Suphero madness-Part 2

People are probably fed up with me talking about superheroes but I love them and going by the amount of money the movies are making, so do a lot of people. Firstly I want to talk about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, probably my favorite film out of Marvel's phase 2. As with Thor: The Dark World it improves on the first film by a fair bit and as with all of the Marvel movies (i.e. those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not including X-men and Spider-man) it is action packed and humorous. Don't get me wrong these films are never going to get any serious awards other than for special effects but they are seriously entertaining and seem to appeal to all ages. One of the things I loved the most about it was seeing Cap's super soldier abilities portrayed a lot better than in the first film. The fight choreography in this movie is really well done especially the hand to hand combat. It is more of a small team movie than a solo movie but Scarlett Johansson is great once again as Black Widow and Anthony Mackie plays a great new character who becomes known as the hero Falcon.

Everyone was kung-fu fighting!

I think Marvel deserve credit for taking risks with their movie, apparently they had to take out a very large loan to finance the  Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk movies which started the movie universe, a risk that has certainly paid off. Iron Man was risky prospect as he wasn't exactly a well-known character before and he wasn't even that popular a character in the comics and now he’s probably a lot of people's favourite (though that is probably due to Robert Downey Junior). With all their success Marvel now have the confidence to release a Guardians of the Galaxy movie,  characters who aren't exactly well known even among comics fans and are pretty out there with a talking racoon and a tree dude as well as planning to release an ant man movie which sounds pretty ridiculous. This is in contrast to DC who have only released Batman and Superman movies (not exactly a risk due to the popularity of the characters) as well as the one Green Lantern movie which was a disaster and of course the awful Catwoman movie. The Man of Steel sequel featuring Batman has been pushed back to 2016 so to put things in perspective we are getting a Guardians of the Galaxy movie before a movie featuring both Superman and Batman, before a Wonder Woman movie, before a Flash movie and before a Justice League movie which is pretty crazy. DC/Warner Brothers seem to be trying to add as many heroes as possible to the Batman and Superman movie, as well as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman they've announced that Cyborg or at least Victor Stone before he becomes Cyborg will be in the movie. They've now officially announced that it is called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, making it sound like it is definitely going to be a Justice League prequel/set-up. I hope they know what they are doing.

Ben Affleck does look pretty awesome as Batman, I like the new suit   based on the Dark Knight Returns.

Now those who have read my previous posts will know that I wasn't that fussed on The Amazing Spider-man. Thankfully TASM 2 improves on many of the things that were wrong with the first movie. I liked Andrew Garfield more in this one, he is less annoyingly awkward, and when he is Spidey he is actually funny rather than coming off as a douche as he did in the first film (he also has some funny moments as Peter). He is also much more of a hero in this movie who inspires people rather than a vigilante. The web swinging and acrobatics in this movie are much better as well, they tried to make it too grounded in the first film but I had a big grin on my face during the first scene with him as Spider-man swinging through New York. One of the best things about the movie is the Peter and Gwen relationship due to the great chemistry they have (probably helped by Andrew and Emma dating in real life) and its nice that Gwen isn't just a damsel in distress.  Overall the movie was a bit different than I expected from the trailers and in some parts scenes from the trailers weren't even in the movie which was pretty strange. Whilst it doesn't suffer like spider-man 3 from too many villains it does seem a bit rushed at times and I found the scene changes to be a bit choppy. I think I would actually remove some things from the movie to improve it as well as adding some things that were missing namely Peter's juggling act of being Spider-man with his other responsibilities that was done so well in the original Spider-man trilogy. It does seem to be setting up future movies and in some cases things didn't get as much time as they maybe needed to.  I do still wonder how Marvel would have done Spider-man if they had the rights and it makes me sad that in all likelihood we will never see him interact with Tony Stark or the other Avengers.

