Pirates of the Caribbean 5 coming, whether you want it or not

Disney has confirmed that Pirates of Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales will be released on July 7, 2017 – a six-year gap between franchise entries. The tentpole, which stars Johnny Depp in the now-iconic lead role of Captain Jack Sparrow, was supposed to hit cinemas in the summer of 2015, but scripting issues have lead to major delays.

Jack Sparrow

Disney will be looking forward to getting Dead Men off the ground; the last Pirates movie - On Stranger Tides - grossed $1.04 billion in 2011. So far, the franchise as a whole has accumulated something like  $3.7 billion in ticket sales alone, and merchandise for the movies sells well, too. 

What’s more, the company are on a roll: Frozen proved to be a hugely successful gamble, and with Star Wars Episode VII steadily leaking drips of information, 2016/2017 will, ostensibly, be a huge year. The weekend of July 7 hasn’t got any other releases scheduled, and it’s unlikely any major studios would want to go up against the powerhouse franchise, despite Depp’s recent slow form with both the critics and the box. 

Disney production president Sean Bailey explained last autumn: "Like audiences around the globe, we have high expectations for Jack Sparrow's next adventure and we want to have all the right elements in place. We're not there yet and we want to make sure this project is everything these wonderful characters and of course the fans deserve."

Fargo Second Series Details Emerge

With most loose ends tied up in the present, the show is diving into the past for new material and a second series.

After Fargo’s very definitive season finale (don’t worry, this article contains absolutely zero spoilers), the question of the day was how would showrunner Noah Hawley and the writing team move the story forward to Season 2?  Well, they’re not. They’re moving it back instead.

Allison Tolman will not be playing Molly's mom, Hawley assured us.

During an online chat at the TCA Summer Press Tour, Hawley offered some major details of the plot for Season 2.

There is a lot of continuity (or would that be reverse continuity) from Season 1 to ease fans into the new story. According to Hawley the new season will focus on Keith Carradine's character Lou Solverson in 1979 and the often-referenced case he worked on in Sioux Falls.

Suffering from PTSD, Solverson is just looking for some peace and quiet, but he won’t be able to catch a break. In another effort to tie the seasons together the show is introducing Molly’s mother as a full-fledged character. In the first season, we were treated to small hints about the character, but this time around, she will have a full storyline. And no, she won’t be played by Alison Tollman, who portrayed Molly this year.

Unfortunately, Billy Bob Thornton won't be reprising his role as Malvo in the upcoming season. Hawley explained: “I haven't considered it. It seems a little gimmicky to me and like cheating.”

The second season of Fargo is expected to premiere in the US in Autumn 2015 with no UK date or channel yet scheduled. Let the plot speculation commence!

Foodies Festival Tatton Park Review: Blatant profiteering.

Imagine a food festival, one you would really enjoy. One where a huge range of new and unusual foods are available to buy, where innovative stands embrace the growing culture of street food by bringing the best of world flavours. One where you could treat yourself to a VIP upgrade knowing it opened a few doors and gave you one or two priorities here and there.

Well if you find one please let us know because Foodies Festival at Tatton Park was a shambles, a waste of cash and if I were one of the many people I spoke to I would be writing to get my money back.

OK it was chucking it down with rain, never going to endear you to an outdoor event, obviously it put off a number of traders too with empty stalls a plenty. Those that were there, well a good 90% were the seen them a million times before type. How many stalls selling cheese with chilli in do you really need? Of course the usual adopt a cat / dog stalls were there, never saw the link before, although did eat dog in Vietnam once so...

Of course being at a food festival you really want your tastebuds titilated at lunchtime...there was a quite impressive deli in the middle of the field that from a distance promised much.  On closer inspection it was, in fact a walkers crisps stand giving away packets of new flavours that we understand bombed when trialed in the South West earlier this year. Elsewhere there were burger stalls, ok the quality of the meat was allegedly much better but it was presented no better than any burger stall outside your average football ground. Anyone familiar with the street food culture around London Kings cross and indeed in Leeds at the Trinity Kitchen will know what a hugely impressive movement is sweeping the nation, creative individuals adapting every cultures food to new and exciting, cook and eat quick levels. A food festival would be right on top of that you would have thought,...you would have thought wouldn't you...

