Off Topic The Review Thread

Yeah, you could smell it in the air a lot of the time. There are 'smoke shops' all over the place - far more than will be able to sustain themselves, I would guess.

 

It’s a shame. I have no objection to the practice of smoking dope, but I don’t enjoy the smell everywhere.

You crammed a lot into your time away, nice one!

 

Went to see Carmen at the Royal Opera House last night. the music is fantastic, more tunes with hooks than a Motown greatest hits, sexier than a 80’s Prince album, and as much anguish, grief and unrequited love as following Rangers this year.
For me the orchestra were not dynamic enough, the best tunes ever and meh. I wanted my chest pounded, it wasn’t. Whilst Carmen and her two friends were brilliant the men around them were alright at best.
Too many children interludes, to make it “family friendly” got annoying.
Interesting rotating set. At £172 a seat (I could have gone to Taylor swift ) I would have liked a bit more, still it was a good shared experience with my daughter.

 

Sounds like I’m best sticking to her rollers.

 

You’ve been waiting for this one!

Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre. I was totally unfamiliar with the play, but it is an early comedy apparently. Four blokes including a Prince make a vow to swear off women for three years (didn’t really catch the reason) and their resolve crumbles when the first four women, including a princess, turn up about 15 minutes later. Rest of the play is various shenanigans, game playing, disguises, but no cross dressing or hiding in woods this time, before a resolution of sorts (they get the girls but have to wait another year).

Really enjoyable production. I have no idea how faithful it was to the original text. The stage was dressed as a country club, including tennis and golf segments, very imaginative and clever, the acting was very good - lots of decent roles giving a range of actors a chance to shine. Genuinely funny as well, which isn’t always the case with Shakespearean ‘comedies’.

Saw the play on Tuesday. Was in the Dirty Duck/Black Swan pub last night, the traditional watering hole for the actors, and after the performance a bunch of them turned up. The male actors all sat together, the female ones sat separately, and a third (mixed) group, the stagehands/technicians, sat at a third table. Odd.

 

Don't need to go to see it now

 

Another thing from the New York trip that was really worth seeing was an amazing 80ft white sculpture of a woman's head which is on the New Jersey waterfront facing Greenwich Village.....

'Water's Soul': Massive white sculpture makes a statement in New York harbor | Reuters

Best seen from the boat trip, it's really quite beautiful.

 

Does anybody else play the license plate game when visiting the US? You have to tick off as many states as you can based on the vehicle registrations. We got 35 on our recent trip, which is pretty good on a short visit - much excitement when we spotted an Alaska plate. When I was first there in the seventies we got up to the high forties on a three week trip. It became such an obsession that if we were overtaken on the freeway by an unusual plate that couldn't be identified we would have to chase after it to check it out.

 

On family holiday trips in UK we used to plays "Legs" to be first to identify and count the # of legs on Pub signs, e.g. White Horse = 4.
Maybe that could have been my excuse last year when I got a 98 MPH speeding ticket (460 USD) in the Mojave Desert, California (70 MPH speed limit). Now Texas was 80 MPH, where incidentally you got a "too slow" ticket if driving less than 75 MPH. At the time Waze was offline and the California Highway Patrol officer (CST McKorkle, right out of a US sitcom) was travelling right in front of a transport truck. My cruise was set to 80 MPH on the 2 lane hwy when I encountered a couple of vehicles on 70 MPH cruise in he fast lane, who wouldn't respond favourably to flashed headlights to get over, so I was forced to manoeuvre around those idiots in the slow lane, then there was a transport truck so back over to the fast lane to pass and was slowing back down to my cruise speed when that cop nabbed me. My first ticket in 70 years, always was able to talk my way out of them, even after a couple of beers as a youngster in UK. Well at the end of the process the cop did shake my hand and comment favourably on my rear Route 66 sticker.

