Reviews of Films We Haven't Seen 2.

It's been a while since we haven't been to the cinema to not watch films we don't think we'll like so we thought it was time we got our act together, put some time aside and not watch some movies. Then talk about them.

First up is...dun..dun...duuuuuun...

Charlie St. Cloud (psh).

(Dir. Burr Steers).

There are two very fucking stupid things about this film that are alarmingly clear right off the bat. Firstly, the name; Charlie St. Cloud. That is a fucking dumb name for a person. Do you know any St. Cloud's? No, because anyone with that last name is a prick and you don't associate with pricks. Do you? The 'St. Cloud's', honestly.

Now, we know it's based on a book, but good god how are you supposed to sympathise with a lead character named Charlie St. Cloud? Say it out loud a few times, try it on for size, now imagine what that person looks like. And now you hate them.

The only thing dumber than the name of both the film and lead character, played by the roguishly handsome Efron (look at his fucking arms! Kablamo!), is the name of the director. Burr Steers. That is the name of a coked out porn producer who sometimes likes to neck a bottle of Limonchello and then get all nasty in the action in front of the camera. Probably. At least the other name is made up. This is either a stage name, which means he chose it and that makes him a real jackass, or someone gave him that name, therefore making him the product of cruel and unusual parents. Either way, it's a stupid name. He did however direct Igby goes Down, which was pretty good.

Anyway, by the looks of it the film is about some dead kid stopping his brother getting laid. Then Ray Liotta is all 'get some ass son, you gotta' work that shit on a sailboat'. Then Zac Efron is all 'Yeah, alright. Fuck my dead brother, he's behaving like a real knobber'. Then by the looks of it he gets his nuts in. Real deep (sorry). That's a review.

Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage.

(Dir. Sam Dunn, Scott McFadyen.)

You know how you love Rush? Yeah us neither. Can you name a Rush song? Yeah us neither (the film title maybe?). That being said they are apparently fucking massive, selling ass-tons of records and gleaning hordes of fans, who by the looks of it, are pretty wet for them.

The concept of the film seems to be rich people in gigantic shit bands talk about how much they like Rush while everyone watching talks about how much they don't give a shit. What's the point here? Rush aren't big enough and people need to know about this cult underground sensation that's going to change the face of music forever? No. Rush are underrated and deserve their place in history as a cultural force of music? No, look how many people are at their gig (it's not a gig, it's a merchandise stall with music and fireworks). IMDB gave this nine stars! Nine stars! How good can this be? Rush? Really?

(Please bare in mind we have never heard a Rush song)

Splice.

(Dir. Vincenezo Natali)

Adrian Brody has a gross baby (no surprise there). Adrian Brody is boring (no surprise there). Adrian Brody is charmless (no surprise there) Adrian Brody makes another terrible career move (classic Brody). Then he probably kills the mutant. Or shags it. Or both. KNOB THE CORPSE BRODY, KNOB THE CORPSE THAT IS YOUR CAREER OVER AND OVER AGAIN LIKE YOU SEEM TO do WITH EVERY MOVIE YOU MAKE (Darjeeling Lmt. was alright).

African Cats.

(Dir. Keith Scholey, Alastair Fothergill.)

This film already exists. It's called The Lion King.

Hakuna Matata bitches.

Cauliflower risotto with chilli and anchovy breadcrumbs

We nicked this one off Jamie Oliver from his Jamie's Italy book. Which is very good by the way.


This recipe will put most people off at the get-go. It sounds pretentious and fiddly for a start. Also, not many of us do or ever will like anchovies. Cauliflower rarely gets used in any apart from cauliflower cheese and is therefore forgettable. We'll be honest and say that we've never cooked with either..... until now.

And, by gollyfuck it's good. The florets of cauliflower give off a great taste into the risotto--which apart from the said veg is basically just a risotto bianco (arborio, celery, onion, garlic, white wine and stock with herbs and seasoning). I'm stuck to say anything better than "great taste" for the cauliflower because it doesn't really taste like anything else.

As for the anchovy breadcrumbs (pangratto to those who give a flying feck), they work mainly for texture and appearances' sake than anything else. Of course, you get that saltiness hitting you as you crunch in but as long as you've not salted the rice and your stock's not particularly salty then it shouldn't over power the dish. The chilli gives a small bit of heat but not enough to worry anyone with a weak tongue.

As for cooking it, once you get used to cooking the cauliflower and stock together and using this pan for two purposes then it's a relative doddle if you've got used to making risottos (like we have: see our Jerusalem artichoke and asparagus one).

So, anyway here's the recipe, starting with the basic risotto and then moving on:

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main courses | serves 6

This is a great recipe for making risotto. You want it to be smooth, creamy and oozy, not thick and stodgy.