We opted to head back to the car and seek out a nearby gastropub, if we cant have invention then at least we will have it in the dry, and a seat.

All in all there are more stalls at the Leeds Loves Food festival each year and thats free, admittedly no VIP and no priority entry to the various theatres, but then again, though promised, it wasn't delivered.

One key difference with Leeds Loves Food and several others up and down the country (all free) is that they are held in city centres, places easy to get to by public transport. Thats how we travel to them, knowing we can safely enjoy a drink or two. With Tatton Park, more specifically the foodies site was only reached by the most convoluted of routes in car....so of course I very very carefully watched my alcohol intake. Given almost everyone arrived by car there seemed an excess of places to drink, more than to eat I estimate, as well as several places offering samples all day, it doesnt seem a safe thing to do. It is a foodies and not a drinkies festival after all.

Now standard pricing was £12, oh and £5 parking that they neglected to mention, but for £38 you too could be a VIP...here's what the extra £26 gets you...

Vip ticket includes - free glass of bubbly, free showguide, goody bag, use of VIP area 

with views of entertainment stage, private bar and refreshments/tea/coffee/biscuits 

all day, priority entry to 1 Chefs Theatre/1 Drinks theatre/1 Cake& Bake Theatre

( tickets released on the day and subject to availability) 

Now first impressions...is that value?
Lets look closer... that free glass of bubbly that everyone seemed to like calling champagne was actually an english sparking wine, not bad in truth but been nowhere near France ever. A show guide... A black and white booklet of exhibitors, those "top chefs" and where / when they are performing, and a crude map that didn't even pinpoint where any exhibitor was. A goody bag... well this aint the Oscars we know that but this crude paper bag of dubious samples and leaflets does not constitute a goody bag in any english speaking part of the world. Use of VIP Area with view of the entertainment stage, well yes if you went out in the rain and asked everyone to move out of the way you probably could see the stage. There was indeed a private bar and free tea and coffee (make it yourself in polystyrene cups - feeling especially VIP yet?) Those tempting biscuits were gone by 1pm and never reappeared.

Now priority entrance to the theatres could be really useful, you know how full these can get, even in this case when its someone you have never heard of.. Now the english dictionary defines priority as:
1. Precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency.
2.a. An established right to precedence.   b. An authoritative rating that establishes such precedence.
3. A preceding or coming earlier in time.
So its fair to assume that if I have a priority ticket that I can get in before anyone else without such a ticket, therefore I will get a seat.
No, priority at Foodies mean you have a priority ticket but you might as well wipe your nose with it for all its worth. There is zero control over who goes in and when, as its raining people sit in there anyway. I spoke to several people who were outraged that they couldnt attend any of the events they had priority tickets for. This really was appalling lack of arrangement and consideration for people who had paid an outrageous amount of money.

In the interests of openness we attended as press guest so paid nothing, though I do begrudge the fiver parking. We did also receive vip tickets through a competition win that were donated to us.

I do feel sorry for those poor souls who unwittingly took up the 2for1 offer I helped promote. Even at £19 each the VIP was very poor value.

I have advised Foodies of this blog article and will honestly and openly print any response I get, but were you there, what did you think. I spoke to around 20 people in the "VIP" tent and not one was happy, they were sitting there most of the afternoon, dry and with free coffee.

The Drums, still our best friends...

The Drums marked the release of their forthcoming album Encyclopedia with packed out roof top show in NYC this week.  
Their third studio album Encyclopedia is released here on September 22nd.

Earlier this week the band unveiled the lead single, "Magic Mountain." It's the first song The Drums have released in nearly 3 years and marks a new chapter for the band, now comprising of the two founder members Jonny Pierce and Jacob Graham. Listen to the track below..

