Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End

At World's End is to the sequel to the excellent Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and is the third in the series of movies based on a Disney adventure park attraction. With the first two movies being so successful and having thoroughly enjoyed both of them, deciding to go and see this one was a no-brainer…

The East-India Trading Company, under the command of the thoroughly nasty Lord Cutler-Beckett (Tom Hollander), has declared war on the pirates and all who collaborate with them. Having been given the still-beating heart of Davy Jones by Norrington (Jack Davenport), he also commands the services of the Flying Dutchman and its grisly crew and is steadily decimating the pirate community, but to what end? What's he after?

Meanwhile, the song has been sung and the brethren council of the Pirate Lords must be brought together to decide how to answer the threat posed by Cutler-Beckett but that needs all nine of them and Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and the Black Pearl were eaten by the Kraken to settle his debt to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy).


So, the mysterious Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) has brought Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) back from the dead and, along with Elizabeth (Kiera Knightley), Will (Orlando Bloom) and the rest of the crew, they head for Singapore to seek the aid of local pirate lord, Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat) in a quest to rescue Jack and the Pearl from the land of the dead - Davy Jones' Locker!

Another convoluted plot, rife with laughs and we really enjoyed it. This film has had some poor press with some reviewers saying it's over-long, short on action and that the storyline had been done to death but I can't see where they got any of that from. Admittedly, a few scenes could have been shortened but the overall storyline fits in very well with the preceeding two films and the comedy and horror elements are still up there as well. Frankly, if the reviewers lost the plot, then they weren't paying attention.


Johnny Depp is still on top form and is hilarious as Jack while Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley play the straight guys well too, even if they are a little on the bland side. Geoffrey Rush and Bill Nighy are excellent as Barbossa and Jones and you just have to hate Tom Hollander as the nasty Cutler-Beckett. With that and some great support from the likes of Jonathan Pryce, Jack Davenport, Stellan Skarsgård and Chow Yun-Fat, it really couldn't fail. Even the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards get a role as Captain Teague, Jacks' dad, and does a good job of it as well.

With the exception of Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner, everyone of import to the plot is or has been either a pirate or a politician so they're all out to double or even triple-deal everyone else. It does make it all a bit confusing but director Gore Verbinski does a good job of pulling all these threads together and bringing the tale to a satisfactory ending. Both of us enjoyed it and would recommend it. If you seen the first two films, then go and see this one but don't blink or you'll lose track of it.

Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror.
My Rating: 8/10

Praia da Rocha, Portugal

We're not long back from two weeks on Portugal's Algarve and we stayed in Praia da Rocha, which is the main beach suburb of the city of Portimão. Praia da Rocha is probably one of the best known resorts on the Algarve and it certainly has some of the best beaches in the area.

Praia da Rocha Beach

Accommodation

We stayed in the Vila Rosa complex, which seems to be a mix of self-catering and time-share/owned apartments. Actually it looked like a time-share venture gone a bit sour but it hits the mark as a self-catering venue. Our building had a few obvious structural cracks in the walls that might have put off buyers, which is how I'm assuming the tour operators get the use of them for holiday lets now.

The building we stayed in, and the place has several spread over a wide area, had several apartments that looked "lived-in". You know what I mean, they had doormats and you could see a level of decor in some of them that we certainly didn't have. Oh and there was a huge Alsatian staying in the apartment above us, which occasionally vented its lungs out from the balcony at all and sundry and that tended to set off the neighbouring muts, of which there were quite a few. For example, the house opposite our building had a Golden Retriever and three large Alsatians prowling the grounds. We did notice a few complaints about neighbours with noisy dogs on a few review sites before we went but they really weren't that bad and we were never disturbed by it.

We had a one-bedroom suite with a sort of open-plan living room and kitchen as well so there was plenty of room, even if fairly basically furnished. The hot water was a bit of a hassle but once we'd learned to put the boiler on boost about 20 minutes before we wanted a shower, then both of us could get washed without it getting cold. Our little balcony looked out over a row of very expensive looking houses and an awful lot of ongoing building developments, through which we had a very small glimpse of a sea view. I guess being surrounded by tourists and poorish ones at that accounts for all the guard dogs around about.

Praia da Rocha Beach

The Vila Rosa complex had a couple of pools with lots of sun-beds and a bar/restaurant close by. There was also a very good restaurant sort of attached near the bottom of the complex. Reception and bar staff were all friendly and helpful. I quite liked the place!

The Resort

From where we were staying, the resort proper was about a 10-15 minute walk down the hill, across a fly-over and up the hill again. Praia da Rocha consists mainly of a single street of bars, hotels and restaurants, stretching along the cliff top above the beach from the adjoining resort of Praia do Vau to the Portimão marina.

