Review: Home entertainment

CD
The Killers: Day and Age
3/5

They bemused a generation of music fans by trading in spangles for Springsteen in the space of one album.

But album three is far more true to the ’80s roots of Las Vegas singalong songbirds The Killers.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not back in the flowery fields of first album Hot Fuss, when we were all welcoming a band of genuine pop class.

But at least it’s not as ego-suffocated and stilted as “working class story� follow-up Sam’s Song.

Inspired by Hunter S Thompson’s rant that America had reared “a generation of dancers�, frontman Brandon Flowers asks the question: “Are we human, or are we dancer?� on single Human.

A bigger question should be whether anyone’s got the guts to take Brandon’s pen off him, before he does lyric sleeve-writers any more serious mental damage.

Awful poetry aside, this is a better effort at doing what The Killers do, which is to slap several layers of Pet Shop Boys and Roxy Music onto catchy stadium choruses.
John Hill

DVD
Mamma Mia (PG)
3/5

Which film outgrossed The Fellowship Of The Ring in British cinemas this year, and kept audience members coming back week after week for even more?

You’re thinking of The Dark Knight right now, aren’t you? Stop that.

In fact, while all agreed as planned that the late Heath Ledger was very good as the Joker, it was Abba adaptation Mamma Mia which ruled the roost, plonking down more than £67million in the UK, compared to FOTR’s £65million and The Dark Knight’s £48million.

So while others were raving about atmospherics and CGI, an unheralded group of film-goers were quietly turning a musical into one of the year’s biggest hits.

For fans of the Swedish band, Mamma Mia is certainly warm and fuzzy stuff, featuring a singing Meryl Streep and a dancing Pierce Brosnan.

Cinemas are loath to take this off the screens even after nearly 20 weeks, and there are several very good, Queen-faced rectangular reasons for that.
John Hill

BOOK
From Left-Wing To D-Wing – The Lenny Glover Story
3/5

As an avid connoisseur of the genre, I find football autobiographies either hit or miss.

For every Tony Cascarino-esque chart-topper, there’s drivel from Ashley Cole.

But Stockwell-bred Lenny Glover, wing wizard for Charlton and Leicester City, is well out of the game and eager to fire abuse. This book charts how Glover, the wheeler-dealer pal of Reggie Kray, fell from footballing glory to being – as Glover adamantly holds – unfairly incarcerated at Welford Road Prison.

For those who don't know, Glover was one of the best English wingers never to play for his country, who after many successful years at his two English clubs eventually competed against the likes of Pele in America.

A book full of insightful anecdotes, it also tells the bizarre story of how Glover’s late miss in a cup game almost cost him his life, before he was saved by a cup of Bovril.
Rob Virtue

GAME
Gears of War 2
5/5

Gears Of War was the first system-selling Xbox 360 shooter, and a visual poster child for the HD gaming generation. Gears 2 arrives with the intention of delivering the rollercoaster ride of your life. It doesn’t disappoint.

Hulking armoured NFL wannabes Delta squad return in Gears 2 to fight an embattled humanity’s last stand against the nightmarish subterranean Locust Horde. Gears 1 was a standard-setting stop-and-pop shooter with an innovative cover system, but the sequel is all of that, tenfold.

It throws hulking monsters and enormous setpieces at you from the get-go, with new weapons, large-scale firefights and seamless co-op gunplay wrapped around a story that’s braindead, but still grittily good fun.

Multiplayer makes this a stellar value package. 5v5 gametypes are joined by Horde, where five players battle increasing waves of Locust. It’s a surprise selling point to a sequel, joined by a campaign with a pace that makes every other 2008 release feel pedestrian by comparison.

Game of the Year? Absolutely.
Mark Scott, GAME