Category: Culture

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No soul

Beatles fans around the world are having orgasms of delight at the announcement, a couple of days ago, that the SDE version of Rubber Soul is coming later in the year.

SDE is Super Deluxe Edition. We have already had these for Sgt Pepper, Revolver, The Beatles, Abbey Road and Let It Be.

There are lots of videos and postings and goodness knows what with people listing and commenting on the contents. Enough to say there are multiple versions, cd and bluray, vinyl, coloured vinyl, whatever…. Completists will get them all. Did we say Apple was trying to money grab from the fans at multiple hundreds of pounds per version? No, we didn’t.

Rubber Soul is OK. We have written about it before, and it’s not on our list of favourites. The lads were still touring but coming to the end of the Fab Four era and getting into more serious stuff. Rubber Soul marks a boundary. It’s got a more Dylan feel. Most of the songs are fine, but the album as a whole doesn’t amount to much. Nothing really stands out. It’s pleasant but unmemorable. It’s even hard to remember the track titles or order.

Rubber Soul also had an American version with different tracks.

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Toy Story 5

We interrupt our holiday snaps to give a short review of a new film. We rarely do reviews, but felt motivated for once.

Cast your mind back to 1995. The company Pixar had 3D rendering software to sell. John Lasseter had created a number of well-received shorts using the software, including Tin Toy, but they needed a full length film with a complicated story and characters. Thus was Toy Story born.

There was so much right about TS. It appealed to adults and children, it was serious and funny, and it was technologically wonderful.

It also set a predictable pattern for following films: bit of story in the first half then long chase. All the TS films, Up!, the Incredibles films and more do this.

TS was highly praised irrespective of the tech and it made a lot of money. Thus came TS2.

As ever, when you run out of ideas, add new characters to disguise the fact. So we get Jessie and the horse. Many people cite the Jessie song as a highlight.

So, in a money grabbing exercise, TS3 came. If TS2 was worse than the original, then TS3 was even worser. but it made money and brought the franchise to a close. They all lived happily ever after. This was 2010.

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