Ingredients:

• approx• 1.1 litres/2 pints stock (chicken, fish or vegetable as appropriate)
• 1 knob of butter
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• ½ a head of celery, finely chopped
• 400g/14oz risotto rice
• 2 wineglasses of dry white vermouth (dry Martini or Noilly Prat) or dry white wine
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 70g/2½oz butter
• 115g/4oz freshly grated Parmesan cheese

stage 1

Heat the stock. In a separate pan heat the olive oil and butter, add the onions, garlic and celery, and fry very slowly for about 15 minutes without colouring. When the vegetables have softened, add the rice and turn up the heat.

stage 2

The rice will now begin to lightly fry, so keep stirring it. After a minute it will look slightly translucent. Add the vermouth or wine and keep stirring — it will smell fantastic. Any harsh alcohol flavours will evaporate and leave the rice with a tasty essence.

stage 3

Once the vermouth or wine has cooked into the rice, add your first ladle of hot stock and a good pinch of salt. Turn down the heat to a simmer so the rice doesn’t cook too quickly on the outside. Keep adding ladlefuls of stock, stirring and almost massaging the creamy starch out of the rice, allowing each ladleful to be absorbed before adding the next. This will take around 15 minutes. Taste the rice — is it cooked? Carry on adding stock until the rice is soft but with a slight bite. Don’t forget to check the seasoning carefully. If you run out of stock before the rice is cooked, add some boiling water.

stage 4

Remove from the heat and add the butter and Parmesan. Stir well. Place a lid on the pan and allow to sit for 2 minutes. This is the most important part of making the perfect risotto, as this is when it becomes outrageously creamy and oozy like it should be. Eat it as soon as possible, while the risotto retains its beautiful texture.

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Ingredients [for Cauliflower risotto]:

• 2 handfuls of stale bread, torn into pieces
• 1 small tin of anchovies, oil from tin reserved
• 3 small dried red chillies
• extra virgin olive oil
• 1 cauliflower
• 1 x risotto bianco
• a handful of chopped fresh parsley
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Parmesan cheese, for grating

Whiz the bread in a food processor with the anchovies, the oil from the tin and the chillies. Heat a frying pan with a splash of oil and fry the flavoured breadcrumbs, stirring and tossing constantly until golden brown.

Trim the coarse leaves off the cauliflower and cut out the stalk. Chop the nice inner part of the stalk finely. Start making your risotto bianco, adding the chopped cauliflower stalk to the pan with the onion and celery at Stage 1. Add the cauliflower florets to your pan of hot stock.

Continue to follow the basic risotto recipe, adding the stock bit by bit until the rice is half cooked. By now the cauliflower florets should be quite soft, so you can start to add them to the risotto with the stock, crushing them into the rice as you go. Continue until the rice is cooked and all the cauliflower has been added.

At Stage 4, when you add the butter and Parmesan, stir in the parsley, taste and season. Sprinkle with the anchovy pangrattato, grate some more Parmesan over the top and serve.

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The Rowdhouse Playlist

Yep, we're those guys... Yeah, you know... the one's that go to a party and make a really unsubtle move towards the music all the while thinking we're being the smoothest muthafucking attendees in the place when this is, of course, a sad illusion.


So, to cut to the chase. If we do come to your party or your wondering if you want to come to ours*, the playlist we've linked to below is what will be playing. We've done a version on Spotify for now but have plans to get (via the boys at The Dog and Pony Show) a proper mix together that you can download at the click of a button and all that jazz.


So, all you need do is (hopefully--we're not tekkies at all) click on the link below and... BRING ON THE WALL!


The Rowdhouse Playlist


PS- let us know your feedback (BELOW), we'll add the decent suggestions that we've no doubt missed out and release an edited version later on?


* Whether marathon sessions of Harry Hill clips on Youtube count as parties we're not so sure.

Meat is the new Bread.

To quote one Tracy Jordan; "Bread is one of the worst things in the world". He couldn't be more right. Fuck Bread. Bread has for too long now ruled the noble sandwich with an iron fist of yeast based autocracy, with the full backing of "The powerful Bread lobby" (Dr Leo Spacemen). Well no longer Bread, no longer shall you plague our sandwiches, for we have a new leader. A man so powerful, so righteous, so in touch with the zeitgeist of modern life that he has instigated a world-wide rebellion. He goes by many name's; The Original, The Southern Bell, Chicken 'not so little' Sanders, The Mississippi Knight, El Pollo Loco, The Crispy Duke, Ol' Fry Bucket. We however know him simply as; The Colonel.

KFC will, in just a few hours release a sandwich that will change the face of sandwich's forever...The KFC Double-Down Sandwich. Containing no bread what-so-ever, the KFC DDS utilizes 'two thick and juciy boneless white meat chicken filets (Original Recipe or Grilled), two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese and Colonel's Sauce. This product is so meaty, there's no room for a bun!' (KFC Website).

Witness...

Eating this sandwich is apparently the equivalent of eating two English Breakfasts, six plates of Shepherd's Pie, two portions of fish and chips, eight doughnuts, two and a half Mars bars (a shocking 512 calories each), or two Big Mac's. So as you can see The DDS is a clear winner, screaming over the finish line of 'the deliciousness marathon' (not and actual event. Yet.) hours before it's withering, weak willed competitors.

