Archives for the month of: February, 2012

We are the gods now…

February 29, 2012 //
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Last Christmas came a few days early for film fans, as Ridley Scott unwrapped the trailer for Alien prequel Prometheus and made us all very happy children indeed.

We’re not sure what the occasion is this time, but the great Scott has just given us another gift, this time in the form of a viral video on non-profit ideas spreading website TED.

Directed by Ridley’s son Luke, it features the ever electrifying Guy Pierce as Peter Weyland, founder of mega-corporation Weyland Industries, making a presentation at the TED Conference 2023. With his slick-backed hair, exquisitely-tailored suit and razor-sharp cheekbones, Steve Jobs he ain’t.

As anyone who has ever obsessed over the Alien series of films will recognise, it is this man’s company that will go on to become Weyland-Yuntani, owner of the LV-426 colony that settled on the same mysterious planet depicted in Ridley Scott’s Alien (which subsequently became the setting for Ellen Ripley’s heroics in James Cameron’s Aliens) and who made at least two attempts to bring live alien specimens back to Earth in both of its sequels.

Pierce’s Weyland is precisely the hubristic, ruthless industrialist you’d imagine him to be, and the new video gives us some portent of the calamity that is to follow in later years, presumably now starting with the events depicted in Prometheus.

As a piece of marketing, it is also another stroke of Scott’s near-genius (perhaps not surprising for a man who cut his directorial teeth shooting commercials). Take a look at every movie and entertainment website right now and it will have pole position amongst the headlines.

Actually you needn’t bother, as like a best friend that just keeps on giving, OnlyForKoolKids has the video for you right here. Enjoy, and remember: “We are the gods now…”

Prometheus is released in UK cinemas on June 1 (a whole week ahead of the US!)

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Categories movie

Lashings of the old ultra-violence

February 27, 2012 //
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Every once in a while a film comes along that is so violent censors barely need to blink before slapping an 18/hard R rating on it. Think Cannibal Holocaust, Robocop, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, if we’re talking violence of  the psychological variety, Sex And The City 2.

Indonesian action flick The Raid has exactly the kind of set-up that screams ‘ludicrously high body count’, portraying as it does the fortunes of an elite SWAT team on a mission to secure a run-down Jakarta tower block that doubles up as a safe house for the city’s most dastardly criminals.

Needless to say, things don’t go exactly to plan, leaving our heroes trapped in a high rise with hundreds of machete-wielding psychopaths for housemates.

Directed by Englishman Gareth Evans, the film looks like a mix between bonkers Thai fight-fest Ong Bak and John Woo’s Hard Boiled, with the latter’s hospital shootout scene in particular providing bullet-riddled inspiration.

Where Ong Bak star Tony Jaa brought muay thai to the big screen in such a bone-crunchingly brilliant way, so The Raid‘s leading man Iko Uwais is set to showcase the equally brutal Indonesian martial art of pencak silat and wow Western audiences.

If all this sounds too testosterone-fuelled to be any good, think again: The Raid won the Midnight Madness audience prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and is already being spoken of as one of the best action films in years.

In an era where Sylvester Stallone reportedly wants a 12 rating for The Expendables 2, it’s certainly heartening to see a movie that hasn’t put box office before bangsmashwallop.

The Raid is released in UK cinemas on May 18.

WARNING – If you are of a nervous disposition and don’t want to see garottings, throat slashings and point-blank head shots, please watch this nicely sanitized trailer:

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If you are the sort of sick bastard that revels in the mayhem listed above, here is the uncensored version (you mentalist!):


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Categories movie

Shut up and…dance?

February 17, 2012 //
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Which movies are you most looking forward to this year? The Dark Knight Rises? Prometheus? LOL, starring Miley Cyrus?

While OnlyForKoolKids anticipates most of the above with baited breath, there is another film that has got us more impatient than The Smiths-loving brat in last Christmas’s Marks and Spencer ad.

Oh, you’d like us to tell you what that film is, would you? Ok then, it’s called Shut Up And Play The Hits, and it documents the final gig of one of the best bands of the last decade or so, LCD Soundsystem.

If you didn’t make it to that gig (and given that Madison Square Garden can accommodate only 20,000 of the world’s population, there’s a good chance a lot of you didn’t) fret not, for Shut Up And Play The Hits looks almost as good as being there itself.

