The opening voice-over reeked of amateurishness – John Lithgow narrating shots of our heroes playing football, describing a wee bit of superfluous info about them all – so I turned it off and watched a documentary about the bomber instead.
I believe it to be the correct decision.
Nice wee proper slow-burning spy thriller here, with a magnificently creepy Ralph Fiennes cameo as the slippery PM trying to bury the dirt. It’s a movie of subtleties and you really need to pay attention to what the characters say, how they say it, and what they omit which you think they would say. Finely acted, tightly plotted, no irritating characters, well shot.
Worth a watch.
Celebrating 20 years of Peep Show.
The indelible memory for me will forever remain Jeremy running over a dog and then eating it on a barge during Mark’s ad hoc job interview.
Because we can all relate to that.
The incredible archive footage, the level of research, the interviews, the music, the sound of Laurence Olivier.
Sublime and unrivalled.
This was just your usual shite and defines what’s so crap about British cinema.
I hated every minute of it, from the moment the director films a moving car in the most irritating way. The writing was frankly ghastly, and I despise, again with the vehicle stuff, scenes of characters looking all serious in cars at night with classical music inevitably playing on the radio. It’s the worst kind of writing. It was all pathetic. There’s even a bit in here involving parents arguing about murder as they are gobbling down fish and chips. TV-quality acting as always; these folk should just stick to Corrie Street.
Another disgrace to cinema this. But check it out if you want some torture.
Next.
Wow, flawless entertainment. It knows exactly what it is and delivers on every level; it’s so immaculate that you can see hundreds of subsequent movies in its accidental blueprint, a formula before there was one. More impressive, if you don’t exactly get to luxuriate in blood and guts, are the shots framing folk actually dying. It sounds a bit daft, but I wasn’t expecting that for a movie of 1938.
Claude Rains once again runs off with a film. There’s something both immediately accessible and conversely abstract and untouchable about him. It’s the extraordinary voice, the alien demeanor, the coolness, and all of this given the fact he’s awfully short. Not sure if he was ever a protagonist in a movie. He was perhaps better as the svelte creep stealing every scene he’s in.
Anyway, a most gnarly yarn here.
This channel is what the Internet was made for (aside from cat videos and staged pranks). The wealth and detail of info in these vids, the animation, the music, the narrator and his redoubtable voice.
Another week, another slice of Netflix mayhem, this series says a lot about the power of cults and how disturbed, megalomaniac manipulators make it to the top in these organisations.
A docu of a pre-digital age, the vintage nature of analogue broadcasting and videotape puts it in another century, which it is, but it’s no less contentious because of it. By default, one of its major concerns is the news media’s obsession with and reaction to havoc, co-dependent symbiotic twins. The Second Amendment is surprisingly given little focus, nor is just how this fits into any broader narrative of Carnage Americana.
Decent enough as a basic history lesson.
Waco, more like WACKOS (plural).
This was verily an impressive motion picture, and it starts with the cast, even though the highly irritating, 100% talentless ‘lad’ from ghastly ’90s British TV series Men Behaving Badly is somehow in it.
The music is pure Vangelis and it suits the story and locales surprisingly well; one wouldn’t expect Blade Runner (1982) stuff to work in this setting. The attention to detail (life on a ship) is necessary, the toils a clear element in the breakdown of the crew, most of them toothless goons who appear to have been press-ganged. You can see the temptation to mutiny. It’s the late 1700s and you’re presented with Tahiti when all you’ve got upon return to Great Britain is living in a cesspool.
The weirdo Anthony Hopkins does his best weirdo Anthony Hopkins, which is just the right amount of weird.
The Robert Bolt screenplay is a tad disappointing. After the craftily put together exposition, he resorts to homoerotic undertones to explain Bligh’s reaction to Christian’s shagging, which is just lazy writing. And there’s not enough drama on display, which sounds nuts considering the scenes. Not enough characterisation, no scenes exploring a character doing anything outwith the collective, not enough style that grabs; you’re in the hands of a most journeyman director.
But it works despite of its bad handler.
Does it still hold up? Did it ever?
The antics of the Pythons have in recent years been wholly irritating, with their pointless TV travelogues and various silly projects, clearly living off past glories. But this has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It must count for something.
Oh dear, a pretty daft excuse for a feature-length movie, this was just boring. So smug, and vexingly self-referential in its desperation for laughs, sketches went on and on and I couldn’t cope anymore so turned it off. The impression I got was of a bunch of very lucky big babies with a budget.
It’s not funny at all.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 