The King is dead. Long live The King.

The Greatest Song Ever Written- Insane Clown Posse.

Insane Clown Posse now only make music in Space, one thousand years in the future atop of inverted, neon pyramids. The song exists beyond our abilities of comprehension and instead moves us into a new state, a state of total and pure being where the body is both obsolete and perfect. This is a utopian hyper-reality where science has been discredited and reduced the whimpering, beaten child that it will surely become. For Insane Clown Posse do not fuck around with science and these arrogant god's of certainty. No, they have discovered the true underlying mechanism that unfolds the modus operandi of this infinite and terrifying universe; Mother-Fucking-Magic (and miracles, don't forget miracles).

In this revelation Insane Clown Posse ask the vital questions we need to know the answers to; like "Fucking magnets how do they work?" Who knows ICP, who knows? They draw our attention to the fact that "Magic is everywhere in this bitch" and that it should not be questioned by contrary scientists who just want to piss us all off. Experience the wonderment, the magnitude, the glorious and eternally burning sun-moon of our collective, harmonious future, where KKK-Clown Wizards concoct beautiful and harrowing experiments with the dark matter of our very souls. Revel in the jubilation of billions, of haunted ghost stars and super-nova spells. Cast your mind into the danger-zone of the blackest of all magic. This is Insane Clown Posse, and your soul belongs to them.

The worst song ever written.

Occasionally a band comes along that changes the face of music forever. A band that blurs genre's in a perfect and heady concoction that leaves you and your friends gasping on your knees like a pack half puking, half crying piss-mutts, begging with your tongues and your bodies for just one more song. Final Placement, a Christian rock group hailing from Midland Texas are not one of those bands. There's nothing particularly offensive about them, they doesn't polarize people, they're not even crassly mediocre. They're just really really shitty.

We (in the Royalist of senses) were in a punk band when we were 15. It was called Cutout and we sucked hard. We did even manage to get on a local compilation with a song called Clowns. The point being, we understand what it's like to be in terrible bands when you're a teenager, some would say it's even a right of passage, so in a strange way we feel for these young chaps. The difference being however, we had the foresight to burn, bury or ingest any evidence of our flirtations with the horror show that was our band. Final Placement put their's on Youtube.

To be fair this might actually be a joke, a satirical jab at people who feel the need to slam bands that no-one has heard of on a blog that no-one has ever read. The problem being, we here at The Mansion have become detached to the point of autism (that line is stolen from somewhere, we can't remember where) so are hanging up the gloves, in the ring of 'trying to understand what the fuck is real and what is fake on the internet' so have decided there's no point anymore. The only thing that suggests to us it might be real is that the band removed the video from youtube after receiving what can only be described as a tidal-wave of degrading abuse from Internet folk, only to put it back up when they realised that it made them look like a bunch of tiny bitches. Our personal favourite is from Tommy Briscoe who quips;

"This is a joke right? A bunch of talentless god botherers, that's all we need!! Why doesn't anyone tell these idiots that rock and roll wasn't meant for them. Now go get me a fire breathing whore!!!"

Oh Tommy, you card.

It might be a joke, it might not be, who cares? Here's Final Placement with their new single Shine. In store's probably never.

This might become a rolling topic. If you know of any bands that are so shocking that they need to be brought to the attention of other Internet people then post them below and we'll showcase the shit out of them.

Clash! Of! The! Titans! in! 3D!

Has anyone gone to a 3D film yet? Well, we did and it's very weird. You get a little packet with a pair of glasses in them and you sit down through the adverts wondering when the 3D will start [it tells you glaringly by the way]. When it does you feel a bit sick, right?

Well, that goes away after a while but basically it's only 3D in close-up and mid-range shots. Which only makes the long distance shots look all the flatter. Also if there is any hint of shakey-cam then the whole thing makes no sense whatsoever. This may be that the 3D was super-imposed later rather than being shot in 3D like say, Avatar, but perhaps we should watch more 3D.

But we digress... You're all dying to know what Clash of the Titans is like right? Of course, who wouldn't? Well, it makes no sense at all. Perseus (Sam Worthington) is a demi-god who, with the help of the other demi-god (played by Gemma Arterton), kind of wage war on the gods that no one likes. Throw in Liam Neeson (Zeus) and Ralph Fiennes (Hades) and you've got a blockbuster!

[As an aside where the fuck is Sam Worthington from? Australia? London? South Africa? San Fran... Oh, he was born in Surrey and schooled in Australia. Well, he sounds fucking weird.]

Now, the film kind of insists that the hero does things "as a man" and that he is NOT a god. But in the end he's all for the gods. If anyone has a idea was happens inbetween then let us know...

BUT... Tiny-fucking-Fey is on Jonathan Ross. Let's go watch!