Evian have made a pretty cool advert to tie in to the movie, better than the American adverts I've seen which have various X-men advertising fast -food:

Most recently I watched X-men Days of Future Past, the seventh film in the X-men franchise, I’ve seen all of them apart from X-men Origins-Wolverine which is meant to be awful and doesn’t seem to be part of continuity any more.  This movie uses time travel to tie together the First Class prequel with the old X-men trilogy.  It’s pretty cool seeing the old and new cast in the same movie. It’s well-acted, it’s visually stunning, we get to see a wide range of mutant powers in great fight scenes and it manages to fix the mistakes made mainly in X-men 3.  Fox should be praised that they have stuck with the franchise rather than go down the reboot route even if the continuity is a bit unclear now.  They  made the bold choice of including Quicksilver a character who is also going to be appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron , a different version played by a different actor (movie rights belong to both Fox and Marvel since he is both a mutant and a member of the Avengers). Despite his goofy outfit he is one of the highlights of the movie, it’s just a shame he doesn't get more screen time.  Overall it is a great movie despite some small niggles (one character having a new power that is never explained, the fact that another character simply being alive is never explained either and as I have mentioned the sometimes confusing continuity). It is definitely worth checking it out although if you haven’t seen the other films you may be a bit confused.

Apparently showing fictional characters eating food makes it more desirable

Thanks for reading!

Volume control

I have talked in the past about how I've upgraded from an analog to digital hearing aid and the quality definitely is better. I actually wore my analog one for paintball and noticed how different it was right up until the battery died and I had to spend the last two matches unable to hear my teammates telling me where the other team were! As much as the digital is an improvement it is not perfect. One thing I have struggled with is watching TV, obviously the trend with TVs now days is that they are very slim, the problem with this is that it means that their sound quality isn't as good. We ended up buying a surround sound system in the hope that it would be better. The system is great but unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem that many TV shows have which is that the dialogue isn't particularly clear. There was a lot of controversy  recently around the BBC's Jamaica  Inn program with the dialogue being impossible to understand. There is also the problem that many shows have such big difference in volume between dialogue and action. I love game of thrones and the dialogue is one of the main reasons, the problem is you have to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue and then you have to turn it way down whenever it switches to a sword fight or people riding horses etc. I understand that action scenes will be louder than dialogue but there shouldn't be such a big difference. Its fine when everyone is in the room watching it and if its a bit loud its not a problem but when you are trying to watch a program by yourself it can be annoying for other people.

It seems like I've seen quite a lot of movies at the cinema already this year (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dallas Buyers Club and Captain America: The Winter Soldier) without any problems but most recently I went to The Amazing Spider-man 2 and it was LOUD! I don't know if it was because we went to a cinema that I haven't been to in years or if it was just an overly loud movie but I could hear it perfectly with my hearing aid muted. It may have been a one off but the fact is movies do not need to be that loud!

I also mute my hearing aid at concerts and my brother wears ear plugs in order to protect our hearing. I get that live music is meant to be loud but it seems crazy that you have to wear ear plugs or risk tinnitus to see bands/artists live. Obviously at large venues or outdoor concerts it needs to be loud so everyone can hear it properly but I've been to some fairly small venues where I've felt that even with my hearing aid muted that I needed to move back as it was THAT loud. Probably the worst concert experience that I've had sound wise was seeing Modestep support Lostprophets (before everybody knew about their singer being a paedophile). I'm not sure if it was their fault or if the sound guy could have done more but every time the bass note hit it was like being vibrated like a tuning fork. It made for a most unpleasant experience. Live music should be loud but sometimes less is more, I just wonder how many people are going to suffer from hearing problems due to overly loud concerts.

Thanks for reading

Success!

Well I found out that I've been awarded the PhD studentship. I'm very relieved that I got it after the hard work I've put in from getting experience in the labs to preparing for the interview and of course the interview itself which as I've said previously was my first proper interview. It's a weight off my shoulders now that I know what I'll be doing for the next three years. The official start isn't until the beginning of October but due to the fact I'm working on trees I will need to collect samples in the summer before the leaves start turning. It's going to be a lot of hard work but I'm looking forward to the challenge.