We’ve been awaiting this one for a while, after spotting the trailer for it. It also got my attention when I read about Isla nearly drowning filming her piranha scene. Magic seems to be the in thing at the moment, in the way subjects often go through phases in Hollywood. This one seemed like the perfect weekend watch.

The Valley of the Rocks is in North Devon, accessible from the nearby village of Lynton. It’s steeped in history, all sorts of Ice Age glacier references and rocky bits and pieces. The Wikipedia entry has what is now my new favourite word – fossiliferous – included in the description. Apparently parts of the book Lorna Doone were set there, although I can’t really picture that in my head, despite having read it relatively recently.

It’s been nearly two months since I posted one of these, and as you can imagine the trailers have amassed at quite a rate. I’ve a list of about a dozen films we’ve been intrigued by, but I’ll just post two trailers here today. The trailers First up, the obvious. Captain America. We didn’t think all that much of the first one, the second one looks an awful lot better. They’ve learnt heaps from The Avengers, it seems.

The National Trust look after heaps of properties - gardens, coastlines, historic buildings - and it is in their interest to get people up and off the sofa and visiting their patches of land. I do like their initiative for the kids, though, a Life List of sorts, except this one has a time limit. Fifty Things to Do before you are 11 and three quarters. These are things that are all about getting kids outside, having adventures with nature, and learning about the world in which they live. Some examples include:

It’s good and I still like it, but it doesn’t really live up to the memory I had of it. The dogs were just rubbish, and the effects on the Creature were really poor. I still love Milla in it, and it was nice that I couldn’t remember all of it so some was still a surprise. I think it’s a good story, has a few holes, but the narrative stands the test of time, even if the special effects don’t.

TV and film does very well on Twitter. Besides live tweeting essential events and posting instant reviews to films you’ve just seen, there are also the endless accounts packed with quotes (I follow some Friends and some Simpsons ones), and those that go a little beyond that. In the past, I’ve seen a few “recreation lists” whereby someone sets up a few accounts to do the back and forth that a play or some dialogue requires.

I had a few options for the letter U in my alphabet adventure, but I opted for the Uffington White Horse as it was something a little bit different. I’ve done castles, gardens, museums and attractions, but I had not, as yet, done a chalk drawing on the side of a hill. Naturally, October isn’t the ideal time to get out and about in the British Countryside, and it was a breezy morning when I clambered up the hill. Located on some rolling hills in Oxfordshire, the horse is a National Trust destination. There’s a car park across a field from the hill that hosts the horse, and as you head towards the hill you get some brilliant views. Or you would, in slightly better conditions.

I was really fascinated by the opening few chapters of this book - wherein a TT racer has a motorbike accident on the Isle of Man, comes to after blacking out and asks about the welfare of his passenger, only to be told he was riding alone. The ‘doubting your own senses’ thing has intrigued me since watching Flight Plan, and I thought that’s what this would be.

I was in two minds about this one. I was curious at Brad Pitt in the role, as it didn’t really seem like his kind of film. I was intrigued by the trailer, but then slightly put off by some of the mixed reviews it got. I didn’t think we would ever get round to watching it, as it’s not Mr C’s type of film really. But he was feeling brave, so we settled down to find out about a new breed of zombies.

A classic, and one that we watched when we needed something simple and delightful. I’ve seen it before, although I can remember the sequel more than I can the original. What I do know is, and this will not come as a surprise to anyone, that Franck is brilliant!

I was intrigued by the premise of this one, and I must admit a little put off by the casting. A family affair with Will Smith and his wife producing the film, and Smith acting alongside his now teenage son Jaden. It happens, of course, family acting together, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but this has a very nepotistic feel to it. Nevertheless, the dystopian thing always attracts me, so I was keen to find out if it lived up to the premise.

I don’t remember buying this one but I have recently started getting more interested in the spy game, after reading some Ken Follett wartime adventures. There’s also the whole James Bond romanticism which paints spies in a fantastic, suave and ultimately successful light. This book attempts to tell a more realistic story - the real MI5 and how it came into being, at the hands of one William Melville.