 

The Guinea, Bruton Place near Berkeley Square. Apparently there has been a pub on the site since 1450 and the current iteration is a very snug Youngs pub on one side and a grill restaurant with a rabbit warren of rooms on the other. The restaurant has been around since the end of WW2, originally aimed at selling steak to Americans. The pub bit was rammed with blokes in suits at lunchtime, good to see some traditions die hard.

Slightly unfair to judge as I was there with my two oldest friends and as always things got a bit messy. But this place specialises in MEAT. Optional sides for the (pricey but very good looking) steaks included chops, kidneys and other extra MEAT. A couple of vegetarian options but no fish available as a main. I had a beef, Guinness and oyster pie which was excellent but very heavy. Good service. Ended up expensive because of the huge mark ups on the wine. Even our Guinness aperitif from the pub was £7.10 a pint.

Recommended if you fancy some well prepared MEAT in an old fashioned ambience. Staff excellent at handling slightly drunk men of a certain age, I suspect they have a lot of practice. A different league from the **** steakhouse I walked out of a couple of weeks ago.

 

Stan I too had an epic lunch at the Guinea Grill with some old colleagues just before lockdown in 2020

Immense lunch, rib of beef, cheeky lamb chop, liver, a couple of bottles of Chateau de Chasselas

A few pints at the hugely crowded bar afterwards and a wobble back to Piccadilly tube station

Looking forward to a rematch soon

 

We wandered around the corner to the Coach and Horses and had several more Guinnesses to wash down the MEAT standing outside as we smoked Romeo y Juilietta No 2s.

 

Very nice mate, good call on the RyJ

As I recall we started earlier at the Punchbowl

I was well oiled later on

 

Finally got round to Ripley on Netflix. Really good, the black and white filming is complemented by style and direction. Andrew Scott is as usual excellent and sinister. Get the sense that this is much more true to the novels than the Matt Damon film (though I enjoyed that too), much slower paced. Two episodes a sitting enough for me.

 

I enjoyed that but the casting of Stings daughter (who’s a plural, apparently) as Freddie, I thought was really poor. Maybe I was comparing to the excellent Phillip Seymour-Hoffman in the film.

 

Without knowing until now who the actor was I thought the casting for that role odd.

 

Went to see Michael Sheen in Nye at the National Theatre last night. It's a life story of Aneurin Bevan, the Labour heath minister who led the founding of the NHS. His story is told in hallucinatory flashbacks as he lays on his hospital bed, close to death and high on morphine. More laughs than expected, but when I wasn't laughing, I was crying. I found it hugely emotional. Sheen is brilliant, as you'd expect, but the play seemed to try to cover too much ground in its two-and-a-half hours, with the creation of the NHS only dealt with in the last half hour. It's transferring to Cardiff soon, but will be shown on TV at some point. Definitely worth watching.

 

When I was young, in my teens, I read Michael Foot’s two volume biography of Bevan and it influenced me greatly, Bevan was a hero until I grew out of that sort of thing. Foot’s books are, of course, a hagiography, but I didn’t realise that at the time.

Sheen is brilliant in these roles as a fictional version of a real person. He is becoming a bit of a professional Welshman and given to OTT performances sometimes when he can’t be arsed, but he also comes across as a good bloke as well. I notice that the role of Clement Attlee is played by women and Winston Churchill by black actors, so blood pressure warning for traditionalists.

My wife went to see The Buddha of Suburbia at the Swan theatre in the RSC last night, on one of those cheap for locals last minute tickets (though the price has doubled to £20 now). I declined the opportunity on the grounds that Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the original book, the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette and other much less successful things, is a writer who I can’t stand. Brief debate on ‘it’s really cheap, what have you got to lose’ v ‘170 minutes of my life’ lines, which ended with me watching lots of Family Guy. Anyway, she really liked it and it’s had loads of 5 star reviews so, amazingly, I might just be wrong on this one, as hard as that is to believe.

 

Two things...firstly, I had to google hagiography, new word for me though I tend to steer clear of biographies. Secondly, watching Family Guy is NEVER a waste of anyones time!

 

Sounds like Strollerporn to me.