Unfortunately they were in the middle of re-laying the road and pavements along almost the entire length of the main strip, which meant the place was in complete chaos. Some stretches had no pavement at all, which meant walking on the churned up earth, avoiding the JCBs and groups of construction workers during the day and trying not to fall down unmarked holes or walk into all sorts of obstacles in the evening. We were there just at the start of the season so the planner's timing was far from perfect, given that there would soon be a very large number of tourists arriving.

Castle of Sao Joao do Arade

I can't fault the beaches though. They were excellent! There was a wide stretch of sand from the marina to the centre of Praia da Rocha with a line of bar/restaurants built out of what looked like mocked up aeroplane fuselage units. You could then walk through a connecting tunnel in the rock to the west side beach, which stretched all the way along to Praia do Vau and had some of the most amazing sandstone rock and cave formations all along the way and all of this backed by a cliff wall.

Eating Out

Being in self-catering accommodation pretty much meant eating out every night. It was okay for cobbling together breakfast and the odd lunch but it wasn't really equipped for cooking a full meal. Anyway, we were on holiday so the idea of cooking wasn't really high on the agenda.

Praia da Rocha has a lot of eateries to choose from and I think we sampled a good percentage of them. You can choose from mainly a mix Italian, Chinese and Portuguese restaurants and I saw at least one Japanese and an American diner as well. The Hollywood Steak House was quite good if a little pricey. We tried a lot of the Italian restaurants and a few of the Portuguese ones but weren't that impressed by any of them. The signature dish of the area is Piri-Piri Chicken but Jús interpretation of that was serving up a grilled chicken breast and handing you a bottle of chilli oil.

Praia da Rocha from the Lighthouse

The Chinese restaurants were much better and The Dragon had a pretty good buffet. Asia had just opened so was also pretty good since they usually want to impress in the first few months. We also tried the Taj Palace for a curry one night and it was pretty good as well. Best of the lot though, had to go to the Sabor Gaúcho, a Brazilian restaurant attached to the Vila Rosa. It was basically a meat-fest and they offered a buffet with two options - one steak from the grill or a constant stream of grilled and barbecued meats. We opted for the simple buffet, which had loads of dishes plus a really well cooked and tasty sirloin as well but a group of four people tried the full buffet option and we sat, amazed at the array of meats that were brought out at a constant rate. There was one point that I thought one of the girls was going to fall over as they dropped yet another steak on her plate - you could see all of them groaning!

Night Life

I think we must have been a wee bit early in the season as the nightlife was still getting into gear and the bars were still a bit quite as they had to compete for the lower number of holidaymakers at the time.

There were plenty of Irish bars with some pretty good, live Irish music acts and of course the Guinness, which helps everyone get into the spirit of the thing. There were a few other decent, modern sort of bars along the strip where you could listen to some non-Irish music and just chill for a while. Of night-clubs we saw but one, which always looked empty, although it did get busier towards the end of our holiday.

See the rest of the photographs of our trip in my Portugal set.

The Year Of Our War - by Steph Swainston

The Year Of Our War is a tale of fantasy and war in the Fourlands.

The Emperor controls and maintains The Circle, a group of 50 immortals and the best at each skill useful in the war against the insects that have plagued the land for centuries, eating everything and everyone in their path.

All mortals dream of joining the Circle and becoming immortal and that place, once gained, must be defended against all challangers. Jant is the Messenger but he's confident in keeping his place among the immortals as he is the only man alive that can fly. Others are not so lucky and have their own rivalries and squabbles to content with. Meanwhile, the insects just keep coming and coming and no-one knows where from!

The Year Of Our War is Steph Swainston's first novel and, as such, it's a pretty accomplished work. However, there's a lot going on and it may get a little too surreal for some readers. It reminded me of the work of China Miéville and his multi-specied world of Bas-Lag. There are the Plainslanders, who seem human, or at least we get no indication that they are unusual in any way. Then there's the Awians, who appear to be humanoids with wings but they can't fly and lastly the Rhydanne, who seem to be evolved from cats but I'm guessing there.

Character development of the main players like Jant and Lightning is quite good but we don't learn much about the Emperor or how he bestows immortality on his Circle. Jant is the main character of the story but I wouldn't exactly call him a hero. He's half Rhydanne, half Awian and, being so light because of his Rhydanne ancestry, he can actually use his wings to fly. As The Circle's Messenger, his place as an immortal is pretty secure; no-one is going to beat someone that can fly but on the downside, he's drug addict with a pretty shady past.

The book ends with no indication of a sequel to come and no obvious loose ends other than the fact that the war goes on. However, it looks like Swainston has decided to expand it into a series so there's No Present Like Time and Dangerous Offspring to be read next if the reader is sufficiently captivated by the first book. I might give the next one a try myself as The Year Of Our War was an entertaining story.

