I don’t get it. Is this supposed to be funny because Arnie is pregnant? Is that how the premise was pitched? It’s not even remotely amusing.
I was disappointed in myself for watching this shit, one of the flattest movies I’ve seen.
Junior (1994).
Tag Archives: Film
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.
F1 (2025).
Jerry Bruckheimer. Hans Zimmer on score duties. A beautiful leading man. Is this another era? I’m torn: it’s either the late 1980s or early ’90s.
A perfectly good movie here, throwback feel revved up to suitable levels of nostalgia but with cutting edge pyrotechnics.
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.
Atonement (2007). I’ve seldom seen such drivel.
Even the opening credits annoyed me in this desperate movie, which is schematic as it comes in its plot contrivances, and a fucking pain to get through. And we have the inevitable fawned-over sequence shot, an intricately constructed bit of cinematography with no purpose other than to showcase the director. A characterless piece, it was dreadful. Every frame and utterance was weak Merchant Ivory or the worst embraces of The English Patient (1996). One is even pummeled with the delights of elegantly framed close-ups of actors with an incapacity to emote; it’s like their toaster has just died when a tragedy occurs.
It attempts to delve into a few ideas about the dangers of subjectivity and misinterpretation, but there’s nothing here that Hitchcock didn’t trample on innumerable times.
I hated it and everyone in it.
Manchester by the Sea (2016).
Despite some well-written scenes built around awkward moments, this is a hollow tragedy wholly dependent upon flashback structure as a means of keeping the audience attuned. And with a protagonist who doesn’t deserve our sympathy, or attention, or any kind of movie made about him, and he’s a lifeless fucker at that.
You understand, with an unsympathetic lad, the brutal approach with the likes of Taxi Driver (1976) or Raging Bull (1980), but these movies were made with exceptional grace and a magnetic, kinetic urgency.
This was just a derivative, bubbling affair, the extended, longing shots of troubled souls staring at one another lifted from a thousand playbooks. I was bored with every character in this film, as was I with the reliance on rote soundtrack choices I’d expect to be made on a student production.
And Kyle Chandler is in it with one of the most exotic versions of a Massachusetts accent I’ve ever heard in a movie. These folk are American actors and can’t even do a dialect properly from a state in their own country.
Rubbish.
Total Recall (1990).
This is one funny movie.
Paul Verhoeven excelled at satirical splatter. Then he made Black Book (2006) and it was a sort of solemn drama and departure from corporate critique, and very good despite the absence of jokes.
Arnie is incredible in this. For a good decade he could do no wrong, the best of the hulking beasts.
5/5, a glorious film.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 