I was intrigued by this book - a peek behind the closed nation of North Korea, by those who lived there and decided to leave. The disclaimer at the beginning naturally says that it’s hard to verify everything, given how little access to North Korea there is, but even if only half of it is true, it’s still an incredible eye-opener.

I was surprised by this film for two reasons - one, that it was brilliant and two, that it had escaped my notice up until this point. A time travel style action adventure with Tony Scott at the helm and Denzel Washington on form. It was a bit slow to get started, but once it was rolling, it was so good.

Thankfully, it was good. Funnier than I had thought it would be, and a bit shocking in places I really wasn’t expecting. I’m glad it was short because I don’t think they could have sustained it for much longer than the ninety minutes but having said that, there was a lot in there that I can see has been referenced in other things. So in that sense, it was packed! I do think Otto should have had his own spin-off show though.

It’s just not as good, really. As a film in its own right, it doesn’t stand up at all, and as the second half of the two-part story, it’s not that great either. There are some more great bits of action, but mostly there isn’t much story. When Neo took the ship and ran off with Trinity, we spent a lot of time focusing on the war in the city. I found myself wishing we could catch up with Neo but then, when we did revisit The One, I kinda wished we hadn’t.

Having really enjoyed the book behind the film Limitless, I was interested in what else Alan Glynn had written. This one takes the form of a sort of action/thriller, a crime novel that doesn’t really focus on investigating the crime itself, but unravelling an entire conspiracy surrounding a new building complex, politics, and all that jazz.

Last year, the iTunes Festival was the awesome tail-end of what had been a fantastic year of sport and general greatness. Mr C watched every single available minute of it, and found a whole host of new acts to like. I even liked some of it, and wrote about my findings. This year, we were excited for the month of September music, although a little disappointed in the line-up when it was announced. Free music, available to stream online, for thirty days, though. Nothing to complain about.

It took me a long time to get into this. For the first half of the book, I think the only thing that was keeping me reading was that I wanted to see how the Prologue fitted in to the story. The character of Freida was interesting, refreshingly different, but also very cold and hard to relate to. There weren’t really any characters that grabbed at me, except for Josef - the Ukrainian handy man that falls through the floor.

The third and final book in a collection of three Ken Follett war time spy thrillers focused on another allied country - this time, Denmark. With Germans occupying the Danish territory, a fledgling resistance network takes shape, and this story follows the boy who tries to save the day, and the policeman trying to stop him.

I think it’s a generally established fact that the first Matrix film is one of the best things ever, whilst the second two are not so much. However, I know that everyone around me hated them a lot more than me, and I remember having arguments with people about them at the time. Unfortunately, since then, I’ve realised there are only two scenes from the second two films that I can remember, which doesn’t help me at all. So, we needed to work our way through the entire trilogy so the arguments could recommence!

The previous Ken Follett wartime thriller I read was all about Brits trying to catch a German spy in their midst, across the English country and up in to Scotland. This time, it was about plucky Brits infiltrating German-occupied France, which almost makes us the bad guys considering the setting of the book.

I’m a fan of Ken Follett’s work and jumped at the chance to buy a collection of three of his early thrillers for the Kindle. This was the first and introduced me to the adventures of World War Two spying and those trying to catch them. The novel spends half the time in the company of a German spy trying to get some important photographs out of the country. The rest is with those who are half a step behind, and have to stop him to save the war.

Not great, really. It didn’t make an awful lot of sense as it was progressing, they stole their ending from Jonathan Creek, and then it turns out the Denzel detective guy wasn’t even that likeable a fellow in the first place. And I really didn’t understand what Jodie Foster was there for, or why she was allowed in the bank.

Don’t be put off by the overly long title, this is a fun read. It took me a while to get in the right zone for it, but once I was there it was great. The style is something unusual - at first I thought it was a translation thing, before realising it was a deliberate style choice. It’s sort of impersonal, with thoughts and dialogue often written in prose rather than speech, and there are lots of nicknames with continued use - the young man with blond hair and a leather jacket, for example.

