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The best Queen album since '76, arriving when no one expected them to make a truly valid and worthy pop record anymore, just at the final rush of Mercury, a step away from the end. The title track is beautiful and one of the best songs of their entire career, "Don't Try so Hard" follows closely behind, Mercury is often majestic (maybe helped by studio tricks and post-production, because it seems he was quite in bad shape, but still majestic) and above all his interpretations are, for obvious reasons, more vibrant and heartfelt than ever. Even the less successful and more pandering tracks (this time a minority) closer to the rubbish of the previous decade, never reach those depths, while most of the songs are well-crafted pop, dignified, pleasant, well-made, with some really good pieces. The only clunker is the one with the cat; the guitar purring is fine (after all, Belew let the whole zoo loose with his guitar) but there’s a limit to trash. Of course, here and there, the melancholic specter of Mercury’s end looms; this is the "mature" album by Queen. One of the best Queen albums and also the one with the coolest artwork of all, almost a sublimation of their former nature as flamboyant glam-rock-poppers who never took themselves too seriously.

My favorite from the little queen. Bruno Mars pulls out the most beautiful song of their entire career, "White Queen (As it Began)," with a fabulous interpretation by Federico Mercurio, who in turn composes his trash-pompous masterpiece that is the splendid "The March of the Black Queen." Another great track is "Some Day One Day," sung by Bruno himself and one of their best. Others that drive me crazy are "Fairy Feller's Master Stroke" and "Ogre Battle" (with those super trashy backing vocals, but I've always loved it). In general, the quality remains good; in this sense, I find it their most "compact" album. "White Queen," however, is a masterpiece of a song; how the hell Bruno wrote it, not even he knows.

The last of the best triptych of the little queen, for me this is a great album, an incredibly successful mash-up of genres and styles, a gaudy and excessive spectacle that never gives the impression of taking itself too seriously, on the contrary ("Seaside Rendezvous" or the laziness of a Sunday afternoon or Taylor singing about his car, or even "Good Company") seems like the perfect musical equivalent of a Trash B-Movie that, for some reason, is beautiful and fun. Every now and then the excess becomes detrimental but overall it’s an album that never tires me. I like "39" with May on vocals, and Mercury brings out two of the band's best pieces: besides Bohemian, I'm talking about "Death on Two Legs."

The last truly great album by Queen before "Innuendo," fifteen years later. I've also reassessed this A Day at the Races; it's inferior to the previous three albums, but only just a little. It's a lovely work that wraps up the theme of "maturation" or greater ambition that began splendidly with A Night at the Opera. A quartet of particularly successful songs for me: "Somebody to Love," of course, one of the best in the Mercury repertoire; the other 100% Queen track, "The Millionaire Waltz," which recalls the operetta/suite style of Zeman's Rhapsody with changes in tempo, rhythm, and style, and is almost equally successful, very beautiful; the usual old-fashioned playful track "Good Old-Fashioned (indeed) Lover Boy" and the concluding choral ballad "Teo Torriatte," a cheeky... erm, homage to the band's Japanese fans, featuring a polyglot vocal from Freddie Mercury, a stunning melody but also a "stadium" chorus that the following year will find its ultimate sublimation in the two most annoying songs in all of music history. On the hard rock side, I find "White Man" to be more beautiful than "Tie Your Mother Down" (catchy, nice, but nothing exceptional), and then there are a few small gems scattered among the lesser tracks, which are all quite nice actually; perhaps the most charming among these is Taylor's "Drowse."

Shabby commercial-necrophilic operation. I even gave it away to someone just to get it out of my house, and I collect it under "Never (I don't care)" because these options in de-collection are awesome :D

The beautiful debut of Queen. Kitsch pastiches, hard rock, pop, glam, ballads—a bit of everything—but they were a fun band that knew how to write some great songs, as long as you can digest the mix. And the choirs. Like "Fairy King," how excessively gaudy is "Fairy King" at more than one moment, yet it's beautiful; I like it a lot. That's the way the Queens are—they took from here and there, never truly original but so personal, positively or negatively, you decide, as they are among the most recognizable bands after half a note of any song. Oh, and Mercury's voice, well. I think this album starts with a bang and then drops off over distance, but it’s a solid debut; there are spot-on singles ("Keep Yourself Alive" but they rarely missed with the singles, even in the worst years), tracks that are a bit too cluttered and heavy even for their standards ("Liar"), and one of the absolute coolest songs of the band, "Great King Rat," the standout of this self-titled debut album. But... "Fairy King"... what a marvelous kitsch.