Genre: Action, Drama, Fantasy, Science-Fiction, War
ISBN: 0-575-07642-9
My Rating: 7/10

Spider-Man 3 - "The battle within"

This third installment in the tale of Marvel superhero Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) brings a couple of new villains and an old one into the storyline. It's quite a complex storyline so here's a brief taster of the plot…

Peter Parker's romance with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) is progressing well and he's planning on asking her to marry him. Also on the up is New York city's romance with Spider-Man. They've finally realised, despite J. Jonah Jameson's constant character blackening efforts, that he is a good guy and a big celebration is being planned in order to present him with the keys to the city. There's even a staff photographer's job going on the Daily Bugle. Everything is looking just rosy!

Into this happy scene comes trouble in the shape of a mysterious black goo from space, Flint Marko (Thomas Hadden Church), Harry Osborn (James Franco) and Eddie Brock (Topher Grace). Marko is an escaped convict that the police suspect of being the real killer of Peter's uncle Ben. Harry Osborn, once Peter's best friend, has taken on the role of his late father as the New Goblin and is seeking vengeance on Peter for his father's death. Eddie Brock is just a photographer but he wants that job at the Daily Bugle and he doesn't mind breaking a few rules to get it.

While the police are chasing down Marko, he blunders into the middle of a nuclear experiment site and is transformed into The Sandman, a being with the ability to transmute his body into any shape and density that sand can take. That black goo is actually an alien symbiote and it latches onto Peter, physically changing his Spider-Man costume and endowing it with special powers. It also bonds with him psychically, feeding off his darker emotions. The symbiote enhances his dark side and when he finds out about the connection between Marko and his uncle Ben, he's incensed and seeks revenge. Eddie Brock? Well, he's just unlucky enough to be caught up in all of the above.

Anyway, you can get the gist from that; there's loads going on in this movie, maybe too much for some. Spider-man has to contend with an alien symbiote, The Sandman, Eddie Brock and The New Goblin as well as try to keep his personal life and romance with MJ on track.


Personally, I really enjoyed it! Director Sam Raimi has done an excellent job of pulling all these threads together and Tobey Maguire is perfect as Peter Parker. Okay so the story isn't exactly true to the comic as Venom and The Sandman are from different tales but they did clash in a later one so it's not too far off the mark. Added to this, there's a good smattering of humour as well; the antics of the dark Peter Parker are so funny and there's still J. Jonah Jameson, who's always good for a laugh.

The special effects are amazing; you can see the difference in quality if you look at the first movie. The fact that the web-slinging Spider-Man is just some CGI is still noticeable but not so much and it's very much improved. Venom is an oily amorphous blob that can take many shapes and The Sandman has a huge repertoire of shapes and sizes to choose from and he can even fly. Then there's Harry Osborn and his arsenal of gadgets and bombs, all of which lead to an awful lot of very realistic looking onscreen collateral damage.

The only downside might be the fact that there is so much dependence on the storyline from the first movie, with only a little from the second one. If you haven't seen Spider-Man, then you might get a bit lost with the flashbacks to the circumstances surrounding Peter's uncle Ben's death. That aside, it still works very well and is a definite must-see for any Spidey fans.

Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama, Science-Fiction, Thriller
My Rating: 8/10

1632 - by Eric Flint

1632 is the first novel in a fantasy series where a six-mile wide chunk of West Virginia, USA is inexplicably transported to Northern Germany during the 17th century and in the middle of the Thirty Years' War.

Northern Germany, 1632, and things weren't going so well for anyone living there. Famine, disease and religious war were the norm and where, if you were a peasant, death was a merciful release. In Grantville, West Virginia in the year 2000, all is peachy and most of the town, including the local branch of the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) are attending a wedding and having a great time. Suddenly, there's a blinding flash and thunder rattles the windows.

When Mike Stearns leads an armed group of the wedding guests out to investgate the source of the flash, they find the road into town cut as with a knife and, on the other side, a scene out of Hell. A man is being nailed to a farmhouse door while his wife and daughter are being attacked by a bunch of men in steel vests. Mike and his boys don't need to think twice and are in no doubt as who needs shooting, bringing good ol' American style justice into the middle of the Thirty Years' War.

Having read the summary while browsing through the books in Forbidden Planet and noticing that it was reduced in price, I thought it might be a light and mildly amusing read. While it certainly isn't that amusing, it is a decent work of pure fantasy and allows us to speculate on an alternate version of reality, a kind of "what-if" the path of history was changed by a visit from aliens with superior technology and completely different moral and cultural values.

