Month: May 2025

Review: Blue Rose Code 10 May 2025

~ anfieldgirl ~ Leave a comment

Thornton Hough Village Club and Bar

Sometimes you miss going to a gig because life gets in the way, or you miss the announcement or you have other plans. Then you have to live with the hint of regret when you hear people talking about that gig that you missed. Happily because Neil Johnson seems to have a perfect handle on the kind of music I love and he nudged me in the right direction this week, I had the immense pleasure of being at the Blue Rose Code gig at Thornton Hough Village Club & Bar last night. I feel like it might be one of those gigs I talk about a lot – “….. remember that night…..”.

Normally my reviews are full of details and songs and band members and history. I have none of that for this gig. I went into the gig knowing almost nothing about the band/duo – I knew I’d heard the name but that was as far as it went. I was not prepared (even after a few listens on Spotify) for the sheer beauty and passion in the music. Ross and Ben took the small but perfectly formed audience on such an emotional journey last night. In places I was just mesmerised both by the intensity of feelings and also the amazing guitar skills of both musicians.

I had a chance to chat with Ross in the interval, what a lovely man – so appreciative of the audience (we’re pretty cool at THVC to be fair, we even sing along when we’re asked to 😆) and so approachable.

So now I go out on my Blue Rose Code journey, in an effort to catch up and fill my soul with these beautiful lyrics and glorious songs.

I’m off to find my “murmuration of starlings” ❤️

Review: Thunderbolts* 2 May 2025

~ anfieldgirl ~ Leave a comment

The latest Marvel film landed this week. We’re not Marvel die hards but we do love the films and seeing them in the cinema in the iSense rooms at our local Odeon is the best way to experience them in my opinion.

Thunderbolts* is everything you expect from a Marvel offering – big budget, incredible special effects, a great storyline, good guys, bad guys and lots of puny humans that need saving. It’s a tried and tested formula that never gets old. This time however there is a little twist – our good guys are former bad guys twisted round to the side of good by a diabolical politician. Some of the characters I recognised (Bucky, John Walker), most I didn’t and assume are new to the story. Like I said – I don’t have a great knowledge of Marvel canon I just enjoy the films.

The fight sequences in this film are excellent and the special effects are amazing. I particularly liked the darkness of The Void and how it crept through the city. Obviously it’s a metaphor for evil but as we learn as the film progresses, it is also more subtly a symbol of depression and loneliness and the insidious nature of that condition. Our descent into Bob’s trauma through Yelena is key to the whole film and is very moving.

Our band of intrepid heroes of course save the day and New York is restored (with a lot of cleaning up needed!) and there’s a comeuppance for the dodgy politician (played brilliantly by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) which is surely going to feature in future episodes.

As with all Marvel films I’ve seen, we were rewarded for sitting though the credits with a couple of extra minutes of the story, which I won’t go into but I’m looking forward to the next instalment already. 9/10

Catch Up Reviews – April 2025

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I’m a little behind on my reviews so before I cover the film we saw today, I thought I’d do a little round up of the last two films we saw, in April.

Death Of A Unicorn. What can I say, it was both disturbing and unexpected. The concept of killer unicorns is a new one on me and a far cry from the Build A Bear creation I own (“he’s sooooo fluffy”). But while this film was exponentially darker than I anticipated from the trailer, it was an interesting concept. The greed and hubris of man will ultimately be defeated by the fantastical creatures of our fairy tales, and only the pure of heart will survive. Or it was just a dreadful film with very little plot, very dark (and often not very funny) humour and a cast that really weren’t sure whether the writers/directors were serious when they sent them the script. I’m not entirely sure either. 4/10

The Amateur. This was a mediocre spy thriller affair. Remi Malik as a computer genius turned vigilante was neither believable nor engaging. There was a pretty standard plot (man’s wife is killed, man chases bad guys, man confounds government agency, blah blah blah). There wasn’t anything dreadful about the film, it just wasn’t anything special. 5/10