The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

This is not a bad film, but neither is it a good film. Lightweight story, almost Mills and Boon, clunky dialogue at times, and probably one to many cliches and an Indian love interest sub plot that it could do without. However it is pleasant to watch, India comes over quite true to life although missing the smells, and it reminded us very quickly of our holiday there 18 months before. All our luvvies preform well, as you would indeed expect them to, but best performance goes to Penelope Wilton as her fraying marriage finally falls apart.
6.76 / 10

Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah @ Shepherds Bush Empire

A very AC/DC gig that started so well, then a rather bland directionless middle, then ending well. I managed to get a place on the barrier at the front and the first three numbers stormed along. At the end of those three number, the six photographers who were camped out stage side of the barrier, and who blocked our view from time to time, then left. So without anybodu blocking my view it was time to get out my camera. Managed to get off two shots before big bouncer told me it was not allowed. 'Thats a professional camera, its got a detachable lens, you can't use it.' Yes its a DSLR but hardly the quality of the professionals who minutes before were just in front of me. Christ its an Ebay second hand special 6meg Nikon, hardly professional. So I tucked it away, listened for a couple of more numbers, thought they were becoming samely, vocals not well mixed in. Strange group, looked like they had just left their day job, put some jeans on, and got up on stage.
So I left the front to seek out somewhere else, and yet again, pull camera out, one shot, and 'you can't do that here, its a professional camera.' So yet again I put it away, feeling rather pissed off as there in front of me, were the smart phones, held aloft, taking photos and videos. Whats the fucking difference!
The crowd were strange too. not a sell out, but still quite packed, but whilst a lot were enjoying the gig, with yes hands clapping above their heads etc. the end of each number was greeted with just polite applause. Set ends, no more,more, more, and again a ripple of applause. But everybody stayed, and sure enough, CYHASY came back on stage for a further three numbers which was already planned as they were listed on their set list taped to the stage in front of each member. Very strange gig, 5 or 6 very good numbers but the rest was average. Not the group I saw six months earlier at End of the Road Festival.

Chatted with one of the senior bouncers in the foyer afterwards, he knew about cameras and even he thought this ban was a joke and mainly historical. The tip was to get a compact camera, but can I afford an Olympus Pen?

The Iron Lady

Poor film indeed, so poor I fell asleep through the last quarter.
Went under duress, and was not my choice at Clapham's Picturehouse
Meryl Streep deserves an Oscar as does the makeup department.
5 / 10

Great Tracks No6, Sometimes It Comes So Easy by Blackie and the Rodeo Kings

Recorded in 2009, this Canadian alternative country group are virtually unknown in the UK and it is only due to hearing this track played by Bob Harris on his Beeb country show, they would have passed me by.
It starts with a false start, then just gets into a groove, and what a groove it is. Simple repetitious drumming on the snare drum with lead guitar and keyboard fill over the top, it just shows how by keeping it simple the end result is quite something else.
The rest of the album is good too somewhat reminding of one of those bands you come across playing in a bar/pub and armed with a drink in hand you have a bloody good time.

The Descendants

Whilst a decent enough film, this is not an Oscar award winning performance by Clooney, good though it is. Recently Cloony's films have always been watchable, from Syriana to Up in the Air (we can forget the Oceans franchise) and this film follows in that rather rich vein, but lets not get too excited. It's the sort of story the BBC does well at although without the exotic locations.
What did strike me about the film and the book it was based on, is that someone, whether it was the author in the first place, or the director, knew Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi.
She said back in 1970 (before the book author was born)
'I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise'
For that is the back story, the opening shot is of a multi laned highway crammed with cars going through urban sprawl with a hint of the sea beyond, and Cloony's character is having to decide what he is going to do with an unspoilt piece of coastline his family have held in trust with property developers offering vast sums for the rights to redevelop.
Then to compound the link, his wife comatose in a hospital bed looks like Joni Mitchell in the long shots, high pronounced cheekbones and long golden hair.
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel *, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum *
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT * now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