When the last series of the Great British Bake Off aired, I was inspired to start baking. I’ve made the occasional cake here and there, but I wouldn’t have called myself an enthusiast beforehand. However, with each episode of the series, I baked something out of my comfort zone to varying degrees of success. This year, I’m less inclined to get the oven on. Part of that is because I have less time, but a big part of it is just how complex the series has got now.

My travels through some of the more popular works of Charles Dickens have found him to be a bit hit and miss, but this was a definite hit. Although I was less interested in the stories that Pickwick and his friends were gathering, it was a good ruse to get them travelling around and finding themselves in scrapes.

I saw the TV adaptation of this a while ago - long enough that I had forgotten most of the plot, but not so long to stop scenes and images coming back to me as I read through. It’s a good start, with the three separate cases, and you wonder how they will be investigated and how they can possibly be connected.

Thankfully, I still love it on rewatching. It’s fun, it has Dennis Hopper, it’s got some good lines, some amusing moments, some good action. It also has some dodgy effects but nothing too bad. It stood up far better than I thought it was going to.

It took me a little while to get into the storytelling - not because it was backwards, but the delineation between the black and white bits and the colour. It was a really fascinating way to gradually reveal the story, particularly when we started to learn about Sammy Jankis and get more of the backstory on that. I like the twist, but I did think it was a bit of a weird ending, and I was left wondering what he was going to do after the end(/beginning).

Overall, I enjoyed it, and it’s definitely sparked up my obsession with submarines again. I thought it got a bit confusing in places, and I did find it difficult to keep which submarine was which in my mind. I later read that they tried to make the interiors a different colour for each one, particularly in the three-way battle at the end. I didn’t notice that, so that didn’t help me! I thought the accents were weird - I get that they didn’t want to speak Russian the whole time, but then perhaps could have decided if they were going to attempt Russian accents or not?

When I was a kid, I remember being driven across Salisbury Plain, and spotting a pristine but empty looking village tucked away in the fields. My parents told me this was an army village, not for living in, but for exercises and drills. My imagination was absolutely caught by this and whenever I travelled around, across or anywhere near Salisbury Plain, I would always be on the lookout for this exceptional village.

I did write an extended review of this book, but the draft got lost somewhere, which is quite frustrating as I was very conflicted by the story. Clearly written as a means of getting the points about copyright across, I was surprised that it was actually a good story as well - utterly transparent, and erring on the side of adult rather than young, but interesting and kept my attention.

This is an interesting one. David Mitchell has attempted to put a unique spin on the memoir format, by linking the life story together through a walk around London. It’s a good idea and for the most part it works, although in some places it gets a bit contrived. Sometimes the ‘I’m walking by this and it reminds me of…’ works and sometimes it doesn’t. Still, it’s better than just a boring diary-style, and it allows for some rants about the way the world works alongside the story of how he got to where he is today.

It’s such a short film, the ending took me by surprises. Subsequent reading suggested a lot of the action sequences were those cut from the first two films, which makes me think they just ran out of ideas and that’s why it ended after 85 minutes. Still, it was nice to see Dr Grant back, and the return of characters who didn’t appear in the second, even if only for a moment. It was also slightly less predictable than the second, but also slightly less scary.

It’s actually better than I remember, there’s plenty of fun dialogue to be had with Ian Malcolm around. It’s very predictable in places, and it does go a bit odd at the end with the dinosaur rampaging around the city. There’s talk of scenes being cut which explain why everyone on the boat was killed but the dinosaur was still trapped… it would have been good for them to keep some kind of explanation in about that!

As I’m sure you’re aware, I’m always on the lookout for things of a subterranean nature, and Steven very kindly pointed out this Cold War mansion in Las Vegas, as featured on The Verge. 26 feet underneath Las Vegas, a worried individual built a bunker to resist any Cold War activities. What I love about this, and what I haven’t seen in underground dwellings in the past, is the way there’s a fake outdoors. The building has a roof, there are trees, a golf course, all sorts.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I might, particularly after the first couple of chapters. It took a little while to get into it, particularly as the different chapters were told from different points of view, but it soon became easy to read and really interesting.