An album that I really like, just slightly below the previous one and absolutely on par with the next. The usual, incredibly entertaining queenly circus at its maximum splendor and inspiration; here more than ever, ideas that would later be presented on "A Night at the Opera" the following year are anticipated. "Sheer Heart Attack" is a lively, varied, colorful, kitsch, glam, pop, hard-rock album, filled with cabaret interludes, over-the-top choruses, stunning melodies, and silly glitz, all recognizable in a quarter note. Another merit, much more evident than in "Queen II" and "Opera," is the compression of the many ideas, from exaggerated kitsch to the sweetest melodies, into very short songs, averaging a couple of minutes, two and a half tops, sometimes even less, like in the delicate minute-long sketch of "Dear Friends." These are shards of songs, fragments of pop-rock-glam pearls ("Killer Queen," "Flick of the Wrist"), delicate ballads ("Lily of the Valley"), lightning-fast rock moments ("Stone Cold Crazy"), and brief flashes of brilliant retro oddity ("Bring Back That Leroy Brown"). Then there's "In the Lap of the Gods," which is both a curse and a delight, the trash and beauty of the Queen, emblematic of their style, and the "Reprised" version, almost the first "rock-arena" song from Mercury. The few longer tracks also work great (especially "Brighton Rock," a showcase for a great May on guitar, and "She Makes Me," also by May).

6.5

"Jazz" has three things: "Don't Stop Me Now" (sticky like honey, damn it, a bomb of a pop song that devastates the charts), "Bicycle Race," and "Fat Bottom Girls." Three perfectly spot-on singles. The rest, forgive me, ranges from horrendous to unbearably boring; I can't listen to this album except for those three. Three perfect singles, but the album itself is rather ugly, the first ugly one by Queen.

The only decent album by Queen in the '80s. Oh my, it's not that I’m particularly fond of this one either, but it's still better than the subsequent quartet of horrors. I might prefer it a little over the previous "Jazz," which, aside from the three successful singles, I find largely unbearable; "The Game" is more cohesive and has a higher average quality, in the sense that it's almost entirely composed of completely innocuous and flat pop-rockers, like a cartoon character squashed by a steamroller, but at least it's not unpleasant to the ears. The best is probably the classic Mayan ballad "Save Me," followed by the '50s-early '60s Mercury revival of "Crazy Little Thing," that song about Pavesini. Then yes, there are another 2-3 nice tracks, roughly. There’s obviously "Anada uan baiz de dazt," well-ranked in the #diteloallozioiside all time, and a few really bad tracks ("Coming Soon," but bad-bad-bad, not just useless-bad). In short, it's a salvageable album with some nice and decent moments, certainly, but nothing beautiful.

Once, I considered it the ultimate trash produced by Queen during their (horrible) '80s, but now I must admit that "The Miracle" has surpassed it. Still, it remains an overall mediocre album with some truly impressive peaks of horridness.

I know I'm being annoying, but today I feel like giving the Queen a hard time. Mediocre album, but in its mediocrity, it’s more pleasant compared to the previous and the following one ("A Kind of Magic"). There are a few decently bearable tracks, but nothing more. Right after "The Game," it’s the most "dignified" of the Queen's 80s albums, but I just can’t give it three balls.

So, just to complete the "magical" quartet of shit-shit-shit albums by Queen from the '80s ("The Game" is half crap but I'll still somewhat save it, more or less). But yeah, in the end, the Queen made "only" four truly terrible albums, but damn, how bad are they. This one is 100% plastic, gaudy, and only partially salvageable for various sentimental reasons.

