Liverpool Sound and Vision rating 8.5/10
A sudden musical blast that you were not expecting can be as exciting to rally around as that which you have been eagerly anticipating for a year, like a tornado ripping through your soul, or an avalanche seen from the safety of nearby mountain, you can only take in the majesty of the force of nature as she sweeps all before it, as she lays in wait to catch you unawares and leave you marvellously breathless.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: David Kross, Freya Mavor, John Henshaw, Harry Melling, Michael Socha, Dave Johns, Barbara Young, Chloe Harris, Mikey Collins, Gary Lewis, Dervla Kirwan, Angus Barnett, Butz Ulrich Buse, Julian Sands, Olivia-Rose Minnis.
To capture a life in sport in film is something that cinema normally fails to truly understand, it focuses too readily on the large scale, the sense of the occasion and the thousand flashing lights that go off in the subject’s face when they battle through adversity to claim the prize they have long dreamed of holding aloft. Regardless of whether it is in the realm of fiction, or in the arena of prepared truth, films about sporting heroes always feel as if they have only room for the fantasy, the polished glamour and the underdog suitable ending which arguably would feel more at home between the pages of Roy of the Rovers, Victor or Tiger comic books.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It could be argued that for many of us The Modern Age is not what we thought it was going to be but then with hindsight and given our past, what else could it be but one in which the urge to rebel, to create havoc and roar as if cornered by some disease of will that has seen us sleep-walk into an era that is only a short step away from being a dystopian novel writer’s fantasy creation. It could have all been so different but then would that have brought back from the depths of the never again promise that 90s Brit Pop favourites, Sleeper insisted upon.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Kudzai Sitima, Donna Berlin, Fode Simbo, Seun Shate, Jade Yourell, Emily Burnett, Romayne Andrews.
We either don’t know enough about our own history, or if we do we selectively tune in to the moments which make us feel a false sense of pride, the stirring of the heart as it clings to a despairing sense of nationalism that is both futile and dishonest; we forget the moments that led to change and only the act itself, and never mind the hardship, the disgrace of our words that went before, hiding behind the celebrations of equality gained as if we somehow played a part.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The truth is slowly being erased in the name of progress’ elitist sibling, gentrification, everywhere you look there is the eradication of what makes a city or a town hum with excitement, with the friction of what is real and what sticks out like a sore thumb in the face of modern and the beige. Yet despite the feeling of up to date dogma and glistening glass that shrouds us all into being consumers of the unwanted, there is still the Dogrel of those who refuse banality and same safe thoughts of not standing out, the voice of those who perhaps read Joyce’s Dubliners and revelled in the early punk ethic captured by The Boomtown Rats and who now commit to keeping a certain culture alive and beating hard.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
To those that don’t understand the concept, the words of the free-thinking person are incomprehensible, strange, even bordering on the dangerous and threatening. The strangeness of the words, the very ideas, they act as if they were bonded in treachery, the straight-jacketed observance hearing only betrayal to the hive mind, the mantra that is constant being questioned; it is no wonder artists of all persuasions are adored but also feared, loved for the sweet release they offer for a while, afraid in some quarters because of the questioning hope they insist on releasing is not easy to translate.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Shining a light through a prism and seeing the array of colours may be a dominate reminder of glories past, of the upheld reflection in which certain Progressive moods were initially formed and which have always been at the undercurrent of many a music fans way of thinking; but a prism can allude to more than just Time and light being slowed down and marvelled at, it is the refraction which illuminates in the Now and one that marvels at the luminosity caught, that is meticulous and filled with beauty.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
What does it mean in these days of the divided nation that we can find hopeful common ground, that we might be able to travel across the country and find hope in what the words From Here might mean, a loaded question perhaps but one that is found to be full of conversation, of a meaning that some might understand if they travelled beyond the end of their roads and narrow minded cul-de-sacs.
Liverpool Sound and Vison Rating * * * *
In the cultivated lawns and gardens that surround many a stately home, or even in the hard-earned and worked back yards of many a town’s terraced houses up and down the country, the sight of a well-kept lawn is perhaps a singular pleasure that is hard to replicate, the perfect haphazard inspired rockery, an allotment that produces a household’s requirements rather than giving in to the superficiality of giving in to the large, uncaring supermarkets, all that comes with this air of order is the gratification one receives from seeing The Wildest Rose take root and flower, blossom above all else that may sit and stare at the sun for warmth and growth.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Out of the resignation of accepted and self-registered failure comes strength and virtue, the realisation that fail does not mean crash out of the dreams you hold, but instead is the accepted truth that to fail means, as many a scholar will be told be their academic masters, it is The First Attempt In Learning.