March Musings

So here we are, the last day of March and with the UK Tax Year End fast approaching (which is always a joy, professionally speaking...), I thought it timely to add an update before life really gets busy.

First up, this month saw me return to Attention Please, a radio show hosted by my friend Eddie Carter on NE1FM. This time, however, was a little different as apart from one song, I chose the whole  two hour playlist. Yep, it was a random collection indeed but I had a great time and it was a laugh. So much so, I will be appearing again (but maybe only picking a single track this time) on Monday April 16th, work depending. There was some good live feedback during the show and Eddie has placed a recording of it on Mixcloud here if you fancy a listen.

I also managed a cinema trip this month, this one to see the new Tomb Raider film. Now games to film adaptations have  a rocky history and this one kind of has the same problem but in reverse to the usual complaint - it's not that it doesn't follow the style of the games, it is that it follows it too closely, more specifically, it follows the story of the 2013 re-boot of the game series, Tomb Raider. Now this may not entirely be a bad thing, that title was a tremendous re-introduction to the character of Lara Croft but as some Youtube channels have pointed out, some scenes from the film are nearly shot to shot identical to the game. The film does have a couple of other problems, namely pacing that is a little too quick but I can see why they have done that and a villain who doesn't really come off as threatening. The acting is decent to good, Alicia Vikander is a suitable Lara and Dominic West is always good value, and the action is...actiony (!) enough. On the whole though, this is a good game to film adaptation and a decent action film in its own right. True, it's not high art, but an enjoyable passing of a couple of hours and I hope it performs well enough for a follow up as there are some decent threads left dangling.

The one piece of saddening news this month was the recent closure of Grainger Games. Not overly well known outside of the north of England, Grainger Games was a 67 store strong chain of video game (and geeky merchandise) shops. Founded in the Newcastle's Grainger Market way back when, it had, until about a year ago, provided a nice alternative to GAME on the UK high street for video games, always being a couple of pounds cheaper on most releases. That, however, stopped when their pricing matched GAME's and they introduced merchandise to the stores (in some instances, nearly half the store was given to non-video game stock). These were the first signs they were not making enough off games alone and as it turned out, a slippery slope to closure. This now means that there is only one large scale high street retailer for video games, in the same way there is only one national high street retailer for books (Waterstones) and one for films and music (HMV). It does make you wonder what specialist stores will be left within a few years...

Anyhoo, I have a meeting of the TWATS to get to and hopefully not make a complete hash of it this time...