Recently I watched (in another back-to-back sit down) the recent series aired on Sky, ‘Ross Kemp In Afghanistan’. I’m a huge fan of the various other programs he has done in his ‘Ross Kemp On Gangs’ series, mainly due to my strange fascination with street gangs and all that. Knowing how great a show that is I decided to check this one out and was not disappointed!
The mini series is all about a British infantry regiment as they prepare, go, and come home from a six month tour in Afghanistan. Ross Kemp tags along during parts of all three of these occasions, interviewing the soldiers, families etc and providing a report on his experiences as he goes.
What is striking and great about this series is Ross’s hands on approach, I have seen it in his Gangs program but this takes it to a new level. He actually goes out on missions with the infantry soldiers as they come under fire on missions and lives in the same conditions they do.
Apart from being a great documentary and a chance to see tanks and guns and explosions for real, it really sheds a light on the whole Afghanistan situation that you don’t get from normal media coverage. You really get an idea of what it is ‘actually’ like over there for a normal solider and how they cope with the day to day strife of modern warfare.
It seems in the normal media that Afghanistan is just a war of finding targets and bombing them to fuck with planes and when a soldier is killed he just gets a mention then onto the weather report. The truth of the situation is that these really are people you could meet down the pub and they’re fighting battles often at close quarters with bayonets fixed!
I think Ross Kemp did an astounding job on this series and its a real eye opener to see a true picture of what it is like over there and I urge everyone to go grab a copy of it.
Links:
DVD
Wiki
So i’v been a bit of a lazy git and spent most of the afternoon watching all of the current Saw films back-to-back. It really does highlight when you do a filmathon like this, how bad some franchisees get as more and more cashing sequels are written.
In Saw’s case the first movie is nothing short of a modern day gory horror classic in my opinion and the second one is ‘ok’. The thing with the original is that it was (or at least seemed to me) fairly original. It mixes violent gory death with clever traps in a knife edge thriller setting, very much the same vibe as The Cube for me. From Saw 3 on in it just gets uninspired and the plot gets so lost and patched and by the end of the (6-8) hour spint I ended up wanting to saw my own fucking leg off.
What is even more odd is that they are making a 5th one! which will be out towards the end of this month (half the reason i watched 1-4, the other half was boredom).
I guess i’ll wait till it comes out on DVD as I cant see my self paying to go to see it at the cinema by which time my saw fest today will be a memory and it’ll make even less sense! ugh.
I just dont get why film makers feel the need to rationalise stuff and explain shit as sequels go on. In the first film you only found out who jigsaw was right at the end (but the hints were there). This added to the film’s thriller aspect and really set the scene. By the later films you find out who he is, ***spoiler*** that he’s not just fucked up because of cancer but that he had a kid that got killed yadda yadda yadda bull shit.
Now I have Starship Troopers 3 on before I goto bed, Now this I know IS going to be shit but shit in a good way with sending you to sleepness added in.
Even if Saw(s) do get a bit wank towards the end, they do carry through plenty of sweet gory painful looking moments that reminded me of the Hostel films in the use of modern special effects to create very realistic scenes that made me pull a ‘ew’ face a few times.