"Encyclopedia is full of magic and surprise while maintaining a serious, more weighty tone throughout," says Jonny. "We were feeling very angry, confused, and alone when we made this album; and we wanted to be very honest this time around, even if being honest meant making some people uncomfortable. We've left the beach for higher ground, always searching for hope."

Emerging from Brooklyn in 2009, The Drums smashed on to the scene with their Summertime! EP that led to a spot on the BBC Sound of 2010 shortlist, The ShockWaves NME Tour, and NME's Phillip Hall Radar Award. The Drums were also voted "Best Hope for 2010" in Pitchfork Media's 2009 Readers' Poll.

The Drums' music explores the themes of loss, nostalgia, redemption, vulnerability, and love - with critics embracing both the lyrics and their sonic signature. This time around, they've embraced a darker sound while making it as grand and majestic as they please.

The upcoming LP marks the first time since the Summertime! EP that Jacob and Jonny have been left to their own devices, with no need to seek approvals. The result is an exciting display of personal emotion and an unashamed songwriting style. UK dates are currently being lined and will be announced shortly. 

'Encyclopedia' Tracklist:
"Magic Mountain"
"I Can't Pretend"
"I Hope Times Doesn't Change Him"
"Kiss Me Again"
"Let Me"
"Break My Heart"
"Face Of God"
"U.S. National Park"
"Deep In My Heart"
"Bell Laboratories"
"There Is Nothing Left"
"Wild Geese"

Movie Review: Dawn of The Planet Of The Apes @ Everyman Leeds

We made our first trip (yes shame on us) to Everyman Cinema Leeds for this, a rare night off from baby Joe duties for both Mrs JM and myself. Comfy sofas, Brooklyn Brewery beer and pizza delivered to your seat is how twenty first cinema should be. True its not Orange Wednesday prices, so it may be a rare treat for us tight northern types, but an absolute pleasure it was...and so the apes...



Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) ramps up this reboot franchise with a strikingly well-written action-drama, which takes an unusually complex route through the story. By refusing to have any simplistic villains, the film encourages viewers to see all sides of the conflict, which draws out vivid emotions and some unusually relevant political themes. It's also a technical triumph, obliterating the line between animation and actors.

It's been 10 years since the events of 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Caesar (Andy Serkis) has built a thriving ape community in the woods north of San Francisco. They haven't seen any humans in years, since the simian flu has killed all but one in every 500 people. But there's a tenacious group of human survivors in the city, and when Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and his team venture out to search for a source of hydroelectric power, they run into the ape community. Both Caesar and Malcolm are willing to talk about cooperating, but Caesar's second in command Koba (Toby Kebbell) finds it impossible to trust men after they so viciously tortured him as a young chimp. And Malcolm's sidekick Carver (Acevedo) is more than a little trigger happy, aas is the community's leader Dreyfus (Oldman) back in the city.

Instead of concentrating on the conflict between apes and men, the film's perspective is through their family units. Caesar's mate Cornelia (Judy Greer) has just given birth to a son, while their older son Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston) struggles to make sense of the clash between humans and apes. Meanwhile, Malcolm's scientist partner Ellie (Keri Russell) and his observant teen son Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee) offer similar emotions from the human side. The script's clear suggestion is that the next generation may offer more hope for understanding, which makes the stakes startlingly high as violence threatens to break out. Indeed, the film is a bracing exploration of how our decisions today will affect our future.

And when the fighting does start, Reeves still keeps the film grounded, with coherent sequences that actually let the audience feel each death. There's a bit of muddiness in the thought that some apes are more human than ape, and vice versa, which feels irrelevant because all of the characters are vivid and engaging. This is because the performance-capture technology is even more impressive now than it was three years ago. Serkis and Kebbell give thunderous performances that are packed with tiny details that add to the film's thoughtful approach. So yes, this is an effects-based blockbuster, but it's a lot more than that.

