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I gave it another bash.
I lasted 28 minutes.
It’s like a movie that has been concocted from the Earth’s crust and skipped the Dinosaurs and is somehow with us.
It’s a rotten motion picture.
Bye for now.
Napoleon (2023). It’s worse the second time.
Category Archives: Cinema
A Complete Unknown (2024).
A perfectly reasonable and noble biopic, so totally in awe of its subject that I lost interest and inevitably pulled the plug due to how tame and by the numbers it was.
But that hour wasn’t torture; I spent most of it on the topic’s Wikipedia entry, a few mumbling song renditions in the background.
So, thanks for the wee boost, for I can now hold a five-minute conversation about Bob Dylan.
Happy Gilmore 2 (2025).
Strong nostalgia tour here, the type of entirely unnecessary sequel you’d expect after a 30-year hiatus.
It’s okay for what it is – hit and miss, breezy enough for an hour but far too draining once the physical comedy reaches breaking point in its repetition.
And erstwhile golfer/legendary hellraiser John Daly has a cameo. I forgot about him. But I’m glad I have learned he is still alive.
Harry Gregson-Williams.
The score in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is exceptional, one of the best I’ve heard, and beautifully applied to image. It’s just a shame Orlando Bloom features, but I suppose you can mute him.
It evokes a time and place in a way that is definitive, without qualification. This is what that period sounded like, surely:
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is mortifying.
I tried.
Scorsese always deserves a second change of pants.
This movie is fucking atrocious. The needless, meandering, wholly unmemorable dialogue was the worst element of this unimpressive stinker.
You get the impression they are all about to drop the bombshell. And there isn’t one.
And it’s not even funny.
I hated it and hope you do too.
Sorry, Marty.
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025).
How a gruesome series of sadistic slashers whose sole concern is setting up, with our complicity in the premonition, chain-reaction sequences of unfettered butchery can be … fun is entirely testament to the filmmakers.
And this is by a mile the best yet.
Back to the Future Part II (1989).
It’s brilliant.
Complex but not too much so, at breakneck pacing the internal paradoxes of time travel have seldom had such thrilling treatment. It’s all a bit depressing as well, with one wrong move ruining future generations, but it’s done in an enjoyable way. Dumping Jennifer, Marty’s beleaguered girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, in an alleyway (and then a porch) is a bit naughty, though. That’s not aged well.
As for it’s prediction of 2015, much of it was accurate, but I don’t recall hoverboards a decade ago. Even today, members of Edinburgh’s shrieking underclass community are still pounding it along pavements on pink scooters (stolen), with lifted cleaning goods from budget supermarket Aldi shoved down their tracksuit bottoms.
East is East (1999).
A real shitty look distinguishes this real shitty film, and there was so much manky, needlessly prurient dialogue in it that just irritated me. Every actor dwelling in this silly bit of unfunny farce had a smutty, unbearable ‘performance’, reeling off standard lines from a depressing (they all are) British soap opera.
Pointless movie, and it won’t shock you to read the revelation that I hated it.
I mind a school teacher back in the day thought it was a hoot because a semi-mute teenager in this shabby excuse for a movie won’t remove his Inuit coat. It’s a less funny gimmick than that kid in South Park who kept dying.
“Oh my God” and all that.
The General (1998).
Brendan Gleeson is one of the finest out there and even in a stinker he’s never the one doing the stinking.
Jon Voight, best known these days as an outspoken MAGA acolyte, has his considerable talents on display as our protagonist’s Gardaí nemesis, the Nineties his thesp Indian summer. This and his barking turn in Anaconda (1997) is a mighty double bill I would recommend to anyone.
The black and white works, it’s frequently thrilling, and he’s a very funny character who maintains your interest.
Superb movie.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 