7.9 / 10 

Ani DiFranco @ Union Chapel, Islington

Our first visit to the Union Chapel and what a wonderful venue, but real star was Ani DiFranco. Bought her cd Dilate a couple of years ago but it has received only sporadic playing but a chance to see her and the venue proved irresistible.
Already slightly late we found seats up in the balcony which offered a good view but one more focussed on the pulpit and not the performer. Enjoyed the last couple of numbers by the support act Ruth Theodore especially her guitar playing, but it was when Ani hit those first guitar notes did the hairs on the neck stand up. I went hunting for different location for photographing from and discovered some empty pews to stage right and spent the majority of her set from there.
A couple of real highlights for me were the 'unloved happier' discarded track from her latest 'Which Side Are You On?' cd and the very impromptu duet with a member of the audience who joined her on stage and played one of her guitars. It turns out that he is Declan Bennett, an Ani fan, singer songwriter back over from New York. A magic moment indeed.
A great 90minute solo performance receiving a well deserved standing ovation, and a great gig.

Set list:
Little Plastic Castle
Dilate
As Is
Unworry
Lifeboat
Swan Dive
Rain Check
J
See See
Unknown Poem
Mariachi
Do Re Mi
Overlap
Albacore
If Yr Not
Which Side Are You On?
Gravel
32 Flavors

The Heart of Robin Hood @ RSC Stratford upon Avon

Panto is always different in the hands of the RSC and this production keeps up their tradition of offering us something different, last years Matilda now a hit in the West End, and the equally stunning Beauty and the Beast a few years back bear testimony to the fact. We bought some restricted view tickets late and whilst I had a narrow metal cruciform post in front of me it only detracted a fraction from the stage only a few metres away.
9 / 10

Below is Paul Taylor's review from the Independent who gave it 4/5 and I won't argue with that.

The greensward is a massive 40-foot high slope in The Heart of Robin Hood, the RSC's captivating new Christmas show.

The characters enter by sliding down the near-vertical back wall of Borkur Jonsson's set with an elating whoosh. Their other main route into the proceedings is by insertion upside down on ropes lowered from a lofty canopy of oak branches. Since the Company started performing on high-altitude thrust-stages, niftiness at dangling in a harness must have become virtually an audition requirement for actors at the RSC. And there's no one better at choreographing this form of suspense than Gisli Orn Gardarrson of Iceland's celebrated Vesturport outfit. Ending with a lyrical aerial twirl by the now-entwined hero and heroine, his is a Christmas production that, in the best possible sense, keeps things above the heads of young and old alike.

If the dominating slope approaches a 1:1 gradient, Robin Hood is on an equivalently stiff learning curve in David Farr's wittily revisionist new version. Looking a bit like a Joe Orton fantasy with his bare chest and laced-up leather trousers, James McArdle's blunt, Yorkshire Robin starts off as an emotionally arrested boy who heads a gang of ullulating thugs dedicated to self-interest. Then along comes Iris Roberts's winningly spirited, blonde-bobbed Marion who (shades of Rosalind in As You Like It) is forced to lead a double life. In the castle, she feigns betrothal to Martin Hutson's pervily psychotic Prince John. In the forest, she masquerades as Martin of Sherwood, spearhead of a rival, more caring-and-sharing bunch of thieves.
 
A bit too politically correct? Actually no, because there's lashings of irreverence (Little John is played a drily philosophical dwarf); some good gruesome gags (such as playing for time by playing puppets with the corpse of Guy of Gisborne) and a lovely fool in the burly shape of Olafur Darri Olafson's Pierre, a self-involved French fop (“”Green is not my colour”) who later quite gets off on faking “butch”. And there's a frizzy-haired dog who parps on a clarinet and wild boar who saws on a cello before it is removed as his innards during a ritual disembowelling.
 
There are also disturbing elements in the central story of the traumatising dangers facing the two children of a man who was hanged as a subversive for refusing to pay Prince John's fraudulent Holy Contribution Tax. For this reason, I think it would be safer to take children a little older than the 7 upwards suggested by the RSC. Otherwise, warmly recommended.