I quite enjoyed it and the author has successfully meshed the story in and around a pretty true depiction of the known history of the period. To the eternal shame of Scottish education, I haven't previously encountered anything about the Thirty Years' War or indeed very much about European history of the period during my school years so it was even an educational experience and it made a very entertaining read. It's a pity that there's no sister story about what happened to the chunk of 17th century Germany that Grantville replaced but the prologue does try to explain a little about what happened after Granville vanished.

The idea of dropping a pretty much gun-crazy bunch of Americans into the middle of a historical war-zone is precious stuff and it works very well. I couldn't help wondering if the author had intended any parallels with Afghanistan or Iraq as, while the yanks have superior fire-power, the locals are a force to be reckoned with, regardless of their technological inferiority and they have an almost inexhaustible supply of cannon-fodder on their side.

1632 has spawned an enormous trail of books and spin-offs and a huge fan-base and it can be read or downloaded in various e-book formats for free from the Baen Free Library, where I noticed that they also have the sequel to it available so I might give that a try and save a few quid as well.

Genre: Fantasy, Science-Fiction, Historical Drama.
ISBN: 1-4165-3281-1
My Rating: 6/10

Secrets Of The Witching Hour - The Crimea

We'd just come back from holiday last night and, while I was trawling through my backlog of mail, I noticed a message about Secrets Of The Witching Hour, the second album by The Crimea. What was unusual about it was the fact that the band have released the album for free over the internet. So off I went straight away and downloaded it as I already had their debut album, Tragedy Rocks, which I really liked.

If you want to download Secrets Of The Witching Hour just go to The Crimea official site and follow the obvious links. It's not a huge download, with 11 tracks and lasting just under 37 minutes, it comes in at under 35Mb and it even comes with CD cover artwork. However, if you want the better audio quality offered from a CD version, and of course the option to digitize it to a format other than MP3, it's on sale from the band's official site shop. Here's the track list…

• All Conquering
• The 48A Waiting Steps
• Raining Planets
• Man
• Bombay Sapphire Coma
• Don’t Close Your Eyes On Me
• Loop A Loop
• Light Brigade
• Several Thousand Years Of Talking Nonsense
• Requiem Aeternam
• Weird

The band, who don't currently have a record label, have basically financed the album by themselves and are releasing it for free in a bold move to try and widen their fan base and in so doing increase sales of upcoming concert tickets and merchandise. They're the first reasonably well known band to do this and with the record sales industry facing serious changes, it may be a trend other artists follow if it proves successful.

As for the music, if you liked the excellent Tragedy Rocks, then I don't doubt that you'll like this too. My daughter saw them at T In The Park last year, bought the first album right away and got me hooked as well. I suppose I'd class The Crimea as a pop-rock band and Secrets Of The Witching Hour has a pretty catchy mix of beautifully melodic tunes with great vocals and lyrics. I'm listening to it (again) as I write this and my head's bobbing away.

It's one of those albums that grows on you as you listen to it more and more. Give it a try, it's free!

Culzean Castle & Country Park

Another nice Sunday and off we went down the coast to Culzean Castle and Country Park. It's only about an hour's drive from Glasgow and we usually visit it a few times a year when the weather is nice enough.

The grounds are huge and there are loads of woodland and clifftop walks, a large pond, formal gardens, a walled garden, a deer park and a small beach with loads of rock pools and some interesting caves under the castle as well. There's also a decent sized visitor centre and adventure playground for the kids so it does get pretty busy on days when the weather is nice. If you're feeling fit, you can stroll over to the larger beach at nearby Maidenhead Bay, although that also gets pretty busy if the weather is good. Of course, you can wander round the 18th century castle as well as it's open to the public but we've done it before and the weather was too nice to stay indoors.

Culzean Castle

We usually take a pack lunch/picnic and just lie on the grass by the Swan Pond and watch the bird-life. There are usually swans, ducks and moorhens as well as a motley selection of gulls and terns on the pond and a fair number of wee tits and sparrows all diving around looking for a few crumbs to eat. There are a couple of picnic tables for the more genteel visitor but the grassy area here is usually swarming with people, some even organized enough to bring barbecues. If you don't fancy that, then there is a restaurant and coffee shop, which are always good for tea and a scone later in the afternoon.

The gardens aren't at their best at this time of year but the Daffodils, Tulips, Rhododendrons and Azaleas are blooming well so there was a good splash of colour around. We had lunch by the pond and then had a good walk around the gardens, grounds and cliffs. After that, we headed over to Maidenhead Bay for a laze on the sand as it was quite a nice day.

The Swan Pond, Culzean

We had a few hours lying around on the beach and pockling about in the rocks pools and then it was time to head back to civilization; sigh!

All of my Culzean photographs can be viewed here.