Emotional, elegiac and electrifying all at the same time, it places us at the heart of the show that LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy decided would take the band out on a creative high, on April 2 of last year.

Frankly, the trailer was enough to make us weep tears of joy and sorrow simultaneously, so lord knows what state we’ll be in during the film proper.

No release date has been announced for Shut Up And Play The Hits yet, but when it has, we’ll be sure to tell All My Friends. And if that seems nothing but grammatically incorrect to you, you probably shouldn’t be reading this post…

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Categories movie, music

Return of the Dead

February 16, 2012 //
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Zombie fans: if you’ve not caught any of The Walking Dead yet, stop acting like a dead-head and procure yourselves the first season of what is one of the most entertaining shows on television right now.

True, it doesn’t quite have the heavyweight chops of The Sopranos or The Wire (it’s a show about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, FFS!) but it is fantastically produced, performed and presented, and it is never anything less than utterly compelling.

Having taken a scheduled break halfway through season two, this week The Walking Dead returns to UK screens to continue the harrowing saga of Sheriff Rick Grimes (played by our very own – and increasingly superb – Andrew Lincoln) and his disparate band of survivors.

Those who’ve been following the show will know how exciting this news is. The mid-season finale ended with just about the most shocking turn of events in The Walking Dead‘s short history, and left many viewers shell-shocked yet full of admiration for the curveball it threw at them.

Until that point, some had aired their frustration that too little was happening. They were wrong, of course; the writers were brilliantly taking their time to develop each character and set everyone up for the jaw-dropping moment that has us all wanting more.

OnlyForKoolKids has already seen the first of the new episodes and we can confirm that, despite its name, there is still plenty of life left in The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead returns to UK television on digital channel FX on Friday February 17 at 10pm.

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Categories television

A Valentine’s Day quickie

February 14, 2012 //
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For all those who groaned at the admittedly abject innuendo in this post’s headline, please read on: it is mercifully short and sweet, and by the end it’ll all be worthwhile.

As you may have noticed, today is the day that morons believe is the only one on which they can express something approaching love to their partner or spouse (presumably they spend the other 364 days just grimacing at each other).

Yes, this amorous 24-hour window has become so profitable that UK chancellor George Osbourne and other expert Conservative think-abouters have proposed introducing a second Valentine’s Day in the latter half of the year to help boost the British economy.*

If you haven’t already guessed from such overt cynicism, OnlyForKoolKids is not a big Valentine’s Day fan. But a few days ago we discovered it had inspired a mix of tracks by possibly the greatest beatmaker of all time, J Dilla (see below), and our normally ice-cold heart melted like butter on hot love toast.

The sixth anniversary of this extraordinary producer’s death was just four days ago, and frankly there is no better time to enjoy a shmooze through his songs dealing with love, lust, relationships, sex and polygamy. And if you enjoy the experience, please consider donating to the J Dilla Foundation.

*Not an actual fact

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Categories music

Re-enter the dragon

February 2, 2012 //
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It may have been almost 40 years since the greatest martial arts movie star of all time departed this mortal coil, but frankly OnlyForKoolKids will never ever tire of watching clips of Bruce Lee kicking butt, sharing his philosophies or just being the ridunculously cool guy he was.

Which is fortunate, as new documentary I Am Bruce Lee is about to hit the big screen (February 9 in the US, but unfortunately no distributor seems to have picked it up in the UK yet).

With its meat being a whole bunch of footage from Lee’s films and archives of interviews with the man himself, the starch of I Am Bruce Lee is a lot of talking heads with contemporary stars of the screen, of sport and, as it is distributed by UFC broadcaster Spike TV, of the world of mixed martial arts.

A few of these look a tad lightweight (do we really need to hear what ‘Taboo’ from the Black Eyed Peas thinks about Bruce Lee?) and some we’ve never heard of (if anyone can tell us who Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini is, please get in touch), but for the most part the film’s makers have assembled some interesting names, including boxing phenomenon Manny Pacquiao, Mickey Rourke, UFC champion Jon Jones, Lee’s training partner Dan Inosanto and Lee’s widow Linda Lee Caldwell.

I Am Bruce Lee looks like a pretty decent tribute to its subject: a man whose philosophy was based on the rejection of dogma and instead being ever adaptable.

As he once said: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” Yeah, cool as f…

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