring the inner voices telling you that it is an abomination.I myself have recently put myself through watching all of Spider-Man 3 just so I can get a glimpse of what someone else thinks Venom (one of my all time favourite fave comic characters) should look like on the silver screen. Fortunately the rest of the movie was not so bad.

Spider-man 3 sees our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Person enjoying the perks of having it all, a city that cheers for the hero, a beautiful girlfriend he plans to marry; then it starts to go all downhill, partly due to an certain extra-terrestrial symbiote. Not to mention a couple of other super-villains.

One of the good points of the film is the action sequences when Spidey gets fighting one of the villains. It does a good job of keeping the audience entertained, smiling at the computer-generated stunts, wincing at the rather painful looking collisions that occur. However the movie starts to suffer when it's out of the action sequences and starts to get into the story, where the story dragged on, the ending got very sloppy, and people where looking at their watches wondering when Venom will make his appearance.

What, you think people paid £7 to see Sandman? I think not.

Speaking of Venom I think Topher Grace did a god job portraying him despite his somewhat limited air time. He got the point across that he believes Peter Parker screwed him over life and wanted to make him suffer. And the CGI Venom was also pretty good, even though you only get to see about 20 minutes or so of him. And the fact he's not as bulky as this comic counterpart. Other than those minor points Venom was a good addition and deserves much more airtime. The other two villains, Sandman and The Green Goblin (Harry Osborn), I felt were shoe-horned into the movie to make the story work so I'm not going to talk about them. Me being biased towards Venom? I tend to agree.

Even though I enjoyed Spider-man 3 a lot more than Spider-man 2, which I felt had way really cheesy acting and Spider-man suffering from reveal-his-secret-identity-to-everyone-itis, I can only recommend you wait for the DVD release or even wait until it comes to TV. Of course my words of caution won't deter all those Venom fans out there, they're going to go see him at the cinema anyway. Hell I wouldn't follow my own advice either.

Oh one last thing to the people who made Spider-man 3. Giving Peter Parker an emo fringe does not make him a bad-ass; it gets him laughed at! I swear he wore a little eye-liner at one point too. I don't blame you Tobey Maguire. After all you were only doing your job.

GRAX RATING: 3/5 (less if you're not a Venom fan).

Pandora's music box

Fri, 11 May 2007 16:50:00 +0100

I've recently found this rather funky online music player. It's called Pandora and it's created by the Music Genome Project. What it is in a nutshell is a Flash based music player that plays music based upon what the music sounds like and what other bands have a similar sound. Or something like that.

For example my favourite band is Alice in Chains. I create a station using the band's name as a criteria. Then Pandora plays music either by Alice in Chains themselves or other bands that sound similar to them. It also works on song titles too. It's a pretty bad-ass way of discovering new bands that you may never would have considered. You can create as many stations as you like and mix and match them as you like.

On top of that you can rate each song being played by whether you like it or not. If you like it the station will play that song more often, if you don't then the station will not play that song ever again.

The only minor negative points I have about Pandora are that sometime it tends to loop through some of the song you like a bit too often (but you can say that you're bored of the song and then it won't appear again for a month) and that because of some licensing issues you can only skip a certain number of tracks per hour per station (but you can simply change stations at that point).

Pandora is a great little online music player to use if you're bored of your music collection, or if you fancy listening out for some new tracks.

Give Pandora a try, you might discover a little musical gem.

GRAX RATING: 4/5