Movies
Black Panther
Another adventure in optimism by me after hearing loads of critical acclaim – I couldn’t get on with Black Panther, either. I think I get the reasons for which this film’s culturally significant, but at the root of it I still just didn’t think it was a very good film. Plus I get the ache…
Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool
Watching on an aircraft seat-back was undoubtably the wrong format for taking in this dramatic romance/biography about a man’s relationship with an American actress throughout their lives. In truth, the main reason I watched this was because I know the film’s producer through our whisky club connections, and I wanted to see what he does…
Justice League
Comic book superhero films generally shit me to tears… but I still feel compelled to try them occasionally to see what the hype’s all about and see if they’ve ever caught up with my expectations of what film should be. This film did not do that. Seeing the formation of a “super team”, akin to…
John Wick: Chapter 2
What’s not to love about the comic-book, choreographed to near balletic perfection violence of John Wick? I don’t think this film sought to raise the stakes from its predecessor: in my mind it was just more of the same, and that’s a simplistic story basis ornamented with scene after scene of punishing video-game-like gunfight scenes….
Death of Stalin
I really, really wanted to like this – Armando Ianucci at the helm, and Steve Buscemi, Michael Palin & other legends in the cast – but I couldn’t get behind the humour, and wasn’t well-heeled enough in the historical context to get it from that side either. Perhaps another case of a poorly chosen film…
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Impressive if only for the ability of the cast (The Rock, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan) to commit to some utterly absurd roles. I definitely enjoyed this much more than the original Jumanji film, and spent a lot of the time distracted & wondering when it became such a milestone film that it demanded…
Game Night
Silly & implausible fun about a couple and their friends who hyper-competitively play board games, and a oneupmanship prank that goes awry turning it into high adventure. Jason Bateman’s everyman is played with an almost Leslie Nielsen degree of straight-down-the-lineness inviting the massive amount of suspension of disbelief that this film needs for the story…
Death Wish
Why’s Bruce Willis doing stuff like this? I guess it pays the bills… I haven’t seen the original Charles Bronson film this is a remake of, but it’s a sort of “one-man-gets-pushed-too-far-and-takes-justice-into-his-own-hands” affair which I suspect has been mined so many times since 1973 that this film loses any sense of relevance it may have…
Pitch Perfect 3
It’s hard to claim that a film like this was ridiculous or over-the-top when you consider the franchise it’s building on… and maybe it was a product of our enthusiasm for the 2nd film and how much we felt it had improved on the 1st film. But this really had us sitting there thinking, “OK,…