I really loved this. A sci-fi story set in the future, where humans are colonising planets across the universe and doing battle with alien races. I write that sentence and think this doesn’t usually sound like my kind of book, but it’s so inclusively written, I was with our hero for the entire journey.

The trailers I can’t remember if I knew they were remaking Robocop, or if I’ve just forgotten but the trailer looks really good. I very much enjoyed the original one, except for the rather ridiculous blood-letting at the beginning. Most remakes are a letdown, and this will probably be the same, but it certainly looks okay from the short clips in the trailer.

The lens flare situation was much improved - it only crept in a little obnoxiously at the end. I liked getting suspicious of the characters and following their twists and turns as they proved to be good/bad/otherwise. I saw some complaints about over-use of CGI, which always baffles me when you’re talking about a film like this. However, I realised that I hadn’t noticed the CGI one way or the other which must surely be a good thing. Enjoyed the various dialogue scenes with Spock, and with Scotty, those two really make the films for me.

When I was younger, I moved from one school that hadn’t started teaching languages yet, to another that were already a year into their studies. I was an entire year behind in learning French, and I vividly remember spending a few weeks beforehand driving around with my mother, listening to some French tapes to try and catch up. In the end, I did a couple of years of French, but studied Spanish more intensely and took exams in that language instead. I did reasonably well, but since then almost all the Spanish has dropped out of my head. French, however, I have managed to retain some knowledge.

A marvellous video from the BBC has emerged, showing three trips from London to Brighton via train from three very different time periods. The journey was filmed in 1953, then thirty years on in 1983, and then this year, another thirty years on. The videos have been sped up and put side by side, and it makes for one of those viewings that I find oddly compelling. I thought more would be distinctly different, but aside from the type of train whistling past, it’s only in London that you can see real differences. I suppose that is because trains tend to carve their own way through the countryside, have their own unique view, and it doesn’t really change.

Another month has magically flown by both in reality, and in Ambridge. Rob and Tom had dinner, much to Pat’s disapproval. What would she think if she learned about Helen’s real relationship with Rob? Meanwhile, Tom got all over-eager, based on Rob’s advice and Kirsty’s Twitter campaign – she’s turning into the new Brenda, meals with Tom, marketing ideas, etc. But Bellingham’s don’t want to increase their order, and Tom may have jumped the gun. For a change!

It was so much better than I thought it was going to be! Funny in all the right places and cultural references galore. The music was a bit saccharine in places, but it had some excellent mashups and songs that got us talking. I was surprised that the big Cups song was actually just a tiny scene in the film, but it just made me want to learn how to do it. So, really enjoyed it, very entertaining and likely to stand up to several rewatches as well.

This was another book that I picked up in a bundle, otherwise I’m not sure I would have stumbled across it. A murder mystery with an estate agent as the protagonist, finding herself oddly drawn into a world filled with intrigue - both into the murder, and into the past life of the guy that she finds the body with.

I approached this crime thriller with an awful lot of trepidation, only because of the title and the concept of snakes being involved in the plot. I picked it up in amongst a Story Bundle, so I didn’t know what to expect as I ploughed on through.

This is probably a book for die-hard running fans only. There’s no big coming-of-age story or over-riding point to make, it’s just the journey of one man through an amateur career of marathon running with details of the highlight races. Some are good, some are bad, each are instrumental in the journey from marathon first-timer, to a veteran at the 26 miles.

There was plenty of this movie that I didn’t really get but at the same time, it was fun just to watch the good cinematogrophy, listen to the soundtrack and drift away. It was an interesting storytelling technique, dipping back and forth and crossing dialogue from one scene across another. There wasn’t a huge amount of story to tell, and the end was a bit weird, but I don’t really think it mattered. To get all deep about it, it was the journey. And the Britney.

That last comment above was made in what was, hands down, one of the best moments of cinema for geeks there has ever been! We loved it! Can’t say the same for the rest of the film, it was one of those that was glorious in its rubbishness, over-the-top nonsense. It was like the brilliance of disaster movies packed into the White House. It was filmed in Louisiana so almost all of it was green-screened up and you can tell.