Review: Monty Python Live (Mostly) - O2 Arena London

Tina Turner has better legs, and Mick Jagger’s got more experience electrifying the crowds. Still, when it comes to singing septuagenarians, it’s hard to top (what remains of) Monty Python as the Brit comedy troupe’s surviving members reunite for a blissfully profane mix of their most popular songs and sketches. Doubling the 8,000-seat capacity of their 1982 Hollywood Bowl concert, the O2-set mega-show demonstrates the group’s massive popular impact as fans who’ve memorized every word enthusiastically sing along, roaring with approval the instant they recognize each classic bit. Clearly, they’re cult figures no more — and everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Dedicated to the late Graham Chapman, the evening opens with a newly animated segment in which the one-time King Arthur’s head is punted off into the cosmos — a deliciously irreverent touch, and yet a missed opportunity all the same. In theory, they could have rewritten the Marilyn Monroe sketch featured on the “Holy Grail” soundtrack, in which the dead actress’ corpse is exhumed to appear in one last film. “But surely Miss Monroe was cremated?” asks an incredulous interviewer. Yes, agrees the director, but her cremated remains are always onscreen: in the ashtray, in the fire grate, in the vacuum cleaner.

“Monty Python Live (Mostly)” is more respectful than that — but only just barely, as the “One Down, Five to Go” subtitle suggests. Though the show tries to forge on without Chapman, the sixth Python is sorely missed. Still, since they can’t very well write his characters out of key sketches, that logistical challenge provides a rare opportunity for the ensemble’s offscreen expat, Terry Gilliam, and its resident bombshell, Carol Cleveland, to expand their involvement with the group. Gilliam takes over Gumby flower-arranging duties, for example, while Cleveland has the honor of playing Chapman’s stand-in during the “Spam” song.


It’s remarkable how easily the rest of the gang manages to reprise their old roles, especially considering the vastly different paths each has taken in the 30-odd years since they last toured. These days, they don’t need makeup to play the four old Yorkshiremen one-upping each other about the hardship of their respective youths, while the addition of facial hair makes their cross-dressing characters that much funnier.


With Python, the fourth wall has always been a porous barrier at best, and this show proves as self-aware as anything they’ve done. The instant the six cast members appear on stage, they soak up the arena’s love, posing as the words “Photo Opportunity” flash on the screen behind them (not that the cameraphones ever go away). No subject is too sacred for satire, least of all their own egos. In the exploding penguin sketch, two mustachioed pepperpots tease poor Michael Palin for the travel docs that have kept him busy for the past quarter century.

Scaling the production to suit the enormous venue, director Eric Idle (the musical one) has expanded various songs to accommodate a company of 20 or so backup dancers, including a club-ready remix of “Nudge Nudge Wink Wink” that takes the routine to pervy new heights. At times, Terry Jones is clearly reading his lines (which many in the audience know by heart), and John Cleese — who can scarcely keep a straight face at times — clearly isn’t as spry as he once was. In Cleese’s case, rather than do without his “Ministry of Silly Walks,” the show delegates it to the dancers, who deliver an imaginatively choreographed version of this most slapstick of Python pantomimes.

At their age, the costume changes aren’t quite as brisk, though three jumbo screens keep the audience laughing during the downtime with reruns of Gilliam’s best animations and other vintage sketches — plus a couple new ones. Never once does the evening fall back on the series’ trademark “and now for something completely different” catchphrase (a key precursor to such sketch shows as “Robot Chicken,” which have honed bits to Vine length). Instead, Idle has gone to great lengths to weave a semi-logical flow between seemingly unrelated segments, Frankensteining thematically similar elements together to create the evening’s program.

Just as earlier Python pics allowed them to get away with bits too bawdy for British broadcast standards, the stage format lends itself to some of the group’s bluer material. Here, transgressions begin with the instrumental overture, which has the crowd singing “Sit on My Face” before the curtain comes up, and extend straight through to the tarted-up Busby Berkeley-style finale, “Christmas in Heaven,” wherein the chorus girls’ costumes have been altered to expose their breasts.

“The Penis Song” expands to include bonus vagina and bottom verses, while “Every Sperm Is Sacred” climaxes with two giant phallic cannons shooting bubbles out over the rows closest to the stage. It’s not every day that you see an Oscar nominee passing loud and painful gas, barfing into his hat and sheepishly dumping its contents on his head, the way the good-sported Gilliam does in Chapman’s stead, but that’s the sort of shameless physical comedy Monty Python likes to mix with songs about philosophers and life’s Big Questions.

