Comedy short film, which I wrote and produced :)
Happy New Year!!!
Friday, 16 December 2011
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
The Voodoo Reviews: Christmas List Recommendations
Click here for a great review of RAYMAN ORIGINS by Dragon Spirit 10.
I watched it played by the expert...
There's some classics on my 'recommended' list as well as new, and not-so-new.
Musical DVDs first. I heartily recommend Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii and Iron Maiden: Flight 666. They never get old, for some reason.
Movies. Obviously, although it makes Christmas a bit like groundhog day for the last eight years, there has to be the last Harry Potter. And of course the Star Wars Blu-Ray collection. It wouldn't be Christmas otherwise.
DVD series box sets include Absolutely Fabulous, the IT Crowd, Comic Strip Presents... (anyone remember those? Who launched Jennifer Saunders, Adrian Edmondson and Keith Allen, among others?)
Other blast-from-the-past box sets you can still get include Black Books, Gimme Gimme Gimme, The Young Ones, Bottom, Filthy Rich & Catflap, Red Dwarf, The New Statesman, Blackadder, and Girls On Top. And if your budget reaches, check out The Golden Girls. Classic Betty White!
If you haven't seen it, definitely get Bridesmaids - it's a hoot!
From the newly-released, there's The Inbetweeners Movie and Horrible Bosses...
And it has to be Super-8. Steven Spielberg back on his best form in this one. Saw it in the cinema, and felt just like being a little kid again, watching ET for the first time :)
If it was out sooner, I'd also add Cowboys & Aliens. Just thinking of Daniel Craig's method of concluding an awkward confrontation with a good... well, it makes me smile :)
Happy holidays all!
L xxxxxxx
Sunday, 11 December 2011
The Voodoo Promo: Two books FREE on Amazon Kindle today!
Death & The City: Book One by Lisa Scullard
Death & The City: Book Two by Lisa Scullard
Both complete books (crime fiction/romance/humour/lit-fic) in the Amazon Kindle store FREE worldwide until midnight tonight 11th Dec PST.
Full details, excerpts and additional free promotion dates for your Christmas and New Year Kindle diary here:
Saturday, 25 June 2011
The Voodoo Review: "PAUL" on DVD
I missed this at the cinema because DS10 was too young to go, so we bought it the week of the DVD release.
I have to admit, I've watched it about five times already! Not only do I love the Pegg/Frost dynamic (Hot Fuzz, Sean Of The Dead), it's revisiting all of my favourite films as a kid. Star Wars, E.T, Explorers, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, The Goonies, The Karate Kid, Aliens - so many classic old lines and images (and so many classic new ones!) crop up in perfect synch with the plot. It's definitely more a film for big kids my age than little kids, with the added kick that it's for grown-ups by the use of colourful and irreverently hilarious language, that kids my age have since learned is part of the real world :)
Also featuring Kristen Wiig (Whip It, Bridesmaids) and Jason Bateman (Hancock, The Switch), the cast is packed out with comedy talent, including the voice of Seth Rogen as Paul, Sigourney Weaver at her boss-like finest since Working Girl, and brilliantly clumsy rookie agents Haggard and O'Reilly, played by Bill Hader and Jo Lo Truglio, both of whom I'd quite happily watch played again in another movie... Bateman in particular seems set to take over the boots of Harrison Ford, having picked up most of his cult lines for the film. Wouldn't mind seeing more of him in action. Er, I mean, action roles.
If, like me, you spent much of your youth in the video store scrutinising sci-fi covers, wondering whether to watch Ice Pirates again or Return Of The Jedi, the film PAUL is the perfect reassurance that you're not alone out there...
L xxxxxxx
Thursday, 16 June 2011
The Voodoo Review: The Great eBook Pricing Debate...
(Image by NASA) eBooks will never be found in future archaeological digs...
When I go into a bookshop, I don't find an enormous range of prices with various authors and publishers telling me their generic sci-fi book is ten times better than the one next to it, so they've slapped a price on it ten times bigger. If you're lucky, paperbacks all come in at around the same price, based on genre and length of book.
I've recently bought a tablet and started reading eBooks, and it's a disposable medium. If something is no good, it can be returned or deleted, similar to a library. If I love something and want to keep it to re-read, I'd buy a paperback copy. Having read one which was a bit of a disappointment not long ago, I was really pleased it was less than a quid's investment. I'd have put it in a second-hand bookshop if it was a real book afterwards, rather than kept or recommended it.
When you look at the top 50 UK Kindle books, most are under £2, some are even free, with only the very high-profile celebrity books sneaking in here and there at £4.99. It's an expensive toy to start with, so of course readers want to save on a few bargains once they've invested.