Since the Quìn are back in fashion in the re-definitions-of-re-works, I’ll dive in too. Horrifying record, the peak of flatness and plasticity logically arrived at the twilight of a decade that had seen this group churn out one piece of trash after another. I save nothing, the deepest abyss before the unexpected and dignified last gasp.

A beautiful pop-rock album deeply hybridized, with the Roman band skillfully maintaining a good balance between genres, inspirations, and the rich arrangements present in the tracks, which clearly go beyond the classic song form while keeping within the duration (all between 3 and 5 minutes). Compositional choices typical of progressive rock, elegant pop made of intertwining and vocal harmonies, a clear inspiration from classical authors, especially baroque style, and electric accelerations, with the inevitable flute (because Ian Anderson must have stopped to sleep in that old inn) played by singer Giorgio Giorgi (...) and the electric violin of Donald Lax (the acoustic violin plays a major role in the more evident classical excursions), instruments that stand alongside Roselli's keyboards, supported by the interventions of electro-acoustic guitars and a nice rhythm section. I find it a very cohesive album; the only weak point is the naivety of the lyrics, which seem to be written with the “big book of dark pessimism for beginners," but the melodies, both in the singing and especially those created by the violin and piano, are truly beautiful, and the more rock and energetic moments are very enjoyable with no poorly executed songs. The cover is a masterpiece, one of the most beautiful I have in my collection.

A cover as beautiful as that of the previous album frames a work even more stunning than the last one. In "Il tempo della gioia," Jethro Tull have now left the old inn, but the Shulman brothers have briefly stopped by (in the title track, the inspirations from GG are evident at a couple of moments; it's a true "gentlegiantata"), and at certain melodies, the ear is drawn to the very early King Crimson; otherwise, in style, the band renounces their rock side (only guitar passages and the rhythm section remind us that we are still close to the "electric rock-pop" territories of the '70s) and the redundant pessimism of the lyrics (which remain a weak point, but are of the kind that—this often happens in prog—can slide away in the face of the central importance of the musical framework). Piano and violin are absolute protagonists; the backbone of the album is much more acoustic and has "classical" tones, the flute serves as a connector or performs in moments of beautiful calm ("E' accaduto una notte"). Basically, one finds oneself in areas of strong classical inspiration (especially "Villa Doria Pamphili" and the splendid "A forma di..." with its constant crescendo of volume and a start that is a whisper) and then it flows into distinct tones of that typical Prog-Jazz-Rock of those years, particularly in the beautiful "Un giorno, un amico" (marred only by those idiotic backing vocals, seriously, guys... Why?).

An exceptional debut work by Tarantino, Pulp at its highest splendor. His best film with Pulp Fiction, featuring a fantastic cast in peak form (devastating Keitel and Madsen, excellent Roth, Penn, and Buscemi, and a great acting performance by Tarantino himself), astonishing direction, brilliant editing, absurd and genius dialogues, and an excellent screenplay. In short, one of the two (and a half counting Una vita al Massimo by T.Scott) great films by Tarantino.

After two great films like "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino's inevitable decline begins. For me, this is consistently between 3 and 4 stars, a film still more than decent with some truly successful scenes, a great Samuel L. Jackson, and a good performance by Robert De Niro (barely decent compared to those from '68-'96, gigantic in comparison to those from '00 onwards). Good film.

Recently rewatched, it annoyed me even more than usual. I consider it immensely overrated. Good job by Thurman, but I just can't stand all those "kung fu" scenes.

I’ve re-evaluated this one a bit; let’s just say it manages to save itself in the nick of time. Nice film, but come on Uma, Bill is charming, why did you have to kill him? The final scene is beautiful (except for the "Ken the Warrior" move).

Alongside The Unforgiven, the only Tarantino film that I truly appreciated. I don't consider Pulp Fiction a masterpiece, but a stroke of genius, yes; a real, big stroke of genius. Fantastic characters, 2 and a half hours that fly by in a breeze, a very funny film, quick, snappy. Splendid, in short.