As sacrilegious and politically incorrect as ever, the show features an elaborate version of “I Like Chinese” that might start a war if it were being sung for the first time and so many assaults on organized religion it’s a wonder lightning doesn’t strike the stage. Shudder to imagine what anyone who doesn’t already know Monty Python’s shtick might make of such a spectacle, which has been blown up to such garishly exaggerated levels that Baz Luhrmann would approve.

Who among these guys would have thought when they were spinning all this silliness 40 years ago that it might scale so well from the small screen to a venue as overwhelming as the O2? And yet, thanks to those giant video monitors and all the Python love under that dome, “The Lumberjack Song” feels as epic as “The Sound of Music,” and that hotly-anticipated Spanish Inquisition sketch could rival the climax of “The Phantom of the Opera.” While it would have been amazing to see more fresh material written for the occasion, this concert is something of a last hurrah for these legends, and in that regard, the only thing the show lacks — apart from Chapman’s ashes hidden in every scene, perhaps — is 16,000 comfy chairs.

Boomtown Rats - Ratlife 2014 Tour

After last year's storming of the Isle of Wight Festival stage an exhilarated Bob Geldof said "It's weird. I'd forgotten how powerful a band The Rats are!"  Others hadn't.  What was only meant to be a brief "re-grouping" turned into a triumphant sell out UK tour, a block-booked 2014 Festival season and now the announcement of 'Ratlife' the second half of The Boomtown Rats' second coming.  Taking in the towns missed out on their first jaunt and returning - literally by public demand - to the country's major cities so thoroughly re-Ratted six months ago.  

Beyond nostalgia both press and audience agreed that those many classic Ratsongs had indeed stood the test of time morphing from the radical, upstart transgressive rage of the mid-70's into tunes for the ages with a tragic contemporary resonance.  The audience, ranging from the Rats' contemporaries to the newer, younger curious crowd wondering what the fuss had been about, immediately recognised the timeless frustrations and rage of the Now embodied in the Rats' tunes and performance.  


Age had indeed not withered them, but made them more potent.  At a time of cookie cutter anodyne musical drivel the visceral Shock of the Old from its original purveyors is one of contemporary music's great treats and revelations. 

Formed in 1975 in Dublin The Boomtown Rats exploded out of Ireland in '76 and their fast, loud, furious music and their fast, loud, furious attitude meant they became part of the burgeoning punk scene. Singer Bob Geldof's defiant motormouth arrogance and flagrant disrespect for authority endeared him and his band to every youth who felt weighed down by the heavy handed blandishments of church and state. In the UK The Boomtown Rats first toured with the Ramones and Talking Heads rocking and mocking the status quo alongside the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam and The Stranglers. They became one of the biggest bands of the late 70s/80s with a string of top ten hits and platinum albums, earning them Brit Awards, Ivor Novellos and Grammy Awards. Making history as the first Irish band to have a UK no 1 hit with 'Rat Trap', they went on to top the charts in 32 Countries with 'I Don't Like Mondays' and racked up six era-defining albums.

Tour dates: 
OCT 
18th - WOLVERHAMPTON, Wulfrun Hall 
19th - NEWCASTLE, O2 Academy 
20th - GLASGOW, O2 ABC 
22nd - SHEFFIELD, O2 Academy 
23rd - LIVERPOOL, O2 Academy 
25th - MANCHESTER, Ritz 
26th - LINCOLN, Engine Shed 
28th - LEAMINGTON, SPA Assembly 
29th - BRISTOL, O2 Academy 
31st - PORTSMOUTH, Pyramids Centre  
NOV 
1st - OXFORD, O2 Academy 
3rd - CAMBRIDGE, The Junction 
4th - LEICESTER, O2 Academy 
6th - BOURNEMOUTH, O2 Academy 
7th - LONDON, The Forum

MORE INFORMATION:

http://www.boomtownrats.co.uk/