The charts are telling us what the people who read eBooks WANT to pay for their books, and HAVE paid.
All those books out there priced at £9.99 aren't getting a look in at these top rankings.
So I've put all my prices down to 99c/70p. (Except for my one 3-in-1 Heavy Duty Edition, still available at a whopping £2.12 for 1280 KB). Not because I want to get a top ranking, but because it's what the readers are demonstrating is a reasonable price, and what I've concluded from my own reading is reasonable. It's like a Lotto ticket every time - you may not enjoy the book, or you may love it and want to buy the hard copy. It's a small investment for whatever return you receive in entertainment terms.
(Beaulieu Motor Museum - Bond exhibit) Buy my expensive eBooks so I can get one of these! LOL :)
Eventually eBook pricing will find its own level, but it will be determined by what the readers are actually buying - not by the publishers.
L xxxxxxxxx
The Voodoo Preview: Meet my stuff :)
OOAK projects (in progress - costumes to follow)
Too much time on my hands, obviously :)
L xxxxxxxxxxx
Friday, 20 May 2011
The Voodoo Review: Iron Maiden - Flight 666
"Iron Maiden - Flight 666" DVD on Amazon
I was already having a good day yesterday when this arrived. All my delayed final paperback proofs for Death & The City Books One and Two, Living Hell, AND the hardback copy of Living Hell, had arrived at 7:30 a.m. I'd approved them online and updated the bookshelf page on my website (see new banner at the bottom of this blog) - and at around elevensies time, there was another unexpected thump on the doormat. Along with the usual junk mail offering me car insurance etc, was a packet from Amazon, containing "Iron Maiden - Flight 666: The Movie" which I'd forgotten I ordered a few days earlier, in all the panic over where my books had got to and what ideas Customs officers were getting by reading my questionable fictionalised door supervisor urban myth antics. Which they weren't, obviously *gulp* :)
Awesome! And great timing - as I started the DVD, it reminded me that I first saw it on TV around the end of last year. I'd been so inspired by it that it was actually the impetus for me to go the indie publishing route, instead of waiting for the gatekeepers to green-light me as an author. Seeing Bruce Dickinson pack his band and crew and equipment into a plane and fly the whole kaboodle (himself!) to the gigs they wanted to do gave me such a great feeling of inspiration, that if I hadn't seen the movie on TV first time around - well, I wouldn't be here talking about it, or rattling on about the mail and plastering my book cover images everywhere. So the fact that it arrived on the same day as my remaining books that were pending release, is a big reminder to me why I set out to do this. And what people can achieve if they really put their minds to it.
"The Maiden" have been around since I was in school and beyond, back in the mid 1980's. The back patches that boys in my English Lit class wore on non-uniform school trips. The music. The music that you tried to get the DJ to play at school parties and he said he didn't have, while the many talents of Stock, Aitken & Waterman monopolized the decks. The mullets that boys grew the moment they finished their O-levels and GCSEs. The first tattoos, on those who were brave enough... the Donington regulars...
...The satire:
Bruce Dickinson and Rowan Atkinson team up for Comic Relief
...And Bruce Dickinson is a literary talent in himself - if you haven't read "The Adventures Of Lord Iffy Boatrace" which I bought when it was first released, you've missed out. Holy macaroni, I didn't know it was collectible! I wonder what my mint 1990 copy is worth? I wouldn't sell it to you anyway ;) It's like a rock-and-roll Tom Sharpe (of "Blott On The Landscape" fame). Written in various hotel rooms while on tour, indebted to night desk receptionists who handed over stationery to the crazy wild-eyed half-dressed man who apparently never slept, it's comedy genius. And I love reading about a male member of the English gentry who owns more high heels than I do...
"The Adventures Of Lord Iffy Boatrace" by Bruce Dickinson on Amazon - if you can afford it :)
He has his own band, he writes books, he flies a plane... Well, you would, wouldn't you? Except my Mum would probably steal him...
Back to the movie though. The reception the band get as they make their way around the globe in six weeks is astounding. And the fans know that this tour is for them - in one example, fans travel into Costa Rica from Ecuador and further afield just to see the epoch-making gig that they never believed would come this close to home. As one fan says "I always thought how great it would be to see them live, but then I remember, oh yeah, I live in the ass of the world, it'll never happen... And here they are." And the priest who has something like 187 Iron Maiden tattoos and named his son Stevie Harris, who includes anecdotes from Maiden lyrics in his sermons.
If the power of prayer has any weight to it at all, it certainly answered the prayers of all those fans who got to see their heroes perfom live courtesy of Ed Force One in 2008. Long may it continue.
And thanks for the inspiration ;)